Languages of the Roman Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Languages of the Roman Empire tells a story not of one tongue but of dozens, layered across a civilization that stretched from Britain to Mesopotamia. At its height, the Empire governed peoples who spoke Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Coptic, Punic, Celtic dialects, Germanic tongues, and a scatter of Balkan languages whose names barely survive. The question at the center of this documentary is not which language the Romans spoke, but how language itself functioned as power, identity, and daily life across this vast, multilingual world.

  Latin was the original language of the Romans, the language of imperial administration, legislation, and the military throughout the classical period. Yet after the emperor Caracalla granted universal citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the Empire in 212 AD, a great number of those Roman citizens would have lacked Latin entirely. They were expected to acquire at least a token knowledge, but Latin was never a formal requirement. Saint Augustine, writing in North Africa, observed that Romans preferred for Latin to be adopted per pacem societatis, through a social pact, not decree.

  Koine Greek, meanwhile, was the shared language of the eastern Mediterranean, a legacy of Alexander the Great's conquests. A rough linguistic frontier divided the Latin West from the Greek East, running through the Balkan Peninsula. Educated Romans of the ruling elite studied Greek, used it for diplomacy, and sometimes preferred it for private life. The writer Lucian even imagined Greek as the universal language of the dead in the underworld.

  By the early 21st century, the first or second language of more than a billion people derived from Latin. How did one administrative language, never officially imposed, come to produce Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, and a dozen others? And what happened to all the languages that Latin and Greek failed to replace? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Latin's Quiet Conquest

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  Virgil, writing under the first emperor Augustus, put a striking speech in the mouth of Jupiter in his epic Aeneid. The god dictates that the refugee Trojans settling in Italy will adopt the language of the native Latini, promising to make them "all Latins with one mode of expression" - uno ore, literally "with one mouth." The Julio-Claudian emperors, who claimed descent from the Virgilian hero Aeneas, made correct Latin a prestige project, encouraging the standards known in modern terms as Classical Latin.

  Yet Latin spread without conquest of will. It was not imposed officially on peoples brought under Roman rule. Local people started speaking it because it opened doors: imperial service, legal standing, military advancement, commercial access. Fluency was desirable for its "high cultural, political, legal, social and economic value," as scholars of the period note. There was no state-supported schooling that privileged Latin as the medium of education. Formal education was available only to children from families who could pay for it, and estimates of average literacy across the Empire range widely, from 5 to 30 percent or higher, depending on what counted as literacy.

  The Romans valued the written word intensely. The Babylonian Talmud records the observation that "if all seas were ink, all reeds were pen, all skies parchment, and all men scribes, they would be unable to set down the full scope of the Roman government's concerns." Birth certificates and wills of Roman citizens had to be written in Latin until the reign of Alexander Severus, who ruled from 222 to 235 AD. Illiterate subjects had government scribes read or write their official documents for them. Laws and edicts were posted in writing and read aloud. Public art and religious ceremonies communicated imperial ideology across all languages and literacy levels. An early form of story ballet called pantomimus, introduced to Rome by Greek performers, became popular across the multilingual empire precisely because it relied on gesture rather than words.

  Latin was the official language of the Roman army until the mid-6th century, and remained the most common language for military use even in the Eastern empire until the 630s. The contrast with religion is striking: by the time of Theodosius II, who died in 450 AD, only two bishops are known to have spoken Latin at the ecumenical councils held during his reign.

• 3. Greek as the Other Official Language

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  The emperor Claudius, known for his keen antiquarian interests, tried to limit the use of Greek and on occasion revoked the citizenship of those who lacked Latin. Yet even when addressing the Roman Senate, he drew on his own bilingualism to communicate with Greek-speaking ambassadors. Suetonius quotes him referring to "our two languages," and the employment of two imperial secretaries - one for Latin and one for Greek - dates to his reign.

