Il latino della storia, la storia del latino

The birth of literature creates a divergence between the sermo cotidianus (which preserves the richness and freedom of a linguistic diasystem open to Italic languages, as well as Greek and Etruscan) and the new literary language that must establish selective rules, initially modeled on Latinitas and then, according to an even stricter criterion, on Urbanitas, the language proper to Rome and its noble élite. The Latin historians, the auctores of the genre, such as Cato and Sallust, both Italics from Sabina, inaugurate a genre of writing that chooses an archaic language to recover traces of that Italic linguistic heritage that the pursuit of urbanitas aimed to erase.