Читать книгу Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin - Nicholas Ostler - Страница 8

… HVMANITAS VOCABATVR, CVM PARS SERVITVTIS ESSET.

… called “civilization,” when it was just part of being a slave.

Tacitus, Agricola, xxi

THE HISTORY OF LATIN is the history of the development of western Europe, right up to the point when Europe made its shattering impact on the rest of the world. In fact, only seen from the perspective of Latin does Europe really show itself as a single story: nothing else was there all the way through and involved in so many aspects, not Rome, not the Empire, not the Catholic Church, not even Christianity itself.

For the people who spoke and wrote it, the language was their constant companion; learning it was the universal key for entry into their culture; and expression in it was the unchanging means for taking social action. And this relationship with Latin, for its speakers and writers, lasted for two and a half thousand years from 750 BC. There was a single tradition through those millennia, and it was expressed—almost exclusively until 1250, and predominantly and influentially for another five hundred years thereafter—in Latin. Romans’ and Europeans’ thoughts were formed in Latin; and so the history of Latin, however clearly or vaguely we may discern it, is utterly and pervasively bound up with the thinking behind the history of western Europe.

Latin, properly understood, is something like the soul of Europe’s civilization. But the European unity that the Romans achieved and organized was something very different from the consensual model of the modern European Union. It was far closer in spirit to the kind of unity that Hitler and Mussolini were aiming at. No one ever voted to join the Roman Empire, even if the empire itself was run through elected officials, and LIBERTAS remained a Roman ideal. ROMANITAS—the Roman way as such—was never something voluntarily adopted by non-Roman communities.^* Conquest by a Roman army was almost always required before outsiders would come to see its virtues, and knowledge of Latin spread within a new province.

At the outset, the Latin language was something imposed on a largely unwilling populace, if arguably—in the Roman mind, and that of later generations—for their greater good. There was no sense of charm or seduction about the spread of Latin, and in this it differs from some other widespread languages: consider the pervasive image of Sanskrit as a luxuriant growth across the expanse of India and Southeast Asia, or indeed the purported attractions of French in the nineteenth century as an alluring mistress. Speakers of Latin, even the most eloquent and illustrious, saw it as a serious and overbearing vehicle for communication. In the famous words of Virgil:

TV REGERE IMPERIO POPVLOS, ROMANE, MEMENTO	you, Roman, mind to rule peoples at your command
—HAE TIBI ERVNT ARTES—PACISQVE IMPONERE MOREM	(these arts will be yours), to impose the way of peace,
PARCERE SVBIECTIS ET DEBELLARE SVPERBOS	to spare the conquered, and to battle down the proud.1

EXPOLIA, “Strip him.”

The most excellent Flavius Leontius Beronicianus, governor of the Thebaid in southern Egypt in the early 400s AD,^† ruled a Greek-speaking province. Greek had been the language of power there since the days of the Ptolemies more than seven centuries before, but the judicial system over which he presided was Roman. Its official records were kept in Latin, even of proceedings that actually took place largely in Greek and perhaps marginally (and through Greek interpreters) in Egyptian. The record we have, apparently verbatim, is in a mixture of Latin and Greek. Fifteen centuries later, it turned up on an Egyptian rubbish dump.

Slaves called to witness in Roman trials had always been routinely beaten, in theory as a guarantee of honesty; but on this day Beronicianus seems to have been in two minds. EXPOLIA. The governor was speaking Latin, and so the first the witness would have known of what was to happen was when his shirt was taken off him. The governor went on in Greek, “For what reason did you enter proceedings against the councillor?” remarking to the staff officer (also in Greek), “Have him beaten.” The record states that the witness was thrashed with ox sinews, and then the governor said in Greek, “Don’t beat free men.” And turning to the staff, PARCE, “Leave off.”²

What was it like having your life run for you in Latin? Even after three centuries of Roman rule, Latin stood as a potent symbol of irresistible, and sometimes arbitrary, power, especially to those who did not know the language.

By the nature of things, we do not have many direct accounts of being on the receiving end of government administered in Latin. Our sources are writings that have survived, whether on papyrus and parchment through two millennia of recopying, or on scraps of masonry that have directly defied erosion and decay. And where Latin was dominant, Latin users largely monopolized literacy. We seek almost in vain for non-Latin attitudes to the advent of Latin.

