The language of the Roman Empire (2024)

Latin may be the language we associate with the Roman Empire, but the question of whether the Romans spoke Latin has no clear answer. Rome grew from a small community in the middle of a culturally diverse peninsula to an empire stretching from Britain to Syria. As Rome's power spread, Romans interacted with speakers of dozens of other languages, becoming fellow citizens. The Romans' love for Greek culture ensured that the Greek language also occupied a central place in Roman society, while Rome itself was a city of immigrants and slaves, many of whom brought their language with them.

Rome and Italy

Rome started life as just one of many small urban communities on the Italian peninsula. Latium, the region on the west coast of Italy where the city of Rome is located, gave its name to the local language: Latin. But Italy was home to many more languages, some of which were closely related to Latin. For example, Faliscan was spoken in cities very close to Rome, and some linguists consider it a dialect of Latin rather than a separate language. Other related languages belonging to the 'Italic' family include the widespread Oscan (central and southern Italy) and Umbrian (central Italy). Greek, a more distantly related language, was spoken in towns all along the coastline. Another prestigious neighboring language, Etruscan, was not related to Latin at all: it is a non-Indo-European language and may not be related to any other known language.

We know that Latin speakers interacted with speakers of these other languages and that some Roman citizens were multilingual. This is partly due to archaeological evidence; it would be very unlikely that the trade, exchange and customization of goods that we see taking place throughout Italy could exist without at least a few bilingual individuals. Even the Roman alphabet was adopted from Etruscan, which could not have happened without some form of conversation between Etruscan and Latin speakers.

Contact between languages also had a lasting impact on Latin itself. We can see that some Latin words were originally taken from other languages. In the same way as we can see from their sound and spellingkaraokeInseen alreadyThese are unlikely to be words of English origin, although they are now fully integrated into the vocabulary of English speakers. However, there are words in Latin that show clear signs of being loanwords.

Unsurprisingly, many of these loanwords are relevant to domains such as agriculture, landscape and commerce, all areas of life where contact between speakers of different languages would have been common. The Latin word for examplelupus'wolf', from which we get the flower namewolf, specialSsounds in a place where Latin would normally have oneksound (usually spelled with aC).OfBof the wordbaas'cow', which we getvee, would also be an exception to the Latin sound laws. These words must have been borrowed from a nearby language, probably one similar to Oscan or Umbrian.

We do not always know the source language of loan words. The volume unitliter, of which the modern measurementliteris derived, has its origins in an unknown non-Latin language, probably Sicilian, which has left few other traces.

Latin was especially prone to borrowing color names, probably because of its frequent trade in furs or cloth with its neighbors. Sometimes the borrowing results in a 'doublet' or two words of the same etymological origin that entered Latin via different routes. For example,roodInRufusboth mean 'red' or 'reddish' and both come from the same Indo-European word. But the former is the 'original' Latin term, and the latter is borrowed from a neighboring language. The English nameRufusis a direct result of the early multilingualism of the Romans.

Language dead

These other languages – Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan and many more – were spoken and written in Italy for centuries. Most seem to have survived into the first century BC, well into the period when Rome had already begun to expand its territories abroad.

As long as the communities in Italy were 'affiliated' with Rome, rather than directly governed as part of the Roman state, their languages continued to survive. Some cities independent of Rome began to use Latin voluntarily. For example, Livius tells us that the city of Cumae, the first Greek colony in southern Italy, which began using Oscan as its main language around the fourth century BC, petitioned Rome in 180 BC. to be allowed to adopt Latin as an official written language, marking the shift from Oscan to the attention of their increasingly powerful Roman neighbors.

For other societies, language change was less peaceful. In the early first century BC the Italian allies went to war with Rome and created an alternative state called 'Italia'. This conflict is known as the 'Social War' because it was a war against the AlliesstaffIt is an ongoing subject of debate whether the Allies were fighting for full Roman citizenship and voting rights, or whether they wanted to end their ties with Rome once and for all after decades of tension. It is likely that both motives – and others – existed among the tens of thousands of soldiers who came from all over Italy.

