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Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin
Nicholas Ostler


An in-depth biography of the Latin language from its very beginnings to the present day from the widely acclaimed author of ‘Empires of the Word’.The Latin language has been a constant in the cultural history of the West for over two millennia. It has shaped the way we think of ourselves and of our (central) place in the world. It has formed and united us as Europeans, has been the foundation of our education for centuries and defined the way in which we express our thoughts, our faith and our knowledge of the workings of the world. And yet, Latin began life as the cumbersome dialect of a small southern Italian city-state.Its active use lasted three times as long as Rome's Empire and its use echoes on in the law codes of half the world, in terminologies of biology and medicine, and until forty years ago in the litany of the Catholic Church, the most populous form of Christianity.In ‘Ad Infinitum’, Nicholas Ostler examines the reasons why Latin made such a long-lasting impact on language, and how it managed to stay alive for two millennia despite the cultural superiority of Greek. He will look at how Latin's sturdy roots remained untouched while empires rose and fell, the influence of religion, war and the ways it has progressed through medieval times right up until the present day.
















AD INFINITUM










A Biography of Latin and the World it Created

NICHOLAS OSTLER








To the memory of my parents

Kenneth MacLachlan Ostler

Yvonne Louise Ostler, née Jolly

DOS EST MAGNA PARENTIVM VIRTVS

The virtue of parents is a great endowment.

Horace, Odes, iii.24


HISTORIAM VERO, QVA TOT SIMVL RERVM LONGA ET CONTINVATA RATIO SIT HABENDA CAVSAEQVE FACTORVM OMNIVM SINGVLATIM EXPLICANDAE ET DE QVACVMQVE RE IVDICIVM IN MEDIO PROFERENDVM, EAM QVIDEM VELVT INFINITA MOLE CALAMVM OBRVENTE TAM PROFITERI PERICVLOSVM EST QVAM PRAESTARE DIFFICILE.

But a history, in which a long, continuous account must be given of so many things at once, and the causes of all the events explained singly, and a judgment offered on each, with its infinite-seeming mass bearing down on the pen, is as dangerous to propose as it is difficult to deliver.

Leonardo Bruni, Historia Populi Florentini, preface

IDEO AVTEM PRIVS DE LINGVIS, AC DEINDE DE GENTIBVS POSVIMVS, QVIA EX LINGVIS GENTES, NON EX GENTIBVS LINGVAE EXORTAE SVNT.

Therefore we have first discussed languages, and only then peoples, because peoples have arisen from languages, not languages from peoples.

Isidore, Etymologiae, ix.1.14

LECTOR INTENDE: LAETABERIS.

Reader, pay attention. You will enjoy yourself.

Apuleius, Metamorphoseon, i.1




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#ud0521bd0-c61e-5135-9125-b42f411b35e1)

Title Page (#u222a39a8-6683-539b-a940-d1482f460b68)

Dedication (#u1c7f4976-d191-52c8-b83c-d5ed9ea65fed)

Epigraph (#ud19a00d1-4553-50e2-b4e0-e9a7fd9f2a7e)

Praefatio (#u82069175-7f22-572c-b956-ee9a833baf45)

Part I : A Latin World (#u8d21d944-00ac-5646-8812-663a26cb88de)

Chapter 1 (#u417b6008-6700-5968-8eb1-f74a1b541b9a)

Chapter 2 (#u6d98e055-fe9d-5451-b432-05474d6730d7)

Chapter 3 (#uc7267148-de10-5d77-abe8-90c5684bfcfa)

Chapter 4 (#u0035ddfd-00df-5939-a145-c38e30040874)

Chapter 5 (#ub1adf483-956c-5b57-af97-abf62aae3c49)

Chapter 6 (#ue3135632-bf95-56af-9394-b4896f8e4815)

Part II : Latin Recruits (#u209e3d4c-befa-593d-bb93-451d21985698)

Chapter 7 (#ua77329e3-f777-5941-ba26-0fe66e562da1)

Chapter 8 (#u2dc587b3-7b20-5c09-8550-8bfde8b97f70)

Chapter 9 (#uf7a6b34d-cb79-5d87-8c63-4e083e21636c)

Chapter 10 (#u0677fa4a-52f9-578a-9a63-b26c3feffe92)

Part III : Worlds Built On Latin (#u35a81aa9-25a2-5654-9812-715d6ce34f2c)

Chapter 11 (#ue026ecab-498d-598e-92a1-7c5e62d5121a)