  The everyday interpenetration of the two languages showed up in bilingual inscriptions that sometimes switched back and forth between Greek and Latin mid-text. The epitaph of a Greek-speaking soldier might be written primarily in Greek, with his rank and unit in the Roman army expressed in Latin. In the Eastern empire, laws and official documents were regularly translated into Greek from Latin. Both languages were in active use by government officials and the Church during the 5th century.

  Language reformers pushed back against the drift of Greek. In the 2nd century, intellectuals associated with the movement called Atticism sought to restore the standards of classical Greek characteristic of the Attic dialect, as represented by Thucydides, Plato, and Demosthenes. The scholar Libanius, writing in the 4th century, regarded Latin as causing a decline in the quality of Greek rhetoric. The emperor Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305, sought to renew the authority of Latin, and a Greek phrase from the period, hē kratousa dialektos, attests to Latin's continuing status as "the language of power." In the early 6th century, the emperor Justinian undertook what one source calls a quixotic effort to reassert Latin as the language of law, even though by his time Latin no longer held any currency as a living language in the East.

  The spread of Christianity deepened Greek's reach. The New Testament was written in Greek, the ecumenical councils of the Christian Roman Empire were conducted in Greek, and the Epistles of Paul circulated in Greek. Constantine, the first emperor to actively support Christianity, used an interpreter to address Greek-speaking bishops at the Council of Nicaea, his court language being Latin. In the Christian Latin West, Greek became associated with paganism and regarded as a foreign tongue; Augustine confessed that he loathed it and found it hard to learn.

• 4. The Languages Latin Did Not Erase

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  Aramaic was the primary language of Syria and Mesopotamia, spoken in several dialects. Syriac, in use around Antioch - one of the three largest cities of the Empire - was particularly associated with Christians. Syriac literature is known from the latter 2nd century, spreading from the Christian community in Edessa. Early Syriac literature operated within a largely Greek intellectual milieu until the 4th century, but was distinctive for its rich symbolism and emphasis on verse forms, and influenced Greek writers including Eusebius, Basil, and Theodoret.

  The prolific Syrian scholar Bardesanes knew Greek and sent his son to school in Athens, yet chose to write in Syriac. He composed 150 hymns described as being of "enormous influence and doubtful doctrine." Works by the Syriac writer Ephraim were translated into Greek. The satirist Lucian came from Samosata in the province of Syria and wrote in Greek, but called himself a Syrian, and a reference to himself as a "barbarian" suggests he also spoke Syriac. Soldiers from Palmyra used Palmyrene Aramaic for inscriptions, in a striking exception to the rule that Latin was the language of the military.

  In Egypt, Coptic emerged as a fully literary language in the 4th century, using a script based on the Greek alphabet with additional characters drawn from Egyptian demotic. Original works composed in Coptic - including homilies, saints' lives, monastic rules, letters, and poetry - were written primarily in the Sahidic dialect. By the 640s, when Egypt came under Arab rule, Coptic-speaking Christians constituted the majority of the population. At the end of the 7th century, legal texts might still be written in Coptic; in one surviving example, a bilingual Greek-Arabic protocol with a reference to Mohammed precedes a document entirely in Coptic that invokes the Trinity.

  Punic, the Semitic language of the Carthaginians, continued in North Africa well into the Imperial period. The emperor Septimius Severus, who reigned from 193 to 211 and was born in Leptis Magna, spoke Punic as well as Latin and Greek; his sister reportedly had little command of Latin at all. Augustine, from North Africa, noted that Punic was related to Hebrew and Syriac, and his knowledge of Punic helped him decipher transliterated Semitic words from the Bible. One of the latest Neo-Punic inscriptions on a monument dates to the reign of Domitian, who ruled from 81 to 96 AD. Latin script was used to write Punic in the 4th and 5th centuries.

• 5. Celtic, Germanic, and the Edges

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  Celtic languages at the beginning of the Imperial period included Gaulish in present-day France, Belgium, Switzerland, and northwestern Italy; Celtiberian and Gallaecian in parts of Spain and Portugal; Brittonic in Roman Britain; and Galatian, a branch of Celtic brought to Anatolia by Gallic invasions in the 3rd century BC. Loanwords from Gaulish appear in Latin as early as the time of Ennius, who lived around 239 to 169 BC, because of Celtic settlements on the Italian peninsula.

  Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum (present-day Lyon) from 177 AD, complained that he had to communicate with his parishioners in their "barbarous tongue," probably Gaulish. The jurist Ulpian, writing around 170 to 228, mentions the need to recognize Gaulish verbal contracts. A druidess reportedly made a prophecy in Gaulish to Alexander Severus, who lived from 208 to 235. The pharmacologist Marcellus of Bordeaux, writing in the late 4th or early 5th century, included several Gaulish words in his collection of recipes - mainly plant names - suggesting the language remained in use for traditional medicine and magic. Evidence in the writings of Gregory of Tours, who lived from 538 to 594, indicates that Gaulish might have been spoken in France into the latter 6th century.

  Basque, not an Indo-European language, survived in the Pyrenean region. Julius Caesar regarded the people of southwestern Gaul and northeastern Hispania as ethnically distinct from the Celts, and the Aquitanian language they spoke was Vasconic, like Basque, judging from place names. Latin did not become as deeply entrenched in the province of Britannia, and may have dwindled rapidly after the Roman withdrawal around 410 AD, though pockets of Latin-speaking Britons survived in western Britain until about 700 AD.

  Of the Germanic languages spoken within the Empire, next to nothing is recorded - with the exception of Gothic. A phrase of Gothic appears in an elegiac couplet from the Latin Anthology, and parts of the Gospels were translated into Gothic and preserved in the 6th-century Codex Argenteus. Tacitus notes that Arminius, the Cheruscan officer who led a disastrously successful rebellion against the Romans, was bilingual in Germanic and Latin. Bilingualism in a Germanic language was especially important in the military for officers commanding units recruited from Germanic-speaking regions. In 5th-century Gaul, the writer Sidonius Apollinaris found it amusing that his learned friend Syagrius had become fluent in Germanic, treating the acquisition of a Germanic language as a dubious achievement that risked "barbarism."

• 6. Multilingualism as Identity

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  A 2nd-century epitaph discovered in 1878 near the Roman fort at South Shields, in northeast England, offers one of the most striking windows into what multilingualism actually looked like. The inscription commemorates a woman named Regina and is written in both Latin and Palmyrene Aramaic. Regina's husband, Barates, has been identified with a standardbearer of that name from Palmyra, Syria, most likely stationed along Hadrian's Wall.

  The Latin portion is larger and provides most of the information. The Palmyrene Aramaic is carved in a fluid cursive script and conveys only Regina's name and an expression of grief. Since few people in Roman Britain could have read Palmyrene Aramaic, Barates' choice to include it appears to be a personal statement of identity and emotion rather than a practical communication. The Latin, however, is constructed grammatically in the manner of Greek honorific inscriptions typical of Palmyra, suggesting that Barates was himself bilingual in Aramaic and Greek and had added Latin as a third language. A fourth linguistic layer appears in the name Regina itself, which can be either Latin or Celtic; such names seem often to have been chosen for their deliberate duality. Regina is identified in the inscription as coming from the British Catuvellauni, but the Gallo-Brittonic spelling Catuallauna is used in the Latin text.

  The Babatha Archive, a collection of papyri named for a Jewish woman in the province of Arabia and dating from 93 to 132 AD, illustrates practical multilingualism in a different region. Most of the documents employ Aramaic, the local language, written in Greek characters with Semitic and Latin influences. A petition to the Roman governor, however, was written in Greek. Scholars call this kind of identity-navigation "cultural triangulation": an individual who was neither Greek nor Roman might construct a sense of self through the overlapping processes of Romanization and Hellenization, using language as one of the instruments.

  Trilingualism was perhaps not uncommon among educated people from regions where a language other than Latin or Greek was spoken. The Latin novelist Apuleius wrote in Greek as well and had learned Punic from his mother. The Augustan poet Ovid, exiled in Tomis on the Black Sea (present-day Constanta, Romania), learned Getic and Sarmatian and noted that Greek in that region was spoken with a markedly Getic accent.

