Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin - Nicholas Ostler

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Latin language have been endangered? To the north and to the south, there were Etruscan-speaking communities; and as we know, in the fifth century Rome itself was heavily influenced, if not actually ruled, by noble Etruscan families. One can speculate that the situation, linguistically, might have been rather like that of England after the Norman conquests, a foreign-language ruling class living self-indulgently in the city while the indigenous farmers toiled in the fields to support them.

      However, looking at the elite technical vocabulary of the period, there is little reason to believe that Latin speakers were being excluded. The names given to the tribes to which Romans were assigned for voting purposes are all, admittedly, words of Etruscan origin: Luceres, Ramnes, Tities. And it is argued—still inconclusively—that an important word such as populus, which came to mean ‘the people’, Rome’s ultimate source of authority, was originally an Etruscan word for ‘army’.1 But besides these, all the mechanisms of government were couched in Latin terminology. Rome had a senate (senātus, literally ‘elder-dom’, related to senex ‘old man’), whose members were addressed as patrēs conscriptī ‘conscript fathers’ and met in the cūria (< co-viria ‘men together’). Its elected officers (magistrātūs) were consulēs ‘advisers’, praetōrēs < prae-itōrēs ‘leaders’, aedilēs ‘buildings men’, and quaestōres ‘inquirers’. Its elections were called comitia ‘goings-together’, decided by suffrāgia ‘votes’. In emergencies, the supreme power would be vested in a single dictātor ‘prescriber’, supported by a magister equitum ‘master of cavalry’. From time to time cēnsōrēs ‘assessors’ would review the senatorial rolls. All these crucial terms are transparently native to Latin. Other ancient constitutional words existed, with more obscure etymology: classis ‘levy’ (an income-based electoral division), tribus ‘tribe’ (an electoral division based on lineage), plēbs or plēbēs ‘masses, lower orders’, pūbēs ‘body of citizens that are of age’. These could have been borrowed, but they could just as well have been ancient Latin terms; in any case, they tended to apply to the opposite end of society from the aristocracy, where we may assume that Etruscan influence would have predominated.

      Whatever the degree of intimacy between Etruscans and Romans, this period left Rome in a position to expand like no other Italian power: within 250 years of its independence, just ten generations, it had moved to dominate not only the rest of Latium and Etruria, but also the whole extent of the peninsula beyond, both northward and southward. Militarily and politically, by 400 BC Rome had secured alliances with all of Latium and defeated the surrounding hostile mountain peoples, the Aequi and the Volsci. The next century and a half saw a hardening of Roman control in Latium, and a simultaneous spread of Roman power in three directions: over Etruria in the northwest, completed by the conquest of Volsinii in 264; over Umbria and Picenum in the northeast, mostly by making defensive alliances against the Gauls, who repeatedly invaded from the north; and over the (Oscan-speaking) Samnite league, which had united most of the east and south, sealed by Roman victories at Sentinum in 295 and Lake Vadimo in 282.

      The final military challenge to Rome’s control of Italy came from an invading force of Greeks, under King Pyrrhus of Epirus (the Greek northwest), invited over by the leading Greek colonial city of south Italy, Tarentum. This war, coming so soon after Rome’s victory over the Samnites, threw all Rome’s previous gains into jeopardy; it lasted from 280 until 272 BC, and although the Romans did not defeat Pyrrhus, his “Pyrrhic” victories over them were so costly and indecisive that he eventually retired, leaving Rome in control of Italy as a whole, and indeed unchallenged south of a line from Pisa to Rimini. Rome’s grip within Italy was not to be tested for another fifty years (during which time they had extended their control as far as the Alps). But when Hannibal invaded the country in 218, at the head of another foreign army (this one Carthaginian), the expected Italian revolt in support of Hannibal never came. In those fifty years, then, Rome had established itself solidly as the ruling city of Italy.

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       Roman expansion in Italy: Rome spread its dominion through a series of conquests and perpetual alliances in the third and second centuries BC.

      Later on, when asked to explain their run of military success, the Romans liked to claim a particular readiness to learn from their opponents. Sallust, a historian of the first century BC, put the following words in the mouth of Julius Caesar:

      Our ancestors were never lacking in strategy or boldness, conscript fathers; nor were they prevented by pride from imitating others’ institutions, if they were sound. They took arms and missiles from the Samnites, and most of their magistrates’ insignia from the Etruscans. Above all, whenever anything apt was recognized among allies or enemies, they followed it up at home with the utmost zeal; they preferred to imitate good things rather than envy them.2

      In an unattributable fragment from a Greek historian, a Roman diplomat gave the following lesson on Roman character to a Carthaginian, who was claiming it could only be folly to challenge his own city at sea. (The dialogue is set in the 260s BC, between the departure of Pyrrhus and the outbreak of the First Punic War.)

      This is what we are like. (I shall tell you facts that are quite beyond dispute, for you to take back to your city.) When we face enemies, we take on their practices, and with those alien methods we surpass those with long experience in them. The Etruscans fought us with bronze shields, and in phalanx formation, not in maniples; we changed our weaponry and squared up to them; and in contest with those long-service veterans of phalanx warfare, we won. With the Samnites, the long “door” shields were not part of our tradition nor were javelins, since we had been fighting with spears and round shields; nor did we have much cavalry, practically all our strength lying in infantry. But we rearmed accordingly and forced ourselves into the saddle, and competing with these alien arms, we brought down those with high opinions of themselves. We did not know siege warfare; but we learned it from the Greeks, its masters, then went on to achieve more in it than those experts or anyone else. So men of Carthage, don’t force the Romans to take up seafaring: if we need a fleet, we shall soon build one bigger and better than yours, and we’ll fight better with it than long-hardened sailors.3

      So much for Rome’s military and political advance in these years, where the results show that Rome did have some long-term military, political, or perhaps even (as the Romans no doubt believed) moral advantage. Of greater interest, though, is how and why Rome was able to convert that into the permanent spread of Latin across Italy. The answers take us to the heart of why Latin ultimately expanded to be the majority language all around the western Mediterranean.

      In fact, Latin tended to spread as a result of Roman conquests for three clear reasons.

      First, and probably most important, when the Romans defeated an enemy, their usual practice was not to destroy its city and drive out or enslave its people, but rather to demand tracts of land from it. Even if a Roman treaty was not imposed at the end of a war, but struck as a defensive alliance, it would quite often involve permission for the establishment of a new Roman settlement or colony.* The land for this was methodically measured out and delimited into rectangular plots by the land surveyors in a process called centūriātiō. Such regular land-plotting was to be practised all over the Empire and is often still visible today.

      Gradually, these tracts of farming land, or sites for new cities, were filled up with Romans and other Latin speakers from allied cities in Latium. It is estimated that in 260 BC there were approximately 292,000 Romans, and three quarters of a million other Latins; their joint population would have made up perhaps 35 percent of Italy’s then population of 3 million souls.4 And so, as the Romans and their allies gradually came to dominate the peninsula, the minority language Latin was seeded around Italy as a community language, and that of an increasingly high-prestige community.

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