Chapter 12 (#u7dd8603f-0f75-5a9e-9df2-1d853ee0d1b0)

Chapter 13 (#u4f676035-728e-5b94-a7ae-fff28c55bc4f)

Chapter 14 (#uc6a9199c-8099-5745-b7ef-502e16f9c0f8)

Part IV : Latin In A Vernacular World (#ud6763977-1d9f-5606-8b3c-0e6b5d5fe53d)

Chapter 15 (#u0a5fcf30-058a-5f80-92e6-fb21304ae528)

Chapter 16 (#u6fa83c36-6bab-572b-81df-998ca11e74e3)

Chapter 17 (#u082d6798-7258-5ab2-9b6c-ce92a789e3ba)

Chapter 18 (#ufb3c9b66-c54e-511e-a67e-afbe5fd52cac)

Chapter 19 (#u358ee6cd-3a5d-5aa0-af21-6732e98f13bb)

Chapter 20 (#u96b64b76-b12a-5f1c-b9ad-e78d312d4c40)

Appendix I (#u02c6d7f6-7158-52ad-babc-7785f7f45dcd)

Appendix II (#u24632f14-0cff-52bb-afaf-b6ec1d8e461c)

Appendix III (#u5062bdd0-1f32-5165-b419-3700d105bd72)

Notes (#u98424c77-0f64-5c11-b104-3ae68e20f39b)

Bibliography (#u5885df22-3031-5233-afd3-156773c4f0ba)

Index (#u413937b9-de92-5226-a600-969dce6f5ae2)

About the Author (#udca09a55-9dc5-5e5f-bc5d-7322188a8d40)

Praise (#uef898fa1-2244-59cf-af3e-97b42f0b0bbe)

By the Same Author (#u7ce4a0c7-4389-5756-b40b-1a39c2c9e47a)

Copyright (#ua1bfa860-df33-5d5c-b556-70ee4f8ff1de)

About the Publisher (#u02e7bc9c-e909-5702-b7e1-a182702fa345)




Praefatio (#ulink_71ab5259-aa2e-58de-873d-b26e99f8925a)


NOWADAYS LATIN SEEMS A comical language. Its antiquity overwhelms us and we are embarrassed. The thing to do with it is make laconic remarks (mea culpa ‘my fault’, carpe diem ‘pluck the day’, veni vidi vici ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, tu quoque ‘you too’), cast spells (reparo ‘I repair’ (my spectacles), expecto patronum ‘I await the master’), or translate children’s classics (Winnie Ille Pu, Alicia in Terra Mirabili, Harrius Potter). Modern English students of Latin receive their lessons by courtesy of a Roman mouse, Minimus Mus. The sheer ponderosity of the Latin word-endings calls forth guffaws in English speakers, whether it is Monty Python’s Pontius Pilate defending the honour of his friends Biggus Dickus and wife Incontinentia Buttox, or anonymous macaronic punsters, providing Anglo-Latin nonsense:

boyibus kissibus priti girlorum

girlibus likibus wanti somorum.

And then there are the associations with anatomy and sex, where Latin seems a whole language provided for purposes of euphemism: fellatio, coitus interruptus, eiaculatio praecox. When Queen Elizabeth II rather poignantly called 1992 her annus horribilis, the Sun newspaper immediately had the vulgar wit to translate it as ‘one’s bum year’.

Latin is often happy to be ridiculous. Plautus’ twenty-one comedies from the third century BC are the first substantial set of texts that have survived in it; and faced with current events, as Juvenal pointed out in the second century AD, DIFFICILE EST SATVRAM NON SCRIBERE ‘it is difficult not to write a satire’.

But it was not always frivolous: for more than two thousand years written Latin was the preeminent mode of serious expression in Europe. That is a long time, and time for a lot of business. Even so, one of its first recorded poets, Naevius, was coyly doubtful of its future:

ITAQVE POSTQVAM EST ORCHI TRADITVS THESAVRO, OBLITI SVNT ROMAI LOQVIER LINGVA LATINA.

And so after he passed to the vault of Orchus [the Underworld], the Romans forgot how to speak the Latin language. (Naevius, 204 BC)

Naevius’ jocular prediction was not borne out. Yet at the other end of its history, there was just as little comprehension of what the future held in store for Latin. Eighteen centuries later and shortly before it was at long last to go out of active use, a disgraced former chancellor of England, expressing relief at the final publication of his work in Latin, had roundly stated his faith in its durability among languages: “For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity” (Francis Bacon, AD 1623). Those who lived with and in Latin clearly could not see the full trajectory of its history, the strengths and ultimately the weaknesses revealed during these two millennia. But that trajectory is what this book sets out to reveal.

