Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

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The most significant inscriptions that have survived in the Umbrian and Oscan languages were also dated long after Rome’s domination in the region.

We know that Camerinum (Camerino) in Umbria had enjoyed what Cicero termed “the holiest and fairest of all treaties”

(#litres_trial_promo) with the Romans since the fourth century BC. Yet when the Tabulae Iguvinae from nearby Iguvium (Gubbio), mostly written in the Umbrian language and alphabet shortly after 300 BC, were updated between 100 and 50 BC, the language used was still Umbrian, even if the alphabet had changed from Umbrian to Roman.

The longest inscription in Oscan is the Tabula Bantina, from the Lucanian city of Bantia in southern Italy: it was written sometime between 133 and 118 BC. Lucania, as a previous hotbed of rebels loyal to the Samnite league, had sustained a fresh wave of Latin colonization from Romans, precisely in this period. The tabula is in fact the only Oscan inscription that has been found written in Roman letters, so changes were under way—and indeed there was a major inscription of a Roman law in Latin on the reverse; but this region had legally been under Roman control since the end of the Third Samnite War in 290. Old loyalties in the region continued to die hard; Venusia, just twenty kilometres northeast up the Via Appia, was the one Latin colony to side against Rome when the non-Latin peoples of central and southeastern Italy rose up to demand citizen rights in the so-called Social War of 90–89 BC.

This war, fought two centuries after Italy was supposedly subjected to Rome, actually used language to crystallize resistance. The belligerents characterized themselves on their coins as eight warriors, for the Marsi, Picentes, Paeligni, Marrucini, Vestini, Frentani, Hirpini, and Samnites. These all had originally spoken languages closely related to Oscan, though Latin seems by then to have penetrated the northerly regions (the Marsi and Picentes). They designated a new capital, the Paeligni’s city of Corfinium, sited strategically to the north on the Via Valeria, but renamed it Italia or VÍTELIÚ, the name for the country in Oscan. Some coins hopefully showed the Italian bull (vitulus)

(#litres_trial_promo) goring the Roman wolf or bore other legends in Oscan, such as the name of the commander in the south G. PAAPIÍ.G.MUTÍL (C. Papius Mutilus), or more generally EMBRATUR (imperator).

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Oscan-language coins from the Social War, 90–89 BC. Eight warriors swear a pact against Rome, and the Italian bull gores the Roman wolf.

Rome won the war, but its rulers had received a serious fright, and there came a total collapse of the Roman hard-liners’ old theory of DIVIDE ET IMPERA, that Italy was best controlled by a policy of “separate development,” encouraging its divisions and differences. The alternative, therefore, had to be pursued, of shared privileges and willing solidarity. Soon afterwards the rights of Roman citizenship were made available to practically the whole of Italy. Although there is no concrete evidence of it, this strategy may also have extended into language policy, with the various communities actively encouraged to merge in the Roman identity and drop their languages in favour of Latin.

(#litres_trial_promo) Certainly, it was in the period after the Social War, the first centuries BC and AD, that the diffusion of Latin, seeded through colonies, army service, and general mobility, accelerated and moved beyond the stage of bilingualism, so that it effectively supplanted all the other indigenous languages of Italy. And with this process, Italy was greatly homogenized.

As the Greek geographer Strabo put it, writing in the early first century AD, “But now, except for the cities of Tarentum, Rhegium, and Neapolis, all [of the Greek domain in southern Italy] has been flooded with foreigners, some parts taken by Lucanians and Bruttians, others by Campanians. But that is just in name; in fact by Romans—for that is what they have become.”

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We have found the basis for an answer to our question: Where did it all go right, for Latin, and for Rome?

Latin had two main indigenous competitors in Italy, Etruscan and Oscan. All three languages had the potential for expansion and did indeed expand: Etruscan mostly to the northeast, Oscan to the south. Latin, with its central position, had nowhere to go but into the domains of Etruscan and Oscan. But unlike them, Latin combined three properties: it was a farmers’ language, a soldiers’ language, and a city language. Together, these gave it the victory.