In fact, some of the most vividly subjective statements of the impact of Roman rule and the advent of Latin come from the pen of a man who had held the highest elective office in the Roman state, the historian Cornelius Tacitus. He described the British in the second century as ready to tolerate military service, tribute, and other impositions of empire, up to but not including abuse, “being already schooled to obey, but not yet to accept slavery.”^* He also articulated the anti-Roman arguments of those who backed the British queen Boudicca’s revolt, after a first generation of Roman rule: “Once we used to have one king at a time, but now we get two imposed, the legate to ravage our lifeblood, and the procurator our goods, one served by centurions, the other by slaves, all combining violence with insolence … and look at how few the invaders are, compared with our numbers.”³

Clearly, the major inconveniences of life under the Empire were taxes and military conscription, and neither was helped by the manifestly arbitrary way that those in charge could abuse their offices. But for many in the first generation to be conquered, the far greater threats were of personal enslavement and deportation, a life made up of all duties and no rights, next to which this “moral slavery” that exercised Tacitus was no slavery at all. This very real prospect, aggravated by the thought that the new recruits would always be the worst treated, was something else that he imagined looming large in the minds of Calgacus and his army of North Britons about to make their last stand against Rome.⁴

On the other hand, once the immovability of the Roman yoke had become established, there were compensations, if only for those nearer the top in their societies.^* Tacitus also commented cynically on the efforts made by the British elite to accommodate themselves to Roman control (PAX ROMANA). The governor Agricola, he said, in a deliberate policy of flattery, “instructed the sons of the chiefs in liberal arts, and expressed a preference for the native wit of the British over the studies of the Gauls, so as to plant a desire for eloquence in people who had previously rejected the Roman language altogether. So they took to our dress, and wearing the toga. Gradually they were drawn off into decadence, with colonnades and baths and chic parties. This these innocents called civilized life [HVMANITAS], whereas it was really part of their enslavement.”⁵

So language was early seen as one of the benefits of the new dispensation. Later, this enthusiasm threatened to get out of hand: Juvenal, a contemporary of Tacitus’ at Rome, commented on the Empire-wide popularity of the Romans’ traditional education in rhetoric:

Today the whole world has its Greek and Roman Athens; the eloquent Gauls have taught the British to be advocates, and Thule is talking of hiring an oratory teacher.⁶

In the early days, even some Romans bore the linguistic brunt when the spreading PAX ROMANA temporarily outran the sphere of Latin’s currency. Ovid was the very model of Roman urbanity, a leading poet and wit in the time of Augustus, HOMO EMVNCTAE NARIS as they would have put it, ‘a man with an unblocked nose’. With a divine irony, if not poetic justice, he was exiled in AD 8 to Tomi, a town on the western coast of the Black Sea (modern Constantsa) with less than a generation of Romanization behind it. Evidently, he suffered from the lack of Latin there. There was so little of it that his reputation counted for nothing. Instead, he described rather vividly the typical problems of a visitor who “does not speak the language”: “They deal in their own friendly language: I have to get things across through gestures. I’m the barbarian here, uncomprehended by anyone, while the Getans laugh witlessly at words of Latin. They openly insult me to my face in safety, perhaps even twitting me for being an exile. And all too often they believe the stories made up about me, however much I shake my head or nod at their words.”⁷

But these were just transitional difficulties for Latin speakers in the empire’s borderlands. Over the long centuries of Roman domination, the language, even in its written form, came to be used at all levels, perhaps even among building workers. At Newgate in London, a tile has turned up with the graffito AVSTALIS DIBVS XIII VAGATVR SIB COTIDIM ‘Gus has been wandering off every day for thirteen days’.⁸ One hundred and fifty miles away, in the health resort and holiday centre that Romans developed at Bath, a hundred ritual curses and oath tokens have emerged from the waters, written in Latin (sometimes backward): DOCIMEDIS PERDIDIT MANICILIA DVA QVI ILLAS INVOLAVI VT MENTES SVA PERDET OCVLOS SVS IN FANO VBI DESTINA ‘Docimedis has lost a pair of gloves. May whoever has made off with them lose his wits and his eyes in the temple where (the goddess) decides’. Although the British language was never fully replaced in Britain (as the modern survival of Welsh and Cornish show), the rulers’ language, Latin, clearly came to penetrate deeply into the days and ways of ordinary life.