Ad Infinitum tells the story of how Latin spread, first as the speech of an unremittingly aggressive and expansive city-state, Rome, then as the lingua franca of the barracks, farming estates, and urban trading centres that its empire established across the lands of the whole western Mediterranean; and of how much later it would spread as the medium of a Christian church that went even farther, seeking converts out to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, the fjords of Norway, and the plains of eastern Poland. Latin was a language spread by force of arms, colonial settlement, trading networks, cultural diffusion, military recruitment, and religious conversion. The character of the civilization expressed in this language changed over time, but there were elements—associated with Latin—that did not change.

This common thread of Latin, once the sound of Europe’s distinctive view of the world, is now a universal academic code, but also a thing of nostalgia. Latin, having been the no-nonsense, hectoring voice of Roman power, and then the soaring mood-music of the Catholic Church, has ended up being used above all to provide the scientific formulas that characterize every life-form on earth. But it is also a language of the heart: the foundation for romance—in all its senses—and a common cultural basis for Europe, the ultimate classic of education.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin came to be a schoolmaster’s language, passed on exclusively in the classroom by the inculcation—literally ‘trampling in’—of rules of grammar. (Not that this limited its prospects, or its utility in the wider world of power and propaganda: its influence was undiminished even a millennium later.) The popularity of favourite textbooks could be amazingly long-lasting: the record must be held by one of the first, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, still being given to pupils twelve hundred years after it was first written in the fifth century AD, but honourable mention is due also to Alexander’s Doctrinale (279 editions all over Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries), and William Lily’s Short Introduction of Grammar, which was still regularly being used by English speakers everywhere two centuries after its first edition in 1511. By these standards, Benjamin H. Kennedy’s Latin Primer (first issued in 1866 but still in use today) is a mere latecomer. I was brought up on Kennedy, as was my father before me, and very likely my grandfather too (though I never asked him).

We were latecomers to Latin, then; but also at a turning point. The British Empire, which my father and grandfather had fought to defend, in India and in Africa, was dissolved into the Commonwealth while I was growing up in the 1960s. Right on cue, elementary Latin had ceased to be a requirement for entry to any British university by the end of the same decade. British imperialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had modelled themselves on the Romans, just as Spanish imperialists had in the sixteenth, and indeed American constitutionalists in the eighteenth. Europeans have in fact been enthralled by the memory of Latin ever since it ceased to be our working language. But in the 1960s the world was turning its back on it.

This Latin winter was sharp. Yet new and rather different institutions were already establishing themselves as the last of the European empires were passing to the vault of Orcus. The new world status of the United States of America after the Second World War was widely characterized with the Latin phrase Pax Americana; here was a new imperial order, but one declaredly without colonies. Could the Roman model apply to it—whether of Empire or Church? And a Europe newly determined to abolish war among its nations has transformed itself into a European Union, choosing for itself a new Latin motto, In varietate concordia. In the twenty-first century, breakdowns in good governance in countries all over the world have tempted foreign-policy makers to reexamine the virtues of imperial-style intervention. The Roman model remains implicit, and that is one reason why Latin’s importance remains controversial to this day. It is time to examine the character of an empire, of a church, of a civilization, whose life was in Latin.

The language itself remained curiously unchanged throughout its long active career. Naevius’ and Bacon’s works are written in a common code, whose stable rules were transmitted intact through eighty generations of grammar school classes: contrast English, which has only existed at all for sixty generations, and which in its modern form has only lasted for twenty. What has changed has been in the handwriting, epigraphy and typefaces that have represented the eternal words on the page. The SQVARE CAPITALS


of the Roman Republic and Empire,

INMORTALES MORTALES SI FORET FAS FLERE, FLERENT DIVAE CAMENAE NAEVIVM POETAM.

which are represented straightforwardly in the first nine chapters, yielded to a variety of rounder and more cursive scripts beginning in the fourth century. First there is rustic:






In the fifth century this was largely replaced by uncial, in the main a Christian innovation:






Then, in the late eighth century, Carolingian style took over, and this lasted for more than four centuries:






But in the thirteenth century this in turn was succeeded by the new Gothic, or Blackletter, style:






Gothic was still in place when the Germans of the fifteenth century invented the first typefaces for printing, and it became the model for them (e.g., for Gutenberg’s Bible). Italians, however, soon attempted to reinstate the old styles that they found in old (uncial and Carolingian) manuscripts and attributed to their beloved Ancients, inventing for the purpose the italic and Roman styles, which have remained characteristic of western European (and hence American) printing to this day.

