La Oratio in matritensi gymnasio, ad cathedram Litteraturae latinae obtinendam (1848). Alfredo Adolfo Camús relee a Marco Antonio Mureto y a Nicolás Funcio.

In 1848, Adolfo Alfredo Camus, who will become the most important teacher of Classical literature in Spain during the nineteenth century, won the chair that will play for decades at the Central University of Madrid. Our aim in this paper is to study the exercise of his exam, the Oratio ad cathedram Litteraturae latinae obtinendam, written in Latin and preserved in the General Archive of the State Administration. Our main finding has been to establish the two literary sources that feed it: the exordium is based in a rewriting of a speech composed by the humanist Marcus Antonius Muretus (De laudibus litterarum) and the development of the subject, the life and work of Silius Italicus, reuses the prose of a scholar of the eighteenth century: Nicolaus Funccius (De imminenti linguae Latinae senectute). In sum, we have managed to consider the historical significance of this Oratio and the way it combines the sixteenth century Latin oratory with the literary scholarship of the eighteenth century, when Latin literature had the name of Latinae litterae or Historia Latinae linguae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]