Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

The Etruscan and Latin alphabets show by their form that the Etruscans had acquired theirs from the (Euboean) Greeks of Italy, and the Romans from the Etruscans. The Euboean origin shows in the values of certain letters: notably F and Q survive, H represents [h] and X [ks] (although some early Latin inscriptions use Φ instead for this last). But the details of the transmission remain obscure: the earliest known Etruscan inscriptions are not found around the most likely point of contact, the island of Ischia, where the Euboeans had their emporium; and they include some letters (C instead of Γ, Μ in addition to Σ to represent the [s] sound) that came from the Corinthian, not the Euboean, alphabet. (But Syracuse, the most powerful of the Greek colonies in Italy, had been founded by Corinth; so this is not wholly surprising.)

Mirror of Volterra. This picture, from the back of a lady’s mirror, shows the goddess Juno formally accepting Hercules as her (adopted) son.

As in many cases of early literacy, the offer of writing to the Romans was not taken up as a chance to begin a literature; for them, as for their Etruscan tutors, the first writing seems to have been a means of making spells or formulas effective by setting them down on a permanent medium. The word zich, meaning ‘writing’ or ‘book’, is common in the Etruscan religious or legal documents that have survived. The boundary stone known as Cippus Perusinus ends with the phrase cecha zichuche ‘as has been written’. And likewise the Tabula Cortonensis, probably a land contract, contains the phrase cen zic zichuche ‘this writ was written’. In the depiction on a bronze mirror, found at Volterra, of the goddess Uni (Juno) being formally reconciled with Hercle (Hercules) by suckling him, a written plaque is held up by an attendant character, who by his trident must be Neptune. The plaque reads in Etruscan, eca sren tva ichnac hercle unial clan thrasce, which would be translated (word for word): “this picture shows how Hercules Juno’s son became.”

It is another example of a written statement being used formally to characterize something, in this case the point of a mythical situation. Early writing, such as the Etruscans knew, and such as they transmitted to the Romans, was for records.

CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_f69b3940-a559-5614-bb76-5c4b8f4a7e15)

Cui bono?—Rome’s Winning Ways

QVIS, QVID, VBI, QVIBVS AVXILIIS, CVR, QVOMODO, QVANDO?

Who, what, where, by what means, why, how, when?

Traditional hexameter line, setting out lines of analysis

IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BC the many cities of Greece’s classical era yielded to the single dominating power of Macedon: Athens, Thebes, and Sparta were among them, but even they were powerless to organize resistance. In that same century, as we have seen, the many cultured cities of Etruria too lost their independence: one by one, they succumbed to the gathering might of Rome. The demolition of leagues of city-states by single, centralized powers—powers that had previously seemed rather backward—was a feature of this century in Italy as in Greece.

Before this happened, could the Latin language have been endangered? To the north and to the south, there were Etruscan-speaking communities; and as we know, in the fifth century Rome itself was heavily influenced, if not actually ruled, by noble Etruscan families. One can speculate that the situation, linguistically, might have been rather like that of England after the Norman conquests, a foreign-language ruling class living self-indulgently in the city while the indigenous farmers toiled in the fields to support them.

However, looking at the elite technical vocabulary of the period, there is little reason to believe that Latin speakers were being excluded. The names given to the tribes to which Romans were assigned for voting purposes are all, admittedly, words of Etruscan origin: Luceres, Ramnes, Tities. And it is argued—still inconclusively—that an important word such as populus, which came to mean ‘the people’, Rome’s ultimate source of authority, was originally an Etruscan word for ‘army’.

(#litres_trial_promo) But besides these, all the mechanisms of government were couched in Latin terminology. Rome had a senate (senātus, literally ‘elder-dom’, related to senex ‘old man’), whose members were addressed as patrēs conscriptī ‘conscript fathers’ and met in the cūria (< co-viria ‘men together’). Its elected officers (magistrātūs) were consulēs ‘advisers’, praetōrēs < prae-itōrēs ‘leaders’, aedilēs ‘buildings men’, and quaestōres ‘inquirers’. Its elections were called comitia ‘goings-together’, decided by suffrāgia ‘votes’. In emergencies, the supreme power would be vested in a single dictātor ‘prescriber’, supported by a magister equitum ‘master of cavalry’. From time to time cēnsōrēs ‘assessors’ would review the senatorial rolls. All these crucial terms are transparently native to Latin. Other ancient constitutional words existed, with more obscure etymology: classis ‘levy’ (an income-based electoral division), tribus ‘tribe’ (an electoral division based on lineage), plēbs or plēbēs ‘masses, lower orders’, pūbēs ‘body of citizens that are of age’. These could have been borrowed, but they could just as well have been ancient Latin terms; in any case, they tended to apply to the opposite end of society from the aristocracy, where we may assume that Etruscan influence would have predominated.