An grammaticorum, quorum propositum videtur fuisse ut linguam latinam dedocerent? An denique rhetoricorum, qui ad hanc usque aetatem plurimi circumferebantur, nihil aliud docentes nisi gothice dicere?

Italice loquentem soli Itali intelligent; qui tantum Hispanice loquatur inter Germanos pro muto habebitur; Germanus inter Italos nutu ac manibus pro lingua uti cogetur; qui Gallico sermone peritissime ac scientissime utatur, ubi e Gallia exierit, saepe ultro irridebitur; qui Graece Latineque sciat, is, quocunque terrarum venerit, apud plerosque admirationi erit.

Aside from the square capitals of Rome’s Republican and Imperial language, this book systematically represents Latin in italics. Other languages that crop up—such as Etruscan, Greek, German, Hebrew, and the many varieties of Romance that have culminated in modern western European languages—are also set down in an italic transcription, but where a text is quoted in extenso at the head of a chapter, the authentic script is occasionally used.

Although plenty of Latin is cited in the text—and even more in the endnotes—the book does not aim to give you the rudiments of the language. For that—in default of a serious Latin course—you must consult Tore Janson’s Natural History of Latin, Harry Mount’s Amo, Amas, Amat … and all that, or indeed dear old Benjamin Kennedy himself. What this book aims to do, rather than to give a halting competence in the language, or re-create an echo of the experience in a grammar-school classroom, is to show what the career of Latin amounted to; and wherever possible, to infer the character, the respected ideal, that grew up within the tradition of the Latin language. This is partly an inspiration to us, but also a warning.

For although it claimed to be universal, Latin always indicated Rome as the fixed point of reference for its world. Latin knew no boundaries because it was looking inward, back towards the Eternal City. Perhaps the effort to understand a language and a civilization that were so polarized may reorient our own sense of direction.

I owe thanks to my agent, Natasha Fairweather of A. P. Watt, for assurance that now is the time for a book about Latin, and to my publishers, George Gibson of Walker & Company and Richard Johnson of HarperCollins, for encouragement to see it through. To Natasha I have looked for SEMINA RERVM, discussing themes, to George for the LABOR IMPROBVS of detailed criticism, to Richard for AEQVVS ANIMVS in grand strategy. My background resources have been the London Library of St James’s Square (as ever, my flexible friend), the Sackler and Bodleian libraries of Oxford, and the unexpected riches of the Hitotsubashi University Library in Kunitachi, west of Tokyo. I depend here on all I learned from Latin teachers over the 1960s and early 1970s: Michael†, Eric†, and Maurice† Bickmore, Geoffrey Allibone, James Howarth†, Jack Ind, Michael McCrum†, Robert Ogilvie†, Eric Smalman-Smith, Jasper Griffin, Anthony Kenny, Oliver Lyne†, Anna Morpurgo Davies, John Penney, Harald Reiche†, and Jochen Schindler†. Friends too over the years have injected and interjected much wit: I think especially of David W. Bradley†, Charles and Francis Montagu, Jeremy Lawrance, David Nash, Harald Haarmann, and Jonathan Lewis. My wife, Jane, and daughter, Sophia, have endured, inspired, and sweetened all my necessary absences.

HOC ILLVD EST PRAECIPVE IN COGNITIONE RERVM SALVBRE AC FRVGIFERVM, OMNIS TE EXEMPLI DOCVMENTA IN INLVSTRI POSITA MONVMENTO INTVERI; INDE TIBI TVAEQVE REI PVBLICAE QVOD IMITERE CAPIAS, INDE FOEDVM INCEPTV FOEDVM EXITV QVOD VITES.

This is what is beneficial and good for you in history, to be able to examine the record of every kind of event set down vividly. Here you can find for yourself and your country examples to follow, and here too ugly enterprises with ugly outcomes to avoid.

Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, preface



PART I A LATIN WORLD (#ulink_b5ea5a64-2808-57e4-a111-57fb9490de35)




CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_3a29abdb-3a56-5449-a52f-ebd79693219f)

Ad infinitum—An Empire Lived in Latin


… 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:




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.”