All over the empire, from Britain to Africa, and from Spain to Asia, men were joining the army, acquiring a command of Latin, and when they settled at the end of their service—sometimes in colonies far from their origins—planting it there. The new Latin speakers made their mark permanently all over the Empire in the spread of their inscriptions. They are typically on tombstones, but the Mediterranean civic life that the Roman veterans brought to their new homes across Europe left written memorials of many kinds. And from these, it is clear that the language spread from military fathers to other members of the family.

Memorial to Annia Buturra. Although the legend is in Latin, the imagery is Basque: the red heifer of Mari and the thistle-head ‘flower of the sun’ eguzki-lorea.

In Isca Silurium (Caerleon in south Wales), for example, a daughter, Tadia Exuperata, erected beside her father’s grave a memorial to her mother, Tadia Vallaunius, and her brother Tadius Exuperatus, “dead on the German expedition at thirty-seven.”⁹ At the spa of Aquae Sulis (Bath), where Romans tried to re-create a little luxury to remind them of home, the armourers’ craft guild recorded the life of “Julius Vitalis, armourer of the twentieth legion recruited in Belgium, with nine years’ service, dead at twenty-nine.”¹⁰ Some inscriptions give glimpses of domestic sagas: Rusonia Aventina, visiting from Mediomatrici (Metz) in Gaul (perhaps to take the waters?), was buried at the age of fifty-eight by her heir L. Ulpius Sestius.¹¹ Some read more like statements by the proverbial “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”: “C. Severinus, Regional Centurion (retd), restored with virtue and the spirit of the emperor the purity of this holy place wrecked through insolence.”¹²

In Gastiain, Navarra, Spain, a memorial to a daughter reads, “To the Gods and Spirits (DIIS MANIBVS). Annia Buturra, daughter of Viriatus, thirty years old, placed here.” The opening phrase is classic for a Latin epitaph, but the effigies of a young woman seated on a ledge above, and a heifer looking out mournfully below, all surrounded by a frieze of vine leaves and grapes, show belief in a Basque underworld.¹³

Across Europe in Liburnia, modern Croatia, fragments of a sarcophagus no older than the second century AD have been found, this time recording a highly distinguished military career. The inscription reads:

To the spirits of the departed: Lucius Artorius Castus, centurion of the III Legion Gallica, also centurion of the VI Legion Ferrata, also centurion of the II Legion Adiutrix, also centurion of the V Legion Macedonica, also primus pilus of the same, praepositus of the Fleet at Misenum, praefectus of the VI Legion Victrix, dux of the legions of cohorts of cavalry from Britain against the Armoricans, procurator centenarius of the province of Liburnia, with the power to issue death sentences. In his lifetime he himself had this made for himself and his family.¹⁴

This sums up the life of an officer who evidently served right across the Empire: He had tours of duty with increasing seniority in five regular legions, as well as a naval command at Rome’s prime naval base near Naples, and active service as leader of British native troops in a campaign in Brittany. His last military command had been as praefectus in Britain, commanding the VI Victrix Legion at York, south of Hadrian’s Wall. But the final post of his career, in the area where his sarcophagus was found and where he presumably retired, was a high civil appointment (reserved for EQVITES—Roman ‘knights’) on the northerly coast of the Adriatic.

And in the great theatre of Lepcis, in Libya, an inscription was placed in AD 1–2 by the theatre’s local patron: “Annobal Rufus, son of Himilcho Tapap, adorner of the fatherland, lover of concord, flamen, suffete, captain of ritual, had it built at his own expense, and dedicated the same.” (It was dedicated to the honour of “the god’s son Augustus,” a nice touch that dates it, since Julius Caesar’s deification had by then been achieved, but not yet that of his adopted son, the emperor Augustus.) Its bicultural credentials were advertised in two ways. He took both Roman and Phoenician priestly titles (flamen like the Roman priests of Jupiter and other major gods, and suffete, no different from the Hebrew shophet, the title of Israel’s ‘judges’). And the Latin inscription was immediately followed by a Punic equivalent, which actually omitted the loyal references to Augustus. Lepcis had been a relatively free ally of Rome since 111 BC.¹⁵

By the reign of Augustus, then, which bridged the millennium divide BC–AD, use of Latin was already a natural symbol of allegiance to Rome. And Latin’s association with sinews of Roman power—with the army, the courts, and the organs of provincial administration, especially taxation—meant that it remained a highly politically charged language throughout the centuries of Roman rule, and especially so in those parts of the empire—Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, Africa, and perhaps even Britain—where ordinary people continued to speak something else at home.

