Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rutilius Namatianus (fifth century AD)25

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