Ille Romanae linguae candor odorque uetustatis. La recreación del latín arcaico en la falsificación epigráfica del Renacimiento

In the process of recovery and revalorisation of the monumenta antiquitatis, the object’s antiquity was by itself a source of admiration. Thus, between 1450 and 1550 a great number of inscriptions presumably engraved in Republican times were documented, which were actually nothing more than literary falsifications. Some forgers, conscious of the historic evolution that the Latin language had undergone, tried to adjust the inscriptions’ phonetics and spelling to their alleged antiquity. This paper analyses the different phenomena (some accurate and some utterly incorrect) that the forgers attributed to the pristine Latin language, through two inscriptions regarding Publius Cornelius Scipio: CIL XI 691* and CIL II 354*.