Latin belongs to the Italic subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Latin was first encountered in ancient times as the language of Latium, the region of central Italy in which Rome is located. Roman conquests later spread Latin throughout Italy and the vast Roman Empire. After the ancient Romans began to develop a literature (in the 3d century B.C.), a gap emerged between classical Latin and vulgar (vernacular) Latin, which was the spoken form of the language.
This division had become considerable by the beginning of the Roman Empire. The modern Romance languages are descended from Vulgar Latin, carried by the soldiers and colonists of Rome throughout the Roman Empire. Latin remained the international language of culture, scholarship, and science through the Renaissance.
Self Learning
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License. It is attributed to Avinash Kunnath, and the original version can be found here
Dictionaries
- Packard Humanities Institute (Online Database of Latin literature)
- De Imperatoribus Romanis (An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers and Their Families)
Multimedia
- The Internet Classics Archive
- The American Classical League
- Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum (Catalogue of Ancient Vases)
- Beazley Archive (for ancient art)
- The Oracle of Loxias
- The Perseus Project (Texts, translations, art and archaeology of Ancient Greece and Rome):
- Medicina Antiqua (Resources for the study of Greek and Roman medicine):
- Lexicon Iconocagraphicum Mythologiae Classicae (Lexicon of mythological figures and images with articles describing them)