• 7. Magic, Law, and Sacred Speech

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  Private ritual in the Empire drew from every tongue available. Spells were not translated, because their power was thought to reside in the precise wording of a language. Gaulish, for instance, may have persisted for private ritual long after it no longer had everyday currency. The Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of spells dating from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD, reflect a deep Greco-Egyptian syncretism: Egyptian and Greek deities, the God of the Jews, Judaic angels, and Jesus are all named. The papyri are written primarily in Greek, with substantial passages in Demotic Egyptian and strings of syllables described as "pronounceable, though unintelligible."

  These voces magicae, or magic words, appear throughout magic texts and inscriptions and often suggest corrupt Coptic or Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, or other Semitic languages, and Celtic. Hebrew and Greek appear in Demotic magical texts; Coptic magic incorporates Hebrew; Egyptian surfaces in Latin spells. A 2nd-century curse tablet from Autun (ancient Augustodunum) lists the names of those to be cursed in Latin, two magic words in Greek, and a series of voces magicae. A silver amulet from what is today Frankfurt, in Roman Germany, dating no later than the mid-3rd century, begins with an allusion to the Greek Trisagion in Latin transcription and quotes Philippians 2:10-11 in Latin - extremely rare evidence of early Christianity in Germany. Christians in late antiquity might insert Hebrew into Greek exorcisms.

  Roman law presents a complementary picture. The letter of the law was tied strictly to its Latin wording, yet any language could be binding in more general verbal contracts grounded in the ius gentium, the concept of natural law common to all peoples. In the legal opinion of Ulpian, written around 215 AD, bequests in trust called fideicommissa were not limited to Latin or even Greek but could be created in "Punic, Gaulish or any other" language, provided that each party understood the other's language through accurate interpreters. The jurist Gaius distinguished between contracts that derived their validity from formulaic Latin utterance and obligations expressing a mutual understanding that required no specific language. Roman jurists paid close attention to Punic, Gaulish, and Aramaic in ensuring the correct application of laws and oaths. The birth certificates and wills of Roman citizens had to be written in Latin until the 220s - the same decade Ulpian was writing.

• 8. The Languages That Survived

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  After the decentralization of political power in late antiquity, Latin developed locally in the Western provinces into branches that became the Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, Sardinian, Aromanian, African Romance, Mozarabic, Dalmatian, and Venetian, among others. Latin itself remained an international medium for diplomacy and for intellectual developments associated with Renaissance humanism up to the 17th century, and for law and the Roman Catholic Church to the present day.

  Greek continued as the language of the Byzantine Empire but never replaced certain languages with which it had long coexisted, including Coptic in Egypt and Aramaic in Syria and Mesopotamia. Around 700 AD, Greek was replaced for administrative use in Egypt by Arabic after the Arab conquest. Coptic declined from that point and was preserved mainly for liturgical purposes. Latin-speaking communities remained in North Africa, particularly around Carthage, during the period of the Vandal Kingdom from 435 to 534, but died out by the late 7th century.

  Of the ancient Balkan languages aside from Greek, only the precursor of Albanian produced a descendant that survives today. Proto-Albanian first came into contact with Latin during the Illyro-Roman wars in the late 3rd and early 2nd centuries BC, with a major Latin influx following the Illyrian Revolt of 6-9 AD. Basque survived in the Pyrenean region, unrelated to any other known language family. The Gothic that was preserved in the Codex Argenteus stands as nearly the sole written remnant of the Germanic languages spoken within the Empire.

  The Celtic languages of Gaul eventually gave way to what became French, but their disappearance was slow. Historical linguistics demonstrates that Gaulish coexisted with Latin throughout the entire era of Roman rule. The last plausible record of living Gaulish comes from Gregory of Tours, who was writing in the late 6th century - more than a hundred and fifty years after the Western Empire had formally ended, and more than six hundred years after Rome first crossed into Gaul.