5. The language: The language of Mark is the language

of the poeta doctus, the learned poet. The poet wants to depict the diversity of life also in the language and adapts the linguistic styles to the respective speech situation.

In Latin philology, older research had often mocked the alleged lack of knowledge of Latin of the medieval copyists.

Today we know: the Latin poets used dialect variants and slang expressions of the social underclass for certain situations in order to distinguish the speech styles of the individual speakers.