HIS EGO NEC METAS RERVM NEC TEMPORA PONO: IMPERIVM SINE FINE DEDI…

On them I place neither bounds to their possessions nor limits in time: empire without end I have granted…

Jupiter’s promise to the Romans: Virgil, Aeneid, i.279

The Roman Empire was a mighty accomplishment, and it affected—as all empires do—the self-esteem of its citizens, its rulers, and above all its creators. They needed an answer as to what their unreasonable military success really meant. The only answer the Romans found seems to have been that they were fated to dominate the world. This consciousness, inseparable from Latin, is the sense of our title: AD INFINITVM.

When Julius Caesar was in his mid-thirties, serving as governor of Further Spain, he fell to brooding on the career of Alexander the Great. This man had conquered the greatest empire of his day before he was thirty-three, while he himself had not yet done anything memorable. Caesar wept.

In Latin, Suetonius wrote, IAM ALEXANDER ORBEM TERRARVM SVBEGISSET ‘Alexander had already subdued the world’. Alexander’s conquests had gone from Egypt to modern Pakistan, but on every border there were still neighbours who had not been conquered, Celts, Italians, Ethiopians, Arabs, Armenians, Sogdians, and above all the vast mass of Indians. Exaggerating the scale of mighty conquests came easily in that age. But the striking thing is how they saw their world as existing only as far as they knew it. Caesar went on to do his bit for conquest (he spent his forties subduing most of what is now France and Belgium—and so in a single decade laid the basis for the existence of French). He then enforced his personal rule over the whole Roman republic, a dominion that in his day included every land with a shore on the Mediterranean Sea. Twenty years after those bitter tears in Spain, he had made himself more famous, and more victorious, even than Alexander. And so, duly, when the dust cleared from the civil wars that followed Caesar’s death in 44 BC, Rome was soon minting coins with the legend PAX ORBIS TERRARVM ‘Control of the World’.

The very scale of the Empire, and the fact that its borders largely ceased to expand in the first century AD, laid the basis for a collective delusion that came to be shared by the whole Latin-speaking world. The distance that separated Rome from any outsiders, and the virtual absence of any dealings with them, whether to fight or (knowingly) to trade, spread the underlying sense that they were insignificant, almost nonexistent. The Latin word VNIVERSVM shows this idea built into the language. It means ‘all’, but is literally ‘turned into one’. The Romans in their empire undertook to do just that to the whole world.

They liked to tell themselves that they had succeeded. Certainly, from the defeat of their rival city Carthage in the third century BC until the influx of Germans in the fifth century AD, the Romans had no neighbour that was a serious military threat and within the Mediterranean world were able to subdue utterly any power that they challenged. Wars with the Romans seemed to have only one outcome in the long term, the subjugation and control of the adversary, to the extent that its territory passed permanently under Roman control. The political environment that the Romans knew was unipolar in a way that has scarcely been conceivable since its empire was broken up. In the second century AD the emperor Antoninus Pius had affected in all seriousness the title DOMINVS TOTIVS ORBIS ‘Lord of the Whole World’.

Aelius Aristides, a sophist from Greece, is famous for his encomium of Roman greatness, which he delivered when he visited Rome in AD 155. He formulated the official self-deception rather well: for him, the boundary of the Empire was not so much nonexistent as irrelevant. What lay beyond it was insignificant, and the boundary itself was perfect both in its form (notionally a circle) and in the ordered zone it defined:

Nothing gets away from you, no city, no people, no port, no fortress, unless—naturally—you have condemned it as useless: the Indian Ocean and the Nile cataracts and the Sea of Azov, called the ends of the earth in the past, are now just “the courtyard fences” for this city… Great and large in extent as is the Empire, it is much greater in its strictness than in its area encompassed … so the whole inhabited world speaks more strictly as one than a chorus does, praying that this empire will last forever: so brilliantly it is conducted by this maestro.