Etruscan was certainly urban and cosmopolitan, and no doubt farmers used it in the country; but it was not linked with a constant military force, nor indeed a government strong enough to unite the various independent Etruscan-speaking cities behind a single policy. When the outposts that they had created for trade faced resistance, they could not project force to protect them; and when thrown back on the defence of their own homelands, they could not unite even for joint survival. Rome—and hence Latin—defeated and invaded them, one by one.

Rome was the heir to the Etruscan legacy of highly organized civic life; but, unlike the Etruscans themselves, Rome was able as a unified land-power to make its gains permanent. The Etruscans gathered wealth, enjoyed it, but ultimately lost it; the Romans acquired land and settled it for good. The Etruscans’ sea power and federal politics meant that their links with their colonies remained rather light; they could not impose themselves on the Italian interior. The Romans not only came to live all over that interior, but they had control of an army that could range over it at will and increasingly made existence impossible for any city or tribe that wished to live independently of Rome.

Perhaps the Samnites, or Lucanians in southern Italy, might have achieved something similar; at the outset their social and military structures were much like Rome’s. Oscan was a language of farmers and soldiers, like Latin; but unlike Latin, it was the language of a league of tribes, with no single centralized city that dominated it. Just such an urban core was Rome: this was the advantage Latin had derived from its centuries of contact with Etruria. Ironically, this single urban core turned out to be much more effective than the multiple urban cores that the Etruscans had developed for themselves. Rome’s centralized control of Latium, and then of colonies that maintained its influence across Italy, meant it enjoyed a permanent hierarchical command structure that the Samnite league, or the other alliances of Italians, could never match. Ultimately, it expanded to absorb them all.

For the Romans had some winning ways that were all their own: after a victory they demanded not tribute, but land, which they would sooner or later settle with their own farmers; and they levied soldiers too from the defeated powers, who would add their strength to the Roman army. The Roman army too, with its compulsive programme of road building, cumulatively and permanently improved ease of communication within the expanding empire. All these policies benefited not just the long-term strength of Rome but also sustained the growth of the Latin language.

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_419bd416-d58e-5391-93bf-ee57acd84db7)

Excelsior—Looking Up to Greek

EADEM OMNIA QVASI CONLOCVTI ESSEMVS VIDIMVS.

You’re telling me. [Greek, literally: (You’re telling) me my own dream.] We saw everything the same, just as if we had discussed it.

Cicero, Letter to Atticus, 6.9.3

EVEN AT THE END of the third century BC, when Rome already controlled Italy and had twice humbled its only serious rival in the west, the city of Carthage, the Latin language was still to its users little more than a practical convenience. Its speakers and learners did not yet conceive it as an attribute of Roman greatness, a language to equal any in the world. To think in such terms, the Romans would need to encounter Greek.

The discovery of Greek would give the Romans a new idea of what skill in a language could do, for its speakers’ attainments as well as for their reputation. They would start to care about powers of expression, both their own personal powers and whatever was connoted by the language itself. They would begin to use Latin as a symbol of Roman power, for what it said about them. Latin literature was consciously modelled on Greek, and techniques to use it effectively were laboriously abstracted from the best Greek practice. In time—and this took more than three centuries—the new canon of Latin classics became able to stand comparison with the best of Greek. And when that happened, Greek had lost its one unchallengeable advantage: from the self-imagined centre of the world in Italy, after all, there could be no serious comparison between Romans and Greeks as ideals. Thenceforth the temptation was to discard wholesale the old model, of learning the best Latin through Greek: the best Latin could now be learned through Latin itself.