Whatever the degree of intimacy between Etruscans and Romans, this period left Rome in a position to expand like no other Italian power: within 250 years of its independence, just ten generations, it had moved to dominate not only the rest of Latium and Etruria, but also the whole extent of the peninsula beyond, both northward and southward. Militarily and politically, by 400 BC Rome had secured alliances with all of Latium and defeated the surrounding hostile mountain peoples, the Aequi and the Volsci. The next century and a half saw a hardening of Roman control in Latium, and a simultaneous spread of Roman power in three directions: over Etruria in the northwest, completed by the conquest of Volsinii in 264; over Umbria and Picenum in the northeast, mostly by making defensive alliances against the Gauls, who repeatedly invaded from the north; and over the (Oscan-speaking) Samnite league, which had united most of the east and south, sealed by Roman victories at Sentinum in 295 and Lake Vadimo in 282.

The final military challenge to Rome’s control of Italy came from an invading force of Greeks, under King Pyrrhus of Epirus (the Greek northwest), invited over by the leading Greek colonial city of south Italy, Tarentum. This war, coming so soon after Rome’s victory over the Samnites, threw all Rome’s previous gains into jeopardy; it lasted from 280 until 272 BC, and although the Romans did not defeat Pyrrhus, his “Pyrrhic” victories over them were so costly and indecisive that he eventually retired, leaving Rome in control of Italy as a whole, and indeed unchallenged south of a line from Pisa to Rimini. Rome’s grip within Italy was not to be tested for another fifty years (during which time they had extended their control as far as the Alps). But when Hannibal invaded the country in 218, at the head of another foreign army (this one Carthaginian), the expected Italian revolt in support of Hannibal never came. In those fifty years, then, Rome had established itself solidly as the ruling city of Italy.

Roman expansion in Italy: Rome spread its dominion through a series of conquests and perpetual alliances in the third and second centuries BC.

Later on, when asked to explain their run of military success, the Romans liked to claim a particular readiness to learn from their opponents. Sallust, a historian of the first century BC, put the following words in the mouth of Julius Caesar:

Our ancestors were never lacking in strategy or boldness, conscript fathers; nor were they prevented by pride from imitating others’ institutions, if they were sound. They took arms and missiles from the Samnites, and most of their magistrates’ insignia from the Etruscans. Above all, whenever anything apt was recognized among allies or enemies, they followed it up at home with the utmost zeal; they preferred to imitate good things rather than envy them.

(#litres_trial_promo)

In an unattributable fragment from a Greek historian, a Roman diplomat gave the following lesson on Roman character to a Carthaginian, who was claiming it could only be folly to challenge his own city at sea. (The dialogue is set in the 260s BC, between the departure of Pyrrhus and the outbreak of the First Punic War.)

This is what we are like. (I shall tell you facts that are quite beyond dispute, for you to take back to your city.) When we face enemies, we take on their practices, and with those alien methods we surpass those with long experience in them. The Etruscans fought us with bronze shields, and in phalanx formation, not in maniples; we changed our weaponry and squared up to them; and in contest with those long-service veterans of phalanx warfare, we won. With the Samnites, the long “door” shields were not part of our tradition nor were javelins, since we had been fighting with spears and round shields; nor did we have much cavalry, practically all our strength lying in infantry. But we rearmed accordingly and forced ourselves into the saddle, and competing with these alien arms, we brought down those with high opinions of themselves. We did not know siege warfare; but we learned it from the Greeks, its masters, then went on to achieve more in it than those experts or anyone else. So men of Carthage, don’t force the Romans to take up seafaring: if we need a fleet, we shall soon build one bigger and better than yours, and we’ll fight better with it than long-hardened sailors.

