Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler

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.^* 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.^†

      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.”⁵

       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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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.⁸

      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.⁹ 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.¹⁰

      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,