This last metaphor is the closest he came to hinting that Latin was the glue that held the Empire’s peoples in place: he was a Greek, writing in Greek, after all. The “courtyard fences” were an allusion to the Iliad, ix.476, where a hero describes breaking out of a palace where he is held under guard: Aelius was implying that Rome could go beyond any of her boundaries if she so chose. Later, he wishfully strayed even further from the strict truth, addressing the Romans, rather than their city:

You have made factually true that saying from Homer “the earth is common to all” (Iliad, xv. 193), having measured out the whole inhabited world, yoking rivers with bridges of every design, cutting through mountains to make bridleways, filling the deserts with staging points, and taming everything with settled ways and discipline… There is no need to write geographical descriptions or to enumerate each nation’s laws, since you have become common guides for all, swinging wide the gates to the whole inhabited world and allowing anyone so minded to see places for themselves, setting the same laws for all … organizing as a single household the whole inhabited world.¹⁶

Again Aelius quoted Homer; but the words were from a speech of the god Poseidon, explaining that the earth (unlike the sea, sky, and underworld) was shared between himself and his two brothers Zeus and Hades. The implication, for the learned reader, was to put Rome on an Olympian level.

Yet when they thought about it, educated Romans always knew that they had not quite pulled it off. Even as Augustus was putting PAX ORBIS TERRARVM on the coinage, the historian Pompeius Trogus was writing that Rome shared the world with Parthia, the power in what is now Iran. In the north—after a humiliating defeat in AD 9 in the Teutoburger Wald, which Augustus could never forgive or forget—it was official policy not even to try to conquer Germany. Practical discretion could cap pugnacious patriotism. And Romans had heard of many more peoples, Hibernians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Aethiopians, Indians, all well beyond their control. In the time of Christ, Pliny wrote of Taprobane (Ceylon), a whole new world across the ocean itself. And where, after all, did silk come from, that mystifying commodity in the luxury markets of Rome?

A generation later, in the prelude to his epic on the civil war that had brought Julius Caesar to power, the poet Lucan pointed out that there had been plenty more foreign enemies for Rome to conquer, before turning on itself for a good fight:

The Chinese should have gone beneath the yoke, and barbarous (dwellers by the) Aras, and any sentient people at the head of the Nile.

If you have such a passion for unspeakable war, Rome, turn your hand against yourself only when you have put the whole world under Latin laws: you have not yet run out of enemies.^*

The readiness of the Romans to overlook the actual limits on their power was more than overweening pride. It showed that although their empire’s borders were far-flung, their consciousness was not. Rather, it stayed concentrated at its traditional centre, in Rome, Italy, and MARE NOSTRVM ‘our sea’. Tellingly, their word for world is actually an expression, ORBIS TERRARVM ‘circle of lands’. Circles have centres. The Roman state did not identify with its provinces as the provinces were made to identify with Rome. Rome was mistress of the world; lands that she did not rule were hardly considered part of the real world at all.

In the three centuries from 238 BC Rome’s territory had expanded beyond Italy to include the whole Mediterranean basin, and with it had always come use of the Latin language. While its use was never officially required when these lands were added as provinces to the Empire, use of the original languages tended to dry up in the following centuries. Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, Southern Gaul, Northern Gaul, and Britain, the Alps, and—despite Ovid’s early problems—the Balkans all found that Latin became the currency of power in the early centuries AD and was then taken up much more widely in general use.

Latin’s expansion across Europe had happened by discrete stages, always after successful campaigns by the Romans’ highly organized army. This language expansion through centrally planned campaigns is unique in Europe’s history. It contrasts sharply with the progress of Gaulish, say, which filled the western lands and North Italy in the centuries up to 300 BC, or Slavonic, which was to spread into the Balkans after AD 450. For them, the engine of language spread was the incursion of large-scale raiding parties followed by settlement, which in the extreme became full-scale migration with bag and baggage, Völkerwanderung. This more traditional way was how Gaulish had reached Galatia in Asia Minor in 278 BC; and indeed this was how the Sabellian tribes had spread Latin’s southern neighbour language Oscan southward across most of Italy’s Mezzogiorno in the early first millennium BC. But when Latin spread, it was as the result of a war waged at the behest of the Senate in Rome; it brought with it a civic culture, based on cities linked by roads, and a much wider use of literacy (in Roman script) than had been known before, even where the newly conquered peoples had long experience of contact with literate outsiders.