The Latins, and specifically the Romans, had always had the Greeks on the edge of their world. Indeed, the earliest known inscription in Greek letters anywhere is from Gabii, just outside Rome, and dates from the early eighth century BC, a generation or so before the traditional date of Rome’s foundation in 753. The Greeks had the opportunity to pass on the technique of writing during this early period when the dominant regional power was still Etruscan; and in fact the story of Rome’s legendary founders, the twins Romulus and Remus, has them learning their letters at Gabii.

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Greek visitors soon after this were establishing themselves as regular colonists farther south: Cumae (Greek Kumē), near the Bay of Naples, was founded around 750 BC, and some fifteen years later a clutch of colonies was established in eastern Sicily (Naxos, Syracuse, Catania, Zankle-Messina), followed a little later by more along the southern Italian coasts (Paestum, Rhegium, Sybaris, Crotona, Tarentum). The settlements grew, were reinforced, and sprouted others, until by 450 BC there were sixteen Greek cities in Sicily and twenty-two in Italy.

The south, however, was not the part of Italy that Romans or Latins frequented in these early years, so the early impact of Greek culture came to them indirectly, through Etruscan middlemen. Specifically—and despite what has turned up in Gabii—this included the technique of writing.

When the Greeks first used their alphabet, the direction of writing was rather fluid: right-to-left, left-to-right, or even alternating (which they called boustrophēdon ‘as you turn an ox’). Etruscans—for reasons we can only speculate about—standardized on right-to-left; but the Latins, after a right-to-left period, finally settled on left-to-right, the same choice as the Greeks ultimately made. Etruscan speakers, who did not hear a difference between [g] and [k] (nor indeed [d] and [t], nor [b] and [p]) provided the reason why the letter Γ, Greek gamma, locally written (right-to-left) as ɔ, hence C, came to be pronounced unvoiced as [k], and to be distinguished from K and Q only by the following vowel. (Their rule was, in the early days: K before A, Q before V, otherwise C.)

(#litres_trial_promo) The Etruscans also dropped (because it was useless to them) the letter O. Still, the Latins, unlike the Umbrians and Oscans, did manage to preserve or reinstate it, keeping it separate from V. They also retrieved the letters B and D (Greek β, Δ), which the Etruscans had discarded. These are all developments of the fourth century BC or before; but it was not until the first century BC that they reintroduced the letters Y and Z, specifically to represent sounds in words borrowed from Greek.

In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as their power grew in Italy, Romans were occasionally nudged to look to a wider Greek world. The Sibylline books, key to propitiation of the gods in time of crisis, were written in Greek; they are supposed to have been acquired in the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, in the early sixth century. In 433, in time of plague, the books enjoined the building of a temple to the Greek god Apollo Medicus; but apparently there was a site already dedicated to him at Rome. In the next generation, in 398 and 394, the Romans visited Apollo’s oracle on the Greek mainland at Delphi, first to consult on their fortunes in the struggle with Veii, and then (after victory) to pay their vow to the god. (Understandably, during hostilities with Etruscan neighbours, the Romans’ usual Etruscan soothsayers were not available or reliable.)

(#litres_trial_promo) At some point in the Samnite Wars of the fourth century, Apollo also caused the erection in Rome of statues to two improbable Greek celebrities, Pythagoras of Crotona and Alcibiades of Athens.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was even said that Romans were among the embassies from all over the Mediterranean world who went to Babylon in 323 BC to congratulate Alexander.

(#litres_trial_promo) Anyway, after Rome had expelled from Italy the campaigning Greek dynast Pyrrhus in 273 BC, it is certain the equally Greek king Ptolemy II of Egypt offered a gratuitous treaty of friendship to this clearly important, rising city. By the early third century, Rome was impressing the Greek world in its own right.

Only when all the Greek cities had fallen under Roman political control did the idea form that something might be done with Latin at all comparable with what the Greeks did with their own language. Even in the late third century, Q. Fabius Pictor, the first known Roman to write Roman history, was writing only in Greek. In those days, the very idea of a written literature was inseparable from the Greek language.

