Jürgen Leonhardt is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Tübingen.

One of the many achievements of Leonhardt’s book is to give readers, for the first time, a sense of what Latin has meant, and what it has been most useful for, in every period of Western history… Leonhardt’s informative and useful book ends with a plea to teach Latin as a living language, but the bulk of his work is historical: a lucid, erudite account of the history of Latin, from its origins as a literary language in the third century BCE up to the present… Leonhardt’s comparative approach illuminates the entire book… Leonhardt has dethroned Latin from its traditional position as a marmoreal, static sidekick to Greek and taught us to understand the history not only of Latin, but of language and literature, in a new way. His approach seems natural in a time of intellectual globalization, but it is the fruit of hard thinking, and adds to our sense of the complex ways in which language and power intersect.

Jürgen Leonhardt is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Tübingen.

One of the many achievements of Leonhardt’s book is to give readers, for the first time, a sense of what Latin has meant, and what it has been most useful for, in every period of Western history… Leonhardt’s informative and useful book ends with a plea to teach Latin as a living language, but the bulk of his work is historical: a lucid, erudite account of the history of Latin, from its origins as a literary language in the third century BCE up to the present… Leonhardt’s comparative approach illuminates the entire book… Leonhardt has dethroned Latin from its traditional position as a marmoreal, static sidekick to Greek and taught us to understand the history not only of Latin, but of language and literature, in a new way. His approach seems natural in a time of intellectual globalization, but it is the fruit of hard thinking, and adds to our sense of the complex ways in which language and power intersect.

Jürgen Leonhardt is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Tübingen.

One of the many achievements of Leonhardt’s book is to give readers, for the first time, a sense of what Latin has meant, and what it has been most useful for, in every period of Western history… Leonhardt’s informative and useful book ends with a plea to teach Latin as a living language, but the bulk of his work is historical: a lucid, erudite account of the history of Latin, from its origins as a literary language in the third century BCE up to the present… Leonhardt’s comparative approach illuminates the entire book… Leonhardt has dethroned Latin from its traditional position as a marmoreal, static sidekick to Greek and taught us to understand the history not only of Latin, but of language and literature, in a new way. His approach seems natural in a time of intellectual globalization, but it is the fruit of hard thinking, and adds to our sense of the complex ways in which language and power intersect.