Some historians have interpreted the Tealliers' use of the Osan language as a defiant statement of non-Roman identity, especially when combined with the images of the Italian bull trampling the Roman wolf on their official coinage. But we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of Italian coins were bilingual, indicating that Latin was already the lingua franca among the multilingual armed forces.

The Social War affected the landscape of some of Italy's most famous cities, including Pompeii. Some of the most suggestive and most ignoredpaintings(painted inscriptions) in Pompeii the spread of Oscan messages is painted at important points on the main roads known asNothinginscriptions (after their first word). These bright red texts served as safety instructions, telling the city's men where to gather and to whom to report in the event of a Roman invasion. They suggest that some men of Pompeii would have no difficulty reading Oscan in a high-pressure situation.

These messages were not written during the early history of the Roman Republic, but while the teenage Cicero was performing his military service. They were written by the last generation of the city who could read and write Oscan: after the Social War, Latin-speaking Roman colonists were sent to settle Pompeii and many of the other cities in Italy to prevent future uprisings. The texts have been preserved because they were plastered over or hidden behind shop awnings, and because the distinctive Oscan alphabet from right to left would not have meant much to the city's later inhabitants.

Dominance

All the languages of Italy except Latin (and Greek) became extinct. Language death can occur when all speakers of a language die or are murdered, or more commonly, when speakers no longer pass their language on to their children. Once language death has set in, it can happen quickly: it usually only takes three generations for all knowledge of a language to be lost. In Italy, the disruption and population movements caused by the Social War and the Civil Wars caused communities to lose their cohesion and to abandon their former languages.

Etruscan had a slightly longer life than Oscan or Umbrian due to its prestige as a traditional language of divination and divination in Rome. The last Roman to speak Etruscan was Emperor Claudius, who wrote a twenty-volume history of Etruria and, as the historian Tacitus tells us, wanted to keep Etruscan traditions alive in Rome. But even Claudius learned Etruscan to access historical sources, not to speak to his subjects. By the early first century AD the economic and practical benefits of learning Latin ultimately outweighed any lingering sense of linguistic identity or tradition and prevented other languages from being passed on to the next generation. Latin now dominated the Italian peninsula.

Both our languages

Latin was not the only language of the Roman Empire, nor was it the only language of Italy. As Rome expanded its control to both the east and west, it encountered many other languages. Most importantly, it inherited a pre-existing Greek system of governance in the areas that became the eastern half of the Roman Empire.

It was not necessary for the Romans to revise this system and replace it with Latin. Raised on an educational diet of Greek philosophy, rhetoric, and drama, Roman men commonly spoke Greek fluently from an early age. The use of Greek was convenient for the Roman elite, and the use of Greek continued in the eastern half of the empire throughout the period of Roman rule.

Because all Roman elite men were fluent in Greek and had knowledge of Greek culture, the use of Greek was often a sign of intimacy and connection. In Cicero's letters, which were collected for publication by his secretary Tiro after his death, he uses Greek expressions, sentences and words, especially in his good friend Atticus. They even play bilingual word games with each other and discuss how certain words should be translated. Letters between Emperor Augustus and his stepson Tiberius, as recorded by later historians, also demonstrate this 'code switching' between Latin and Greek.

Although Shakespeare records Julius Caesar's final message to Brutus as 'And you, Brute?' ('You too, Brutus?'), Suetonius records the famous last words as Greekkai su teknon('you too, child?'). There are differing interpretations as to whether Caesar questioned Brutus' motives, claimed paternity, or made a threat ("you are next, young man!"). Suetonius claims not to believe that Caesar even spoke a last word. But the idea that Caesar would turn to Greek, and not Latin, to express himself in a moment of great emotion and pain shows how embedded Greek was in Roman life.

Dealing with bureaucracy in Greek was therefore not a problem for the Roman aristocracy, and the vast majority of Roman official material found in the East is in Greek. This linguistic division between East and West made Rome a completely bilingual empire. Suetonius reports that Emperor Claudius joked that Greek and Latin were "both languages" and that bilingualism was ubiquitous in Roman life.