(#litres_trial_promo) But in 240 BC the half-Greek freedman from Tarentum, L. Livius Andronicus, produced a comedy and a tragedy in Latin for performance at the Roman Games; in all, he is known to have written at least three comedies and ten tragedies, as well as a translation of the Odyssey. These new, literary forms of entertainment caught on at Rome, and the stories from Greek drama and epic dominated Latin literature for the next century. Among the early greats of Latin literature are Cn. Naevius (around 265–204), T. Maccius Plautus (around 250–184), Q. Ennius (239–169), M. Terentius Afer (around 190–159), M. Pacuvius (220–around 130) and L. Accius (170–around 86).

(#litres_trial_promo) Among them, Ennius stands out for the variety of what he wrote, not only comedies, tragedies, and an epic of Roman history (Annales), but also epitaphs, theology, satire, and even the Hedyphagetica ‘sweet eatings’, a gourmet’s review, with such deathless lines as:

BRVNDISII SARGVS BONVS EST; HVNC, MAGNVS SI ERIT, SVME.

The sar fish of Brindisi is good; if it is a big one, take it.

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Among these writers—all still taken seriously by the critics of the first centuries BC–AD, when the classical canon was being laid down—only the comedy writers Plautus and Terence have been preserved with complete long works to their names. Hence early Latin literature comes down to us with a strong emphasis on a fantasy of Greek life, its situations and characters based in Greek plays. In this world, a universe away from Roman ideals, young men are hopelessly in love, whores have hearts of gold, old men are miserly and dirty-minded, and slaves—realistically, their only resource being their trickery—are more resourceful than their masters. Old women are largely unknown. No one has much on their minds but sex, money, food, mischief, and occasionally concern for their children, especially if long lost: there is not a whiff of military service, farming, or civic piety. Writers thought it worth telling the audience of their Greek sourcing. In the prologue to one play, Terence wrote, “As for the rumours put about by some grouches that the author has spoiled a lot of Greek plays to make just a few Latin ones: he does not deny that’s what he’s done—no worries—and he says he’ll do it again.”

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In his prologues, Plautus sometimes gave the name of the Greek author of the original version, but added that it was he who VORTIT BARBARE ‘turned it into foreign’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Either his tongue was firmly in his cheek, or Roman audiences were amazingly ready in the early second century to take their laughs from a Greek standpoint. Perhaps the explicitly Greek settings kept the feckless content at a safe distance from what would be accepted in real life at Rome, much as Indian Bollywood films in the twentieth century long played out ideas of romantic love in luxurious surroundings for the delight of orthodox Hindu and Muslim audiences who had no place for it in their actual lives.

Comedy may have been king for the Roman in the street, but serious statesmen and intellectuals, as they increasingly looked beyond Italy, were also coming to notice and value the Greek heritage. In 228 BC, when the Romans had cleared the Adriatic of Illyrian piracy, gaining themselves a coastal strip (the coast of modern Albania) as a first base in the east, they sent embassies to Greek cities, notably the trading centres Corinth and Athens, pointing out that the new Roman policing of the seas was very much in their interests. Symbolically, Romans were then invited for the first time to compete in the Isthmian Games, held every other year near Corinth.

Much of the third century was taken up with fighting Carthage at sea or overseas (264–241), and later surviving and then retaliating against the Carthaginian invasion of Italy under Hannibal (218–203); but even interactions with this age-old and non-Greek empire (founded around 900 BC, with a maritime empire since the seventh century) would increasingly have impressed on the Romans that Greek was the language of the wider Mediterranean. Amazingly, the Carthaginian senate had once in an earlier era legislated to outlaw knowledge of Greek at home, to prevent private contacts with the enemy.

(#litres_trial_promo) Nonetheless, in Rome’s day Carthage’s troops, largely mercenaries, were commanded not in Punic but in Greek.