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,
