Philip Wilson, Harvard University
If Latin songs were sung as Roman power collapsed, what was the relationship of Latin songs to Roman power? I ask that question of the hymn Pange lingua (PL), drawing on anthropological studies of literacy in postcolonial Ghana (Goody). In late antique Gaul, “the last poet of antiquity” (Bernt) Venantius Fortunatus wrote a hymn in trochaic septenarius, a meter sung by Roman soldiers, including those who occupied Gaul (Suetonius, Iul. 49.4, 51; Vell. Pat. 2.67.4). Certain cognitive functions of literacy explain how singing Roman marching tunes safeguarded the sense of Roman subjecthood after Gaul was captured by illiterate Germanic chieftains. Literacy offered two powerful tools to Roman colonial administration: the inventory of goods with lists, and the social discrimination between literate and illiterate people. PL’s sounds, its matching lists of synonyms, and its military vocabulary, transfer these literate administrative operations to a song anyone could sing. This oral poaching of writing’s cognitive tools represents what Goody (ironically) called “the domestication of the savage mind,” and illuminates how singing in Latin allowed Latin speakers to perpetuate and replicate the social power of literacy after the Roman empire.
The hymn’s scansion shows how PL sounded more like written prose than prior trochaic septenarii. This hymn’s monotonous metrical regularity diminishes features common to sung trochaic septenarii in Plautus, Lucilius, and extant soldiers’ chants (Fraenkel, Usener). Unlike the comic and satiric examples, PL has little of the resolution of long syllables that characterizes conversational Latin—especially conversational Latin set to music (Morgan). Unlike soldiers’ chants, it has relatively little anaphora and rhyme. The hymn’s sonic resemblance to writing achieves a hyper-classicism, an overcorrection of singing with writing. Venantius apologizes to patrons for how little his songs resembled classical writing, and Goody clarifies how literacy’s social prestige could inspire such classicizing distaste for living language. Per Goody, judgements like “unclassical” are normally made of writings, which, unlike instantaneous speech, can be studied repeatedly. Venantius, by criticizing his Latin’s dissimilarity to writing, reimagines singing as a socially inferior form of writing. Indeed, the hymn’s first line, “compose/arrange, my tongue,” reimagines singing as a scribal act. Venantius tells his tongue to write.
The hymn’s resemblance to writing culturally entrenches the empire’s administrative use of literacy. PL’s lists of matching concrete nouns (PL 15, 16, 19, 21-25) reproduce tools of colonial administration within popular song. Literacy allows things to be grouped into inventories with lists and tables. Therefore, this hymn’s lists of synonyms mirror a powerful imperial use of writing (Jones; Bouet). Goody’s studies of the cognitive effects of literacy suggest why Venantius would pantomime colonial administration with PL’s matching lists. The strings of words evoke imperial ordering of things, as the martial imperatives in trochaic rhythm evoke the imperial ordering of its soldiers. By interspersing his hymn with lists akin to inventories, Venantius musically reinscribes the defunct civilian power and authority evoked by PL’s military triumphalism (“… the glory of victorious battle,” PL 1).