Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler

       Greek- and Latin-speaking zones in the Eastern Empire, AD 300. Latin never spread widely in Greece or the Levant, except in army bases and academic centres.

      In all the sixteen centuries that the Roman Empire was to last in the east, Latin never spread as a popular language. Some say the Romans themselves were at fault, in never making a determined effort to require its use. But what cultural inducement were the Romans able to offer to the Greeks? They were not offering any serious political rights comparable to Greek aspirations before the Roman conquest, and both Greeks and Romans agreed that the Greeks already had privileged access to the finer side of private life. A passage of particular pomposity from the first century AD suggests that it was usual for Romans to stand on their linguistic dignity:

      How much the magistrates of old valued both their and the Roman people’s majesty can be seen from the fact that (among other signs of requiring respect) they persistently maintained the practice of replying only in Latin to the Greeks. And so they forced them to speak through interpreters, losing their linguistic fluency, their great strength, not just in our capital city but in Greece and Asia too, evidently to promote the honour of the Latin language throughout the world. They were not lacking in learning, in everything they held that what was Greek should defer to what was Roman, thinking it improper that the weight and authority of the Empire should be sacrificed for the charm and attractions of literature.¹⁷

      But be this as it may, the language never expanded out of the functions (army, law, government, and the administration of imperial estates) and the particular cities (Constantinople, Nicomedia, Smyrna, Antioch, Berytus, Alexandria)^* that had attracted larger Roman populations. Roman citizen colonies in the east had been few (notably Corinth, refounded by Julius Caesar in 44 BC amid the century-old ruins left by L. Mummius) and soon effectively hellenized.

      As long as the Empire was united and looked only to Rome as its capital, there was an inducement for the elite, at least, to learn Latin and seek advancement in imperial service. There was even a brief surge in the use of Latin in the east, when the capital was moved to Constantinople in 324. Berytus became a great centre of Latin studies, with a practical bias preparing its students for careers in law.^* But even so, Latin speakers were increasingly hard to find in the fourth century: Ammianus recorded two high officials appointed to service in the east specifically for their bilingual skills.¹⁸ In the fifth century, from the reign of Theodosius II (408–450) the eastern and western halves of the Empire increasingly went their separate ways. The use of Latin in the east was becoming purely a formality. From 397, governors had been permitted to issue judgments in Greek; from 439, wills too were confirmed to be valid in Greek. The emperor Justinian (527–565), himself a Latin speaker from Illyria, tried to boost Latin again, calling it PATRIA VOX, and (still in Greek) hē pátrios phōné; but he had no choice but to publish most of his famous law code, the CORPVS IVRIS CIVILIS, in Greek as well as Latin, to make sure it was widely understood.¹⁹

      This period is documented among other sources by the memoirs (in Greek) of John the Lydian (490–ca 560), whose high judicial position in Constantinople, exceptor in the Praetorian Prefecture, had been achieved partly on the strength of his Latin. He witnessed with foreboding the courts’ abandonment of Latin, which happened in his time in office, recalling a prophecy attributed to Romulus, that Fortune would abandon the Romans whenever they should forget their paternal language.²⁰ Declining use of Latin had become a symbol of the fading importance of traditional learning, especially in the law, where clarity was being sacrificed for ease and accessibility.²¹ Still, we know that Latin was hanging on in some of its traditional functions: the emperor Maurikios (who reigned 582–602) wrote in Greek a field manual for the army in which the words of command were listed in Latin.^* And a new emperor was in these days formally acclaimed in Greek by the populace, but in Latin by the army.²²

      Then in the early seventh century, after the death of Muhammad in 632, the eastern Empire was buffeted by a series of military disasters that deprived it of all but its solidly Greek-speaking heartland. Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, where Greek had only ever been an elite language, and most spoke Egyptian or Aramaic, would never again be under Roman control. This turned out also to give the quietus to even official uses of Latin: there was no longer a need for it as a distinct, formal unifying language when everyone in the eastern Empire spoke Greek anyway. Looking back from the mid-tenth century, Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus judged that it had been in this early seventh century that the Romans “had been Hellenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue.”²³

      In a confusing footnote to the career of Latin in the east, the Byzantines were soon calling Greek itself rōmaíika ‘Romanish’ (in contrast with latiniká), a term for Greek that lasted at least until the nineteenth century. When Emperor Michael III (reigning at Constantinople in the mid-ninth century) was reported to have called Latin a “barbarian and Scythian language,” Pope Nicholas I riposted by suggesting that if that was his opinion, he should give up the title Emperor of the Romans.²⁴ Of that there was never any question. The eastern Empire had abandoned Latin, but that did not mean its citizens had given up on their Roman identity. Quite the reverse: the Byzantines were known as Rūmī to all their threatening neighbours to the east, Arab, Persian, and Turk, for more than eight hundred years, at least as long as their previous allegiance (as Graeci) to Rome in Italy. And when the Seljuk Turks, after 1071, succeeded in dislodging them from most of Anatolia, the Turks called their successor kingdom there the Sultanate of Rum.

      In some sense, the Greeks had never “got the point” of being Roman.

      They had never agitated for the kind of citizen rights (of trade, marriage, the vote) that exercised their fellow peoples subject to Rome in the west—and which meant that the Roman conquest and assimilation of Gaul, Spain, and Africa was like a continuation of the earlier struggle to expand across Italy. The Greeks’ loyalty to Rome, such as it was, was shown rather through participation in novel religious cults: first they hastily conjured into existence a new goddess, Roma (honoured in Alabanda, Chios, Miletus, Smyrna, Rhodes, as well as Athens); later—bizarrely—they affected to worship the most popular of the proconsuls sent to govern them; and ultimately they offered adoration to the emperor himself. In the first century AD, cities vied for dedicated shrines of worship to the emperor, since they were some kind of badge of status, entitling the city to call iself neōkóros ‘temple warden’. This was most un-Roman behaviour. But religion had always been an important mark of tò Hellēnikón ‘Greekness’—Herodotus²⁵ related how the Athenians had appealed to it in seeking alliance with the Spartans against the Persian menace in 480 BC. It would be again, after the Christianization of Greece in the fourth century AD. This would offer scope for almost endless doctrinal dispute: henceforth the Greeks would be able to combine the two traditional Greek propensities, for worship and for argument.

      Ultimately Greek was little affected by its eight hundred years of cohabitation with Latin, but Latin on the other hand derived much of permanence from its cohabitation with Greek. We have seen that Latin drew from Greek the conception it had of its own grammar, and also the tradition that a gentleman’s education should be general, based on literary classics and the skills of public speaking. But Latin is an heir to Greek in many other ways.

      Most concretely, there are far more loans of Greek words into Latin than the reverse, starting with the philosophical and intellectual vocabulary, which has largely been transmitted