(#litres_trial_promo)

So much for Rome’s military and political advance in these years, where the results show that Rome did have some long-term military, political, or perhaps even (as the Romans no doubt believed) moral advantage. Of greater interest, though, is how and why Rome was able to convert that into the permanent spread of Latin across Italy. The answers take us to the heart of why Latin ultimately expanded to be the majority language all around the western Mediterranean.

In fact, Latin tended to spread as a result of Roman conquests for three clear reasons.

First, and probably most important, when the Romans defeated an enemy, their usual practice was not to destroy its city and drive out or enslave its people, but rather to demand tracts of land from it. Even if a Roman treaty was not imposed at the end of a war, but struck as a defensive alliance, it would quite often involve permission for the establishment of a new Roman settlement or colony.

(#litres_trial_promo) The land for this was methodically measured out and delimited into rectangular plots by the land surveyors in a process called centūriātiō. Such regular land-plotting was to be practised all over the Empire and is often still visible today.

Gradually, these tracts of farming land, or sites for new cities, were filled up with Romans and other Latin speakers from allied cities in Latium. It is estimated that in 260 BC there were approximately 292,000 Romans, and three quarters of a million other Latins; their joint population would have made up perhaps 35 percent of Italy’s then population of 3 million souls.

(#litres_trial_promo) And so, as the Romans and their allies gradually came to dominate the peninsula, the minority language Latin was seeded around Italy as a community language, and that of an increasingly high-prestige community.

Second, many treaties contained a condition giving Rome the right to levy young men for its army. (Military age for the Romans was from seventeen to forty-six years old.) As well as increasing the military strength of Rome, this too spread knowledge of Latin, since the Roman army was commanded in Latin.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the early centuries of Rome’s wars, such levies would return to their homelands after service, mostly annually; but they remained available for enlistment for sixteen years. A famous example of a man who learned Latin in the army was Q. Ennius (239–169 BC), who went on to become a considerable tragic and epic poet in the language. Ennius had come from a noble family in Calabria but served in Sardinia, where he impressed M. Porcius Cato (later a consul) and so was taken to Rome.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Venta Icenorum, ca AD 4. This impression shows the division of the land into square centuries.

Later on, the latinizing effect of army service also reinforced indirectly the spread of Latin speakers in colonies: with the institution of a standing army by the general C. Marius at the end of the second century BC, it became usual for retiring soldiers, after their sixteen years’ service or when armies were disbanded at the end of major campaigns, to be settled on the land, perhaps far away from the lands of their birth, but quite likely where they had seen service. This was a major reason for personal mobility through the war-filled periods of the late Republic and early Empire, from 100 BC until the emperor Hadrian ended the practice in the early second century AD. Thereafter soldiers tended to be recruited from home communities, so lifelong personal mobility was reduced. But in any case there were no more significant additions to the territories of the Empire; and by then, of course, the use of Latin had become dominant throughout the western Mediterranean provinces.

Looking back to Rome from his own (political) exile in the 40s AD, the philosopher and future statesman Seneca wrote, with some feeling, “The Roman Empire looks to an exile as its founder…[he meant Aeneas]. How many colonies has this nation since sent into every province! Wherever the Roman has conquered, he inhabits. Willingly they have given their names to this change of homes, and leaving their altars behind, the old would follow the settlers across the seas.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

Roman roads.

The third reason that Latin spread so widely was the building of roads, a well-known feature of Roman civilization, which in fact extends back to 312 BC, with the first stretch of the Via Appia from Rome south to Capua. This also tended to be a function of the army, since it required a mobile workforce, and was directly useful, above all, to the military. The whole of Italy, and later the whole world north of the Mediterranean, came to be linked by a network of roads that led back to Rome. This was especially true of the western provinces, where Latin became the dominant language. Like the postwar interstate highway system of the USA in our own time, the principal purpose of this government-financed road-building programme was the easy movement of military forces and supplies to wherever they should be needed. But again as in twentieth-century America, the wider community received an immense social benefit, or at least an immense cohesive effect, in making their travel across longer distances more feasible. For all Rome’s new dependencies, the costs of human contact beyond the immediate neighbourhood, for whatever purpose, were lower within Roman domains than they had been before, in their independent past.