The displacement effect of this orderly advance of Latin on the previous languages of what was becoming Europe was devastating. It is calculated that in the five centuries from 100 BC to AD 400 the count of known languages in lands under Roman administration fell from sixty to twelve, and outside Africa and the Greek-dominant east, from thirty to just five: Latin, Welsh, Basque, Albanian, and Gaulish—among which Gaulish was already marginal and doomed soon to die out totally. The very names of the lost languages, crossing southern Europe from west to east, sing an elegy of vanished potential: Lusitanian, Celtiberian, Tartessian, Iberian, Ligurian, Lepontic, Rhaetic, Venetic, Etruscan, Picene, Oscan, Messapian, Sicel, Sardinian, Dacian, Getic, Paeonian.¹⁷

Although the spread of Latin was never an object of Roman policy, there was a certain triumphalism about it in some quarters, even early on. Pliny the Elder was writing in the mid-first century AD that Rome had been elected by divine providence “to unite in conversation the wild, quarrelsome tongues of all their many peoples through common use of its language, to give culture to mankind, and in short to become the one fatherland of every nation in the world.”¹⁸ And even if this attitude was not often made so explicit, there can be no doubt that de facto all Romans presumed that their language, if any, would be the standard for communication in their domains. The first emperor Augustus left a declaration of his achievements (INDEX RERVM GESTARVM) with the vestal virgins to be read in the Senate after his death; copies were likely placed in temples all across the Empire, although there is only direct evidence for four, all in the East. Its text is always in Latin, in the Greek-speaking cities of Antioch, Apollonia, and Ancyra in Asia Minor, as in the nearby major Roman city of Colonia Caesarea, though in Ancyra at least it appeared with a full Greek translation.

Anecdotes show the early emperors’ concern to assert the status of Latin. In the first century AD, Augustus’ successor Tiberius is on record as having required, during a trial, a soldier who was questioned in Greek to answer in Latin; and his successor Claudius deprived a notable Greek of his judgeship, and even his citizenship, on the grounds that he did not know Latin.¹⁹ Clearly the only language whose status could contend with Latin for official purposes was Greek; but even the cultural prestige of Greek, and its practical usefulness as a lingua franca, had to yield for the highest government purposes to Latin. As Cicero put it, “It is not so much creditable to know Latin as it is a disgrace not to.”²⁰

Romans’ attitudes to others’ languages and traditions as spoken in the provinces were always dismissive. The popular dramatist Plautus, writing in the generation after Rome had subdued and incorporated Carthage, introduced a Carthaginian character with the words “He knows every language and knowingly pretends he doesn’t: a typical Carthaginian, you know what I mean?”²¹ Occasionally we can see the kind of condescending attitudes that nonliterary Romans felt for the populations into which Latin was projected. “The Britons have all too many mounted troops. Their riders do not use swords, and these Brits don’t sit back to discharge their javelins.”²² This is from a note made at the Roman garrison at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, established in the first century AD on the boundaries of Scotland, perhaps speculating why these Brits were less effective as soldiers than the Romans.^*

But war was not the only way that scope was created for the spread of Latin. People who were to be incorporated into the Empire might well have encountered Latin well before it became the language in which they were governed, most likely on the lips of NEGOTIATORES, Roman businessmen. Cicero in a defence speech in 69 BC, stressed how full Gaul already was of these operators: “Gaul is packed with businessmen, chock-full of Roman citizens. Not a Gaul does the slightest business without the involvement of a Roman citizen; not a coin changes hands without the involvement of Roman citizens’ accounting.”²³

And in another speech, delivered a few years later, Cicero took for granted—even with an audience of Romans—the fact of Romans’ abysmal behaviour as governors and exploitative businessmen in the provinces: “Words fail me, Romans, to express how much hatred is felt for us among foreign peoples because of the lusts and depredations of those that we have sent out to govern them over these years. Do you think there has been a temple left honoured by our magistrates, a community inviolate, a home adequately locked and defended? Nowadays cities are sought out for their wealth and resources so that war can be waged on them, just for greed to despoil them.”²⁴

The increasing presence of influential Romans, welcome or not to the host communities, would have given many a motive to learn Latin simply to get on in the world. Everyone must sooner or later have observed that Roman domination, once established, was permanent: indeed it was to last unbroken for five centuries, twenty generations, in western Europe. Except among the Basques, and in the wilder recesses of Britain and Dalmatia, every community in that vast territory came to abandon their own traditional culture and adopt Roman ways.

