Apollo Never Spoke Latin:
Divine Language, Poetic Inspiration, and Literary Translation in Antiquity
Many ancient poets claim direct divine inspiration for their work, invoking gods to help
sing or speak through them, and recent scholars have noted that these poets often represent
themselves as translators of divine knowledge for human audiences (Cavarero 2002, Laird 2002).
But scholarly focus on archaic Greece as the prime locus of ancient thought on poetic inspiration
(Sperduti 1950, Murray 1981) has left one aspect of this translational function unexamined: what
happens when poets must translate not only between gods and mortals of the same culture, as
Homer and Hesiod do, but also between gods of one culture and mortals of another (i.e., when
Latin poets ask Greek gods for inspiration)? More to the point, what linguistic barriers to divine
inspiration were thought to arise and how did Latin authors seek to overcome them?
This paper gathers evidence for ancient ideas about divine language and argues that a
number of Latin authors believed Apollo and the Muses, the gods most responsible for poetic
inspiration, retained their Greek identities despite their importation to Rome and would not speak
Latin, even with their own Roman devotees. It also argues that Latin literary translators – the
nature of whose work requires mediating simultaneously between Greek and Latin sources of
inspiration – developed several different ways to address these linguistic challenges.
In the minds of many Romans, Greek gods would not deign to use Latin. The polymath
Varro and his teacher Aelius Stilo thought the Muses would have used Plautine diction if they
were willing to speak in Latin (Varro Musas, Aeli Stilonis sententia, Plautino dicat sermone
locuturas fuisse, si Latine loqui vellent, Quintilian 10.1.99). This statement implies, of course,
they were not so inclined. Similarly, Cicero denies the authenticity of Pyrrhus’s oracle at Ennius
Annales fr.167 (aio te Aeacida Romanos vincere posse), because he says Apollo never spoke in
Latin (Latine Apollo numquam locutus est, De Divinatione 2.116; Skutsch 1985). Likewise, in a
tongue-in-cheek metaliterary joke, Apuleius claims that Apollo (despite being Greek and
addressing Psyche’s Greek father in Greek Miletus) delivered an oracle in Latin for the sole
benefit of Apuleius himself (Apollo, quanquam Graecus et Ionicus, propter Milesiae conditorem
sic Latina sorte respondit, Metamorphoses 4.32.6; Hijmans 2006). Apuleius’s suggestion that
this oracle was an ad hoc concession implies that Apollo did not speak in Latin regularly. These
statements, though not a coherent ancient theory on divine language, indicate that monoglot
Greek gods were a standard concept for many Romans.
At least three Latin literary translators were aware of this difficulty and approached it in
innovative ways. In his Aratea, a translation of Aratus’s Phaenomena, Germanicus rewrites his
prologue to downplay Zeus’s role as divine inspirer and elevates both Aratus and the emperor
Tiberius (Maurach 1978, Possanza 2004) as his external supporters, the former offering content
and the latter providing leisure and motivation. Cicero, however, marks translation as purely
human techne unrelated to poetic inspiration (cf. Cicero’s comments in McElduff 2004).
Immediately before he rejects Ennius’s oracle as false, he renders his own translation of the
famous Croesus oracle (Croesus Halyn penetrans magnam pervertet opum vim, De Divinatione
2.115), asserting his ability to translate divine utterance without divine aid. Finally, Livius
Andronicus turns to the Italian Camenae instead of the Homeric Muse in the opening of his
Odussia, seeking a goddess whose language is appropriate to his Latin work (cf. “Epitaph of
Naevius” at Gellius 1.24, which directly links the Camenae with Latin speech). These issues
have larger implications for Latin poetry in general, especially epics like Vergil’s Aeneid that
engage allusively and multilingually with Greek sources (O’Hara 1996).
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