Such enhanced communications gave a differential advantage to Latin: its speakers were able to travel more easily, and farther, than speakers of any other single language. But the road network was also a vast contribution to the prestige of the growing Empire, ostentatiously measured out as it was by mīliāria, ‘milestones’, an extended symbol of pāx Romāna. That in itself acted as a further inducement to solidarity for those who lived within its bounds.

There is something of a paradox here. Rome’s navy was to defeat every other naval power in the Mediterranean, and largely clear it of piracy as well. Its empire came to occupy the whole Mediterranean coastline and surrounding lands, so that from the second century BC onward the most direct route from Italy to most provinces would have been across the sea. The sheer cost of transporting goods by road must have meant that trade always favoured shipping over wagon haulage: the cost difference was a factor greater than sixty.

(#litres_trial_promo) Although some of the shorter roads near Rome had indeed had an economic origin (as the Via Salaria, which had supported Rome’s ancient trade in salt with inland communities of Italy to its east, and the Via Latina, which ran southeast toward Campania), it appears that the road system was never primarily an economic infrastructure.

Yet despite these geographic and economic facts, Roman power, and hence Latin, was never spread by sea power. Rome remained a land-based power, and its roads remained as a highly durable trace of the route marches, itinera, of the Roman army. In a way, the fate of the Etruscans, as well as the limited political success in the long term of the Greek colonies in southern Italy, had demonstrated the lack of durability in what the Greeks would have called thalassokratía and emporía, an unchallenged navy and a trading network. What lasted was a centralized government, a large and mobile strike force, and a readiness to occupy territory permanently.

Although the long-term outcome is clear, the processes by which the various regions gave up their previous languages in favour of Latin are not well documented. Descendants of Latin are spoken to this day throughout the peninsula, as well as in the offshore islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia. Latin was already close to universal in Italy by the first century AD. But we can only find traces here and there of the changeover: late inscriptions in an inherited language, transitional effects as inscriptions in one language show the influence of another, the very occasional literary reference to language use.

What does emerge from this sparse evidence is how long the transition to Latin was delayed. Etruria in fact provides the richest source in Italy of such evidence of language shift, probably because it both had a history of literacy previous to any in Latin and was close to Latium. Epitaphs there have been traced by date, as Etruscan-language inscriptions yielded gradually to Etruscan-Latin bilinguals and then to purely Latin inscriptions.

(#litres_trial_promo) The spreading wave of Latin-language use passed northward over two centuries, from Caere (25 km from Rome) in the late second century BC, to Volaterrae (200 km farther north) in the late first century AD.

(#litres_trial_promo)

This means that the progress began as much as eleven generations after Rome’s first military inroad, the destruction of Veii in 396, and a good six generations after the conquest of the last independent Etruscan city, Volsinii, in 264. However, even after the Latin wave had passed, another four or five generations were needed before Roman burial customs were adopted by Etruscan families.

(#litres_trial_promo) People clearly went on feeling themselves culturally Etruscan long after they had lost their own language, something one can see paralleled in minority language communities to this day.

(#litres_trial_promo)

In this delay, Etruria seems to have been quite typical. Cumae had been the crucial bridgehead for Greek culture into Italy, founded jointly by the Greek cities of Kyme, Khalkis, and Eretria around 750 BC (some 160 km to the south of Rome, at the north end of what would be the Bay of Naples). It had experienced an exciting history of its own before it came under the Roman domination in 343 BC, together with its larger neighbour Capua. Despite being a Greek foundation, its major language was the surrounding vernacular, Oscan. An early and essentially voluntary adherent to Rome’s league, whose citizens had been awarded civitas sine suffragio, Roman citizenship without voting rights, it was well integrated into the Roman system, governed from Rome by annually elected officials (the four praefecti Capuam Cumas, ‘officers for Capua and Cumae’), a post that offered an early rung in Rome’s cursus honorum, the standard career path for a noble Roman. Nevertheless, only in 180 BC, after a full six generations, did its burghers formally request permission of the Roman government to use Latin in public business and for auctions.

(#litres_trial_promo) And five generations later, in 54 BC, a letter from Cicero to a friend living there noted Oscan farces still being performed in the local senate-house.