La lingua del De errore profanarum religionum di Firmico Materno

A linguistic study is presented on Firmicus Maternus’ De errore profanarum religionum, a work that sheds light on some fundamental aspects of the Christianization process of Western society in the fourth century AD. In this treatise of anti-pagan polemic, many lexical, morphological and syntactic peculiarities are found, some of which are part of the context of late and vulgar Latin. This paper has illustrated these linguistic peculiarities and commented on the most significant examples.