Some coins hopefully showed the Italian bull (vitulus)* 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).13
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.14 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.”15
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.
Excelsior—Looking Up to Greek
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.1
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