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.”




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.




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.”




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.




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.”




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’.


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.”


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.”


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.


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.”




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.




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.




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.




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.




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.




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.”


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.


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.”




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?”


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.”


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.”




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.”




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)




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’.


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.


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.


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.”




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.




CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_b02b9a42-f869-5a65-9f96-6a25f2af332e)

Fons et origo—Latin’s Kin


MAIORES NOSTRI…VIRVM BONVM CVM LAVDABANT, ITA LAVDABANT, BONVM AGRICOLAM BONVMQVE COLONVM. AMPLISSIME LAVDARI EXISTIMABATVR, QVI ITA LAVDABATVR.

Our ancestors … when they singled out a good man for praise, used these words: “a good farmer and a good settler.” Someone so praised was thought to have received the highest esteem.

Cato, On the Country Life




LATIN OWES ITS NAME to its home region of Latium in west-central Italy, the southern half of modern Lazio. With hindsight, it certainly looks a good starting point for a future Italian, and then Mediterranean, power. Its position is central in Italy, and it controls the ford on the river Tiber (modern Tevere), which is the main divider of Italy’s western coastal plains. Italy, in turn, is central within the northern sector of the Mediterranean, equidistant from Spain in the west and Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the east.

The first question that naturally arises is why the language is not known as “Roman,” for the power that spread the language far and wide was not Latium, but the city-state of Rome, and the result was the Roman, not the Latin, Empire. But the Romans’ influence was usually decisive, even with outsiders, in setting the names of their institutions; and the Romans always referred to their language as lingua Latīna, or sermō Latīnus. It shows that the language is older, and its area, originally at least, wider than the Roman state.






Languages of ancient Italy. Until the third century BC, Latin was just one among many Italic languages.

Looking as far back as we can to the origins of Latin, we do not have the convenience (as we do for English) of being able to give it a place and a period. But it is discernibly an Indo-European language, a member of a highly diverse family of related languages whose borders were set, before recorded history, between Bengal and Donegal (and indeed between Iberia and the edge of Siberia). Its speakers will have reached Latium along with the forerunners of most of the other language communities that largely surrounded Latin when we read their first traces in the written record. They are called Italic languages and included Faliscan, Umbrian, and Venetic to the north, Oscan to the south.


Sadly, there is no agreement on when these languages would have come to Italy (sometime between the sixth and the second millennia BC, but all as a group, or in separate events?), on what allowed their speakers to spread (prowess at farming? Copper, Bronze, or Iron Age weaponry?), or even on what their route would have been (over the sea from the Balkans? down the Adriatic or the Tyrrhenian coasts?). We can only say where in the Italian peninsula the Italic languages ended up, and what sort of languages they were.

As to where in Italy they settled, it is clear that there were two major groups or subfamilies: Latin-Faliscan-Venetic settled the north, whereas Oscan and the rest, usually known as the Sabellian languages, occupied most of the south of Italy. The main exception to this pattern is Umbrian, a dialect which is more similar to Oscan than northern Italic; so its position in north-central Italy suggests that the Umbrians migrated later from the south up into the Apennines. It is also significant that the very similar Latin and Faliscan—a dialect best known for its drinker’s motto FOIED VINO PIPAFO CRA CAREFO “Today I shall drink wine; tomorrow I shall go without.”


—were separated from their cousin Venetic by a large, and totally unrelated, Etruscan-speaking population. The geography suggests that the Etruscans moved in from the west, splitting the two wings of northern Italic apart.

The Italic languages were not mutually intelligible, at least not across their full range. An idea of how different they could be may be gained from looking at some very short texts in the two best known and farthest flung (Venetic and Oscan) with a word-for-word translation into Latin. (For comprehensibility, none of the languages is shown in its actual alphabet.)

First a Venetic inscription on a bronze nail, found at Este:

mego zontasto sainatei reitiai egeotora aimoi ke louzerobos [Venetic]

me dōnāvit sanātricī reitiae egetora aemō līberīsque [Latin]

i.e., word for word in English:

“me gave to-healer to-Reitia Egetora for Aemus and children”

or more clearly:

“Egetora gave me to Reitia the healer for Aemus and his children.”