Latin, whether its use was spread by positive encouragement or contempt for any alternative, came to represent the universal aspirations of PAX ROMANA. Although Roman domination came at a high continuing price in taxes and military service, once imposed, there was no resisting it. And once accepted, it did offer universal access to the Romans’ own law, roads, and civic institutions, and beyond that to the wider pool of Western culture: Etruscan divination, Greek arts, commerce and engineering, Carthaginian agriculture and shipbuilding, Gaulish carriagework, Syrian and Egyptian mystery religions. And to the gastronome, besides an appreciation of OLEVM ‘olive oil’ and VINVM ‘wine’, it brought with it the culinary refinement of GARVM ‘fish sauce’.

You have made a single fatherland for peoples all over: With you in charge, for the lawless it paid to be defeated. And sharing your own justice with the conquered You have made a city of what was once the world.

Rutilius Namatianus (fifth century AD)²⁵

Latin was a factor unifying the Empire’s elites, through a common education and literary culture. In literature, in the first and second centuries BC the greatest writers had tended to come from the provinces of Italy, not Rome. Virgil was from Mantua, Livy from Padua, Horace from Apulia, Catullus from Verona in Cisalpine Gaul. But after this, a large proportion of the greatest authors—essentially the creators of literary Latin in their ages—hailed from diverse regions outside Italy.

In the first century, Spain was preeminent. From Corduba (Cordova) came L. Annaeus Seneca,^* the tragedian and moralist (son of an equally literary father, who had concentrated on rhetorical declamations), and his nephew M. Annaeus Lucanus, the epic poet of the Roman civil war; from Bilbilis (Calatayud) came M. Valerius Martialis, writer of epigrammatic verse. L. Iunius Moderatus Columella from Gades (Cadiz) wrote the classic text on farming; and M. Fabius Quintilianus from Calagurris (Calahorra) was an orator, but even more famous as the classic authority on rhetorical theory.^†

In the second century, the historian P. Cornelius Tacitus and the theorist of aqueducts and military strategy Sex. Iulius Frontinus came from southern Gaul. But the real competitor was Africa: C. Suetonius Tranquillus the biographer, M. Cornelius Fronto the orator, C. Sulpicius Apollinaris the grammarian, all came from there. Africa’s cultural repute at the time was captured in a quip of Juvenal’s: NVTRICVLA CAVSIDICORVM AFRICA ‘Africa, that amah of advocates, suckler of solicitors’.²⁶ Meanwhile Greeks, and other residents of the eastern provinces, are absent from this roll, as they continued to write in Greek. Some famous literary westerners (notably the sophist Favorinus, hailing from Arelate (Arles) in southern Gaul) even chose to be Greeks rather than Romans.

All these luminaries had felt they needed to travel to Rome to take part in the language’s cultural life at the highest level. This changed in the later second century. Apuleius, after studying in Greece and Italy, returned to Africa to work and write his bawdy but devout novel Metamorphoses (better known as “The Golden Ass”). Thereafter it seemed no longer necessary to establish oneself at Rome to make a literary or philosophical reputation. The poet Nemesianus (around 250–300), and the Christian writers Tertullian (around 160–240), Lactantius (around 240–320), and Augustine (354–430) all stayed in North Africa; others, such as the Bible translator Jerome from Pannonia (347–420) and the historian Orosius (early fifth century) from Spain, were happy to travel and work (in Latin) in different parts of the Empire.^* The Empire was the basis for the creation of RESPVBLICA LITTERARIA, a Republic of (Latin) Letters, which was to be an aspect of western Europe for the next millennium and beyond, almost unaffected by political and economic collapse.

The army too, like the process of literary education, provided a motive for the spread of Latin within the Empire, but one that affected a different, and very much more numerous, class of people. We are best informed about the top flight of military men, drawn from ever wider circles: the most successful could ultimately even become emperor. Already in the last days of the Republic (to 44 BC) it had been possible for provincial Italian lads to ascend to high command: T. Labienus, Caesar’s principal aide in Gaul, and P. Ventidius Bassus, who campaigned successfully on behalf of Mark Antony in Parthia, both seem to have come from modest backgrounds in Picenum.