It was not only the Roman elite who spoke Greek. People from all professions and social groups spoke and wrote Greek, although it is impossible for us to know much about the languages used by the illiterate. However, craftsmen, craftsmen and soldiers are all well represented in our sources, showing how commoners throughout the Roman Empire used both Latin and Greek. In a museum in the Sicilian capital Palermo, an inscription written in both Greek and Latin shows how bilingualism could be a marketable skill. The inscription is an advertisem*nt from outside a stonemason's shop and reads something like: 'Have your public and private inscriptions made here.' The inscription is bilingual, not only to attract a wider audience but also to demonstrate the craftsman's skill in carving both alphabets. Linguists have suggested that the slightly unusual wording in both halves may mean that the stonemason was not a native speaker of Latin or Greek: his native language could have been Punic, a Semitic language spoken in North Africa. But whatever the native language of the stonemason, this sign declares him skilled enough to make an elaborate inscription in any of the languages of Rome.

Letters home from soldiers show a different side of how the Romans used Greek. Like letters written by elite Roman men, soldiers' letters exhibit "code-switching" between Latin and Greek, suggesting that they and their families could read both languages, or at least understand them if a scribe read the letter aloud. The most famous military letter writer is Claudius Terentianus, a soldier stationed in Egypt in the second century AD. We have a small collection of surviving letters from Terentian to his father Claudius Tiberianus, an army veteran.

The letters use both Latin and Greek, and it is not clear why Terentian alternates between the two. Various proposals have been made. For example, Latin-speaking scribes may not always have been available, so Terentian – who would have followed the normal Roman practice of dictating to a scribe rather than writing letters by hand – used whatever language was available. An alternative explanation is that he wrote mainly in Greek, because he wanted to include his mother and sisters in the letter, and wrote in Latin to discuss military matters with his father. This explanation is based on the idea that father and son were the bilingual members of the family because of their military service. Another alternative is that Greek was used for more personal topics and Latin for more formal or impersonal content. Neither of these explanations covers everything, and it is likely that Terentian was comfortable using both languages for a variety of topics.

The other major Greek-speaking group in the Roman Empire were slaves. Over the course of Roman history, hundreds of thousands of people were smuggled into Italy. They came from all parts of the empire, but the majority appear to have come from Greek-speaking areas in the east. Many of these Slavs probably had a different native language, but could speak Greek as a second or third language. Furthermore, most would have had no choice but to learn Latin had they been brought to the West. Roman literature shows that native Latin speakers mocked slaves and freedmen whose Latin was peppered with Greek words and expressions. In the novel of PetroniusSatyricon, written in the first century AD, the "uncivilized" freed slaves are the butt of the narrator's jokes. Their use of Greek swear words and idioms is believed to demonstrate their lack of education, along with nouveau riche displays of wealth. In the Roman imagination, Greek was the language of the Slavs, but also the language of high culture.

The language of power

The Romans thus had an ambivalent relationship with the Greek language. They admired the Greeks who had lived centuries before them and envied the Attic dialect in which figures such as Plato, Demosthenes and Sophocles had written. Roman writers of the early centuries BC and AD lamented the poverty of Latin and apologized (perhaps protested too much) for attempting to write poetry, technical treatises, or philosophy in so uncooperative a language. But the contemporary Greek language, which was usually Koine Greek rather than Attic, did not have such high associations. For the Romans, Koine Greek was a practical administrative language and the language of the conquered peoples.

The Roman position was that, despite the prestige or usefulness of Greek for some purposes, there were times when Latin was the only suitable language. Cicero's personal letters alternate between Greek and Latin, but in his professional capacity as a lawyer and politician he wrote only in Latin. His political speeches even avoid using Latin words borrowed from Greek. Cicero relates that he once used Greek to give a speech in Sicily, where Greek was the majority language, and was criticized by his fellow citizens for this linguistic error. Although the elite were bilingual, there were social consequences for pretending to be Greek, especially when acting in an official capacity.

This is consistent with evidence found in Egyptian papyri. Although most Roman administrative records were kept in Greek, some key phrases and formulas had to be in Latin. For example, in case files, all lawyers' testimony and arguments are usually presented in Greek, but the court's final decision is recorded in Latin. For this reason, linguists have sometimes categorized the Latin of the Greek East as a "super-high" language used to lend legitimacy to the state's official proclamations.

