Latin, the language of Virgil, Cicero, and St. Augustine, was the lingua franca of the Western world for over a thousand years. First scratched onto stone and bronze objects in the seventh century BCE, Latin developed into a flourishing literary language that in the Classical period encompassed (among many other forms) epic and lyric poetry, history, drama, biography, and philosophy, and was the language that governed the Roman Empire. Latin is the common root of English and many other modern European languages, which developed out of a shared linguistic heritage and whose connections the study of Latin can help us understand.