A century later, after the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties had run out of heirs, the Empire was forced to fall back on outstanding soldiers; and it became clear that such distinction was no longer restricted to men from the traditional elite in Rome and Italy. Two emperors from Spain (Trajan in 98, Hadrian in 117) were succeeded by one from Gaul (Antoninus Pius in 138). After a turbulent interregnum caused by an attempt to reinstate the dynastic principle, military candidates for emperor again started emerging from the provinces, and more and more distant ones: Africa (Septimius Severus in 193, Macrinus in 217), Syria (Philip 244), Thrace (Maximinus 235), Pannonia (Decius 249), Moesia (Aemilianus 253). Aurelian, acceding in 270, even came from outside the Empire, in the lower Danube region.

The Latin language itself became a sort of repository of the languages of the peoples the Romans had subdued and brought into their great coalition. Many of the words are simple borrowings, but many more are harder to place, since they seem to be portmanteaux: Latin words clearly, but somehow dressed to look foreign. LYMPHA with its Y and its PH looks a clear borrowing from Greek, but it isn’t. It is just a grandiose word for ‘water’, redolent of nymphs, limpid pools, and deliquescence. Sometimes it is matched with nymphs, as if it were the word for another kind of water fairy; sometimes it becomes the name of a goddess in her own right, as when Varro invokes her (along with the equally bogus ‘Good Outcome’) at the beginning of his treatise on agriculture.²⁷ It went on to be a pseudo-explanation for all kinds of frenzy, of the sort that the wild spirits of wood and water will send down on mortals: LYMPHATICVS was much the same as LVNATICVS.

Home provinces of the Roman emperors. From the first to the third centuries AD, emperors were chosen from ever farther afield.

ARRA is another such word, meaning a bond or surety, but this time shortened from a word taken from a Semitic language, probably Punic, the language of financial transactions par excellence. Pliny the Elder jokes that a doctor’s fee is MORTIS ARRAM, a down payment on death.²⁸ Its original form ARRHABON represents the Semitic ‘erabōn, but in ARRA it has been shortened to be like Latin ĀRA, an altar—but a more Roman-feeling security: as when Ovid says that a friend of his is “the only altar that he has found for his fortunes.”²⁹

To add a third cultural mixer, consider the word CARRICVM, unknown to Latin literature, but evidently universal in spoken Latin, since echoes of it are found in every modern Romance language (French charge, Spanish cargo, Rumanian cârcă, Catalan carreg, Italian carico…) as well as English carry. At the start, it evidently meant a wagonload, such as a CARRVS (a word borrowed from Gaulish, to mean four-wheeled cart) could hold. CARRVS has had a major career of its own (e.g., car, chariot, career), but CARRICVM is another example of a word borrowed into Latin that there found a new and extended life, first as the replacement for the ancient Latin word ONVS ‘burden, load’, later with a rich metaphorical life, ranging over duties, pick-a-back rides (in Romanian at least), accusations, attacks, and (much later) ammunition for firearms, and then explosives generally. Gaulish may have been the language of choice for words for wheeled vehicles, but Latin gave an opportunity for transfusion into Europe’s future world-mind.

Languages create worlds to live in, not just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’ lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas. Latin has in fact been the constant in the cultural history of the West, extending over two millennia. In a way, it has been too central to be noticed: like the air Europe breathed, it has pervaded everything.

It was the Empire that gave Latin its overarching status. But, like the Roman arches put up with the support of a wooden scaffold, the language was to prove far more enduring than its creator. As the common language of Europe, spoken and written unchanged by courtiers, clerics, and international merchants, its active use lasted three times as long as Rome’s dominion. Even now, its use echoes on in the law codes of half the world, in the terminologies of biology and medicine, and until forty years ago in the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the most populous form of Christianity on earth. And through these last fifteen hundred years, Europe has remained a single arena, largely independent of outsiders, even as parts of it have sought to dominate the rest of the world.

Yet after the collapse of Rome’s empire, Europe itself was never again to be organized as a single state. The Latin language, never forgotten, was left as a tantalizing symbol of Europe’s lost unity. “Once upon a time the whole world spoke Latin.” This mythical sense remained behind Europe, and its proud civilization. And so, more than Christianity, freedom, or the rule of law, it has in practice been the sense of a once-shared language, a language of great antiquity but straightforward clarity, that has bound Europe together.