Before we go more deeply into the specifics of it, it would be desirable to clarify what Latin is, when it was spoken, as well as why it is so important.
Proto-Indo-European language
Teaching people from around the globe for years, I noticed that there is a common misconception of Latin as the father (or the mother, if you will) of all European languages. Indeed, Latin is universally used to denote important terms in different fields, but it is not true that Latin gave birth to all of the most common languages that we use nowadays.
Latin is rather a cognate language with some other languages we call Indoeuropean languages today. Thanks to Sir William Jones in the 18th century, who came up with the theory, and Franz Bopp, who started the serious scientific study that dealt with it, we now have more knowledge about the origin of these languages. They all derive from a common, ancestral language called Proto-Indo-European (probably 5th mil. B.C.) Its name is derived from the fact that the descendants of this language are found both in or near India and in Europe.
It is supposed that the people speaking this language gradually dispersed throughout Europe, Asia, and India, and the language changed in different places until different languages and language groups developed. The oldest of these languages are Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, and Latin.
Thus, we can say that some languages are descendants of Latin. They go by the common name of the Romance languages, which are direct derivates of vulgar Latin, spoken by the common people from the period of conquest of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, the same cannot be said about other European languages.
History of Latin
Latin was a language spoken in a small district on the west coast of ancient Italy called Latium, the capital of which was Rome. Hence the word ''Latin''. One of the earliest inscriptions in this language is a 6th -century graffito called Duenos vase.
It was an insignificant language spoken by a small group of people until Rome started spreading. By the end of the 3rd century B.C., Rome already conquered all of Italy and started expanding its territory across the sea and beyond the Alps. Eventually, as we all know, Rome had conquered all the known world. Thus, what was once a language spoken by a single tribe, became the universal language. It still is, in a way.
What is important to be clarified in the beginning is that in the same way that the English that we speak today is not the same English that was spoken 300 years ago, Latin also changed with time. The Latin language commonly taught in schools worldwide is known as classical Latin, used around 2,000 years ago. The reason for this is that the Latin language was at its best at the time and that is when the greatest works of Roman literature were produced. This period is also known as the golden period of Roman literature.
Rome and Greece
Another important thing to explain here is the relationship between Greece and Rome and its nature. While conquering the world, Romans came in touch with the Greeks. The Greeks were inferior to the Romans in military power but far superior in culture. They were already flourishing in the matters of art, literature, music, science, and philosophy. The fast-expanding Rome was not familiar with most of these areas. This may have been because they were too busy conquering the world, but anyways, to really expand their dominance, it was necessary to have a strongly developed culture as well.
Greece revealed the importance of education and imposed the thirst for knowledge among the Roman higher circles. As a result of this, the same way that Latin used to be and it still is, in a way (on a much lower scale though) the language of the educated for the modern world, the Greek language became universal among educated classes. This was necessary to explain because by spreading its influence on the rest of the world, Rome was also spreading the Greek culture and creating what we now know to be Western thought.
Roman Literature
In the aforementioned first part of the Roman expansion, we have the emergence of Roman literature. The most prominent authors at that time were the comic poets Plautus and Terrence, the epic poet Ennius and the orator and historian, Cato (more famous for his sentence Carthago delenda est, than anything else). The language of the comedians is believed to be the closest to the spoken language, so if we study the language used in Plautus and Terrence we are a bit closer to imagining the spoken language of that period.
Ennius, on the other hand, spoke both Greek and Latin, and thus adapted many characteristics of the Greek language to Latin, and he is believed to be a pioneer of the literary language. All of these authors wrote in the language that we now call early Latin.
In the next two centuries, so by the end of the first century B.C., Roman authors continued where Ennius had stopped, which is to say that the development of the literary language progressed heavily. This language was still under the enormous influence of Greek, just as Ennius had done previously. These authors established the rules of morphology, syntax, spelling, and vocabulary. The result is classical Latin, the language that was spoken and written by the educated part of the Roman population during the late republic and the early empire, the one that is still taught in schools nowadays. The most famous writers of this period are Cicero, Caesar, and Livy in prose, and Catullus, Horace, and Virgil in poetry.
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