And then a clause of a Roman magistrate’s arbitration (183 BC) between Nola and Avellino, written on a boundary stone:

avt púst feihúís pús fisnam amfret, eíseí tereí nep abellanús nep nuvlanús pídum tríbarakattins [Oscan]




autem pōst murōs quī fānum ambiunt, in eā terrā neque avellānī neque nōlānī quicquam aedificāverint [Latin]

i.e., word for word in English:

“but behind walls which temple they-surround, on that land neither Avellani nor Nolani anything they-shall-have-built”

or more clearly:

“but behind the walls which surround the temple, on that land neither the Avellani nor the Nolani may build anything.”

Nevertheless, there are striking similarities among them, and features, from the most specific to the most general, that set Italic languages apart from the other Indo-European languages.

First of all, a distinctive sound in Italic is the consonant f. It is extremely common, cropping up mostly in words where the Indo-European parent language had once had either b


or d


. In Latin, the sound is mostly restricted to the beginning of words, but in Oscan and Umbrian it often occurs too in the middle: Latin fūmus, facit, forēs, fingit; Oscan feihús, mefiú; Umbrian rufru—meaning ‘smoke, does, doors, makes’; ‘walls, middle’; ‘red’.




With respect to meanings, the verb form ‘I am’ is sum or esom, with a vowel (o or u) in the middle and none at the end; there is no sign of such a vowel in Greek eimí, Sanskrit asmi, Gothic im, Hittite ešmi. There are also some distinctive nuances of words in the Italic vocabulary (asterisks show that forms are historical reconstructions): the common Indo-European root


deikmeans ‘say’ here (Latin dīcere, Oscan deíkum), not ‘show’ as it does in the other languages (Greek deíknumi, Sanskrit diśati, English token); also, the root


dhē- means ‘do’ or ‘make’ (Latin facere, Oscan fakiiad, Umbrian façia, Venetic vhagsto ‘made’) and not ‘put’ as it does in the other languages (Greek -thēke, Sanskrit -dhā-).

The pattern of verb forms is simplified and regularized from Indo-European in a distinctive way. As every schoolboy once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs, each with slightly different endings, known as conjugations. The different sets of endings corresponded to the vowel that closes the stem and preceded the endings (as amā- ‘love’, monē- ‘warn’, regĭ- ‘rule’, audī-‘hear’). This vowel then largely determined the precise forms of all the verb’s endings, 106 choices in all.


Something similar is seen in Oscan and Venetic verbs. This is complex by comparison with English, but is in fact rather simpler than the fuller, differently organized systems seen in such distantly related languages as Greek, Sanskrit, or Gothic, where one can find more persons (dual as well as singular and plural), an extra tense (aorist), voice (middle), and moods (optative, benedictive).

The nouns, on the other hand, followed five patterns (declensions), choosing a set of endings on the basis of their stem vowel (-a, -o, none, or -i, -u, -e): the endings marked whether a noun was singular or plural (here too, in Italic languages, dual was not an option), and which case it was in, i.e., what its function was in the sentence; the cases were nominative (for subject), accusative (for object), genitive (for a noun dependent on another noun), dative (for a recipient), ablative (for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee), though the last two had become marginal in Latin. Hence analogously to a Latin noun like hortus ‘garden’, which had a pattern of endings

Sing. N. hortus, Ac. hortum, G. hortī, D. hortō, Ab. hortō, L. (hortō), V. horte Plur. N. hortī, Ac. hortōs, G. hortōrum, D., Ab., L. hortīs

we find in Oscan (remembering that ú was probably pronounced just like ō)

Sing. N. húrz, Ac. húrtúm, G.*húrteis, D. húrtúí, Ab. *húrtúd, L. *húrtei, V. ? Plur. N. *húrtús, Ac. *húrtúss, G. *húrtúm, D., Ab., L. *húrtúís.

On this kind of evidence, one can say that Latin and Oscan in the second century BC were about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese are today.

Consciousness of Latin as a language with its own identity began in the words of the poet Gnaeus Naevius, one of the very first in the Latin canon, writing from 235 to 204 BC. He wrote his own epitaph, showing either a concern that the language was in danger of decay, or an inordinate pride in his own literary worth!











Naevius is the earliest Latin poet whose works have survived. (He was actually a man of Campania and so probably grew up speaking Oscan.) But when these words were written, at the end of the third century BC, Rome already had three centuries of forthrightly independent existence behind her, and we know that Latin had been a written language for all of that time. Our earliest surviving inscriptions are from the sixth century BC.

