The works of classical authors present the core of Classical Latin, the variation of Latin that has been the object of study throughout the centuries. That is Caesar, Cicero and others are our fundament. The more confusing for me sounded the following words (from a forum):
The words belong to a man whose erudition I doubt not in the least. Yet I strongly hope he is wrong this time. Are there evidences available that texts ascribed to Caesar & Co. are authentic rather than a fake of first millennium's scribes?It's like the Bible in Church Slavonic: nowadays it's quite different from what it used to be in Nikon's time - lots of antiquated words have been replaced with more intelligible ones, the same is true in in respect of antiquated grammatical and syntactic turns. The same thing was happening to Latin texts. They were not being corrupted, but people just tried to write them in a more intellegible way. Besides, there were different sorts of scribes: one of them used to copy texts scrupulously like maniacs, others, on the contrary, rather rendered them in a free manner.