adapted from a 30 May 1997 post by Raymond A. Brown
Classical Latin was undoubtedly a conlang modelled by the rhetoricians on the example of literary Classical Greek and using the actual spoken language of Latium.
To some extent any language that develops a literary form has a tendency to move away from the colloquial spoken form to something more artificial. The language of the King James' version of the Bible was certainly not the current Jacobean English of the time but was deliberately modelled on the Tudor English of a century before in order to achieve a 'timeless' effect.
In the case of literary Latin, the Greek models were very strong. The 'golden' language of Cicero's speeches was achieved after years of schooling. The language of his letters has a somewhat different flavor. And the 'silver Latin' of Tacitus & his contemporaries is clearly artificial with its delibrately contrived effects; it must've been quite different in many respects from the ordinary, spoken Latin ('vulgar Latin') that the soldiers & traders spread across the Empire. Indeed, it has been noted that if no Latin had been written & we had only the evidence of the modern Romance langs with which to reconstruct Latin, we would never come up with the Latin of the grammar books.
Jerome in the 4th century also had to forge an artificial medium for his translation of the scriptures: the Vulgate (not written in 'vulgar Latin'). If he'd followed the spoken forms of his time, his work would have been discounted by the educated; if, on the other hand, he wrote in the norms developed in the 1st & 2nd century literary language, he'd not be understood by many. He had to adopt a middle path and in doing so greatly influenced the development of ecclesiastic Latin of the Middle Ages.
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