Latin had been literate, then, but not literary: scribes will have noted down important utterances, but few will have consulted those records after the immediate need for which they had been made. One ancient historian recounted that important laws were stored on bronze pillars in the temple of Diana on Rome’s Aventine Hill,


and at least one ancient inscribed stone has been found in the Roman Forum.


There was a tradition at Rome that the law was set down publicly on Twelve Tables in 450, but the fragments that survive, quoted in later literature, are all in suspiciously classical-looking Latin.


It seems unlikely that there was any canon of texts playing a part in Roman education in this early period.


Famously, the important written texts, such as the Sibylline Books, consulted at times of crisis by the Roman government, were not in Latin but in Greek. The absence of a literary tradition in Latin until the second century seems to have allowed speakers to lose touch with their own language’s past, in a way that would have been unthinkable, say, for Greeks in the same period.






The Duenos ceramic, a tripartite vase of uncertain, but perhaps erotic, use. It holds the earliest substantial inscription in Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC).

In fact, about three generations after Naevius, the historian Polybius managed to locate the text of a treaty that had been struck between Rome and Carthage, explicitly dating it to the first year of the Roman Republic, 508 BC (“under Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Horatius, the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings, twenty-eight years before Xerxes crossed into Greece”). He commented, “We have transcribed this, interpreting it to the limits of accuracy possible. But such a great difference in dialect has arisen between modern and ancient that the most expert Romans can barely elucidate parts of it, even after careful study.”




He then quoted it in full, but tantalizingly only in Greek translation. However, one of the few inscribed survivals from earlier Latin may offer a hint at the kind of difficulties those Roman experts were encountering. Latin grammar had moved on quite smartly in those two hundred years; and many old inscriptions remain enduringly obscure, even though we now can approach them with a comparative knowledge of other Indo-European languages inconceivable to contemporaries.

Consider for example the oldest substantial example, on the famous DVENOS ceramic, a tripartite, interconnecting vase rather reminiscent of a Wankel engine. Found in Rome in 1880, it is dated to the sixth or early fifth century BC, the same period as that early treaty.

The inscription is in three lines, which may be transcribed as

IOVESATDEIVOSQOIMEDMITATNEITEDENDOCOSMISVIRCOSIED

ASTEDNOISIOPETOITESIAIPAKARIVOIS

DVENOSMEDFECEDENMANOMEINOMDUENOINEMEDMALOSTATOD

and which are conjectured to mean

He who uses me to soften, swears by the gods.

In case a maiden should not be kind in your case,

but you wish her placated with delicacies for her favours.

A good man made me for a happy outcome.

Let no ill from me befall a good man.




This is unlikely to be fully correct—some of the vocabulary may simply be beyond our ken because the words died out—but even if it is, it presupposes that the words here must have changed massively over three centuries to become part of a language that Naevius would have recognized. Here is a reconstruction into classical Latin, with the necessary changes underlined:

iurat diuos qui per me mitigat.ni in te_comis virgo sietast [cibis] [fututioni] ei pacari vis.bonus me fecit in manum munus. bono_ne e me_malum stato

Virtually every word had changed its form, pronunciation, or at least its spelling between the sixth and the third centuries BC. This shows what rapid change for Latin occurred in these three centuries, comparable to what happened to English between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries AD, when Anglo-Saxon (typified by the Beowulf poem), totally unintelligible to modern speakers, gave way to Middle English (typified by Chaucer’s writings), on the threshold of the modern language.






The inscription that circles the Duenos ceramic. Written in a highly archaic form of Latin, it appears to offer a love potion.

Yet (again like English), as reading and writing became more widespread, the pace of change in the language was to slow dramatically. Naevius’ poetry of the third century remained comprehensible to Cicero in the first, and indeed Plautus’ comedies, written in the early second century BC, were still being performed in the first century AD. Those plays are in fact written in a Latin close to the classical standard, canonized by Cicero and the Golden Age literature that followed him, a literary language that was simply not allowed to change after the first century BC, since every subsequent generation was taught not only to read it but to imitate it.

But why did this language, which only came to a painful self-awareness in the third century BC, go on to supplant not only all the other languages of Italy but almost all the other languages of western Europe as well? In the sixth century BC, a neutral observer could only have assumed that if Italy was destined to be unified, it would be under the Etruscans; and in the third century BC, Latin was still far less widely spoken than Oscan. Where did it all go right for Latin, and for Rome?




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