Latin Style

Apicius the gourmet would have been ashamed of the Latin used in the recipes, to say the least. He would have been a member of the educated ruling élite in the first century AD and would almost certainly have written in the polished style familiar from classical Latin. The Apicius text is written in what we have called ‘blue-collar’ Latin, and what is usually termed ‘Vulgar Latin’, the Latin of the street and work-place rather than the study and poetry reading.