Some documents were only legal and binding if they were written in Latin. For example, wills had to contain specific formulas in Latin to be considered valid until the law was changed in the third century AD. Greek-speaking Roman citizens who wanted to exercise their legal right to make a will had to employ a specialist to ensure that the document was binding. Mixed wills, which include Greek property lists alongside Latin legal phrases, show that getting the language of these texts right was sometimes a challenge.

So there were clear legal and financial advantages to being able to speak Latin. We have ample evidence that Greek-speaking citizens and non-citizens of the Roman Empire wanted to learn Latin, and that schoolchildren and adults alike sought out language learning tools. Eleanor Dickey's latest book,Learn Latin the old way, provides an accessible introduction to these texts, most of which are found on papyri from ancient Egypt. Unlike modern students of foreign languages, who generally learn phrases or sentences, ancient schoolchildren memorized entire Latin paragraphs or stories, with a side-by-side translation into Greek to assist them.

There are also useful phrasebooks and glossaries for travelers that guide speakers through a variety of common situations. Many Roman citizens wanted to learn Latin for everyday practical reasons, not to read poetry, and were therefore more interested in speaking Latin than in reading it. Instead of working with an unfamiliar script, they bought phrasebooks that converted Latin into the Greek alphabet, much like an Arabic phrasebook for English speakers might look like today.

A growing empire

As the empire grew, Roman citizens came from further and further away. Its wealthy citizens were drawn to the city of Rome by the promise of power and political involvement, and brought with them a variety of languages. For centuries, a prominent Palmyrene-speaking community existed in Rome, consisting of migrants from Syria and their descendants.

The use of Latin also continued to spread, especially in the western half of the empire. Just as Etruscan and Oscan had influenced the vocabulary of Latin many centuries earlier, other languages now borrowed from Latin. We can see the legacy of this in, for example, the large number of Latin borrowings found in Welsh. Words likeost'cheese' andmilk'milk' is taken directly from LatinostInlak. The influence of Latin on Celtic in Britain is so strong that even common words, such as names of body parts, were borrowed. WelshbochFor example, 'cheek' is a loanword from Latinable to.

The empire also grew so large that regional variants of Latin began to develop. The result was that Latin did not sound the same everywhere. In the second century AD, emperors themselves were from outside Italy, and they clearly did not sound the same as the aristocracy in Rome. Emperor Hadrian had a strong 'Spanish' accent, although sources are vague as to exactly what that sounded like. He spoke Latin fluently, but sounded unsophisticated to his contemporaries. Septimus Severus speaks Punic, the language of North Africa, as his native language and has never managed to lose his African accent. According toAugust history, his sister spoke little Latin and was sent back to Africa in disgrace. Without the literary training their brothers received, wealthy Roman women sometimes struggled to acquire enough Latin to succeed in high society.

We do not know whether multilingualism in the provinces caused these regional changes in the Latin language. In general, the larger a language grows, the more likely it is to develop distinct dialects and regional forms. Thus, it is likely that Spanish Latin would have sounded different from African Latin even if no other languages had been spoken in these areas. don't know enough about the languages on the fringes of the Roman Empire to be sure of the effects they might have had on Latin.

Whatever the reason for the regional changes in Latin, it is likely that in the Imperial period we can see the seeds of the regional differences that would transform Latin into French, Spanish, and Italian. The Romans in the western half of the empire never stopped speaking Latin, but Latin diverged and eventually became the current Romance language.

What language did the Romans speak? Some of them spoke Latin. Some spoke Greek, Punic or Oscan. Some spoke two or more languages. Some learned Latin at school or in their spare time. Multilingualism was part of daily life in the Roman Empire and affected everyone from the imperial family to their soldiers, from senators to their slaves.

Katherine McDonaldis Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter and author ofOscan in Southern Italy and Sicily(Cambridge, 2015).

This article originally appeared in the November 2017 issueHistory todayunder the title 'Les Latin'.