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.
In the first century, Spain was preeminent. From Corduba (Cordova) came L. Annaeus Seneca,* the tragedian and moralist (son of an equally literary father, who had concentrated on rhetorical declamations), and his nephew M. Annaeus Lucanus, the epic poet of the Roman civil war; from Bilbilis (Calatayud) came M. Valerius Martialis, writer of epigrammatic verse. L. Iunius Moderatus Columella from Gades (Cadiz) wrote the classic text on farming; and M. Fabius Quintilianus from Calagurris (Calahorra) was an orator, but even more famous as the classic authority on rhetorical theory.†
In the second century, the historian P. Cornelius Tacitus and the theorist of aqueducts and military strategy Sex. Iulius Frontinus came from southern Gaul. But the real competitor was Africa: C. Suetonius Tranquillus the biographer, M. Cornelius Fronto the orator, C. Sulpicius Apollinaris the grammarian, all came from there. Africa’s cultural repute at the time was captured in a quip of Juvenal’s: NVTRICVLA CAVSIDICORVM AFRICA ‘Africa, that amah of advocates, suckler of solicitors’.26 Meanwhile Greeks, and other residents of the eastern provinces, are absent from this roll, as they continued to write in Greek. Some famous literary westerners (notably the sophist Favorinus, hailing from Arelate (Arles) in southern Gaul) even chose to be Greeks rather than Romans.
All these luminaries had felt they needed to travel to Rome to take part in the language’s cultural life at the highest level. This changed in the later second century. Apuleius, after studying in Greece and Italy, returned to Africa to work and write his bawdy but devout novel Metamorphoses (better known as “The Golden Ass”). Thereafter it seemed no longer necessary to establish oneself at Rome to make a literary or philosophical reputation. The poet Nemesianus (around 250–300), and the Christian writers Tertullian (around 160–240), Lactantius (around 240–320), and Augustine (354–430) all stayed in North Africa; others, such as the Bible translator Jerome from Pannonia (347–420) and the historian Orosius (early fifth century) from Spain, were happy to travel and work (in Latin) in different parts of the Empire.* The Empire was the basis for the creation of RESPVBLICA LITTERARIA, a Republic of (Latin) Letters, which was to be an aspect of western Europe for the next millennium and beyond, almost unaffected by political and economic collapse.
The army too, like the process of literary education, provided a motive for the spread of Latin within the Empire, but one that affected a different, and very much more numerous, class of people. We are best informed about the top flight of military men, drawn from ever wider circles: the most successful could ultimately even become emperor. Already in the last days of the Republic (to 44 BC) it had been possible for provincial Italian lads to ascend to high command: T. Labienus, Caesar’s principal aide
