Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
its burghers formally request permission of the Roman government to use Latin in public business and for auctions.* And five generations later, in 54 BC, a letter from Cicero to a friend living there noted Oscan farces still being performed in the local senate-house.11
The most significant inscriptions that have survived in the Umbrian and Oscan languages were also dated long after Rome’s domination in the region.
We know that Camerinum (Camerino) in Umbria had enjoyed what Cicero termed “the holiest and fairest of all treaties”12 with the Romans since the fourth century BC. Yet when the Tabulae Iguvinae from nearby Iguvium (Gubbio), mostly written in the Umbrian language and alphabet shortly after 300 BC, were updated between 100 and 50 BC, the language used was still Umbrian, even if the alphabet had changed from Umbrian to Roman.
The longest inscription in Oscan is the Tabula Bantina, from the Lucanian city of Bantia in southern Italy: it was written sometime between 133 and 118 BC. Lucania, as a previous hotbed of rebels loyal to the Samnite league, had sustained a fresh wave of Latin colonization from Romans, precisely in this period. The tabula is in fact the only Oscan inscription that has been found written in Roman letters, so changes were under way—and indeed there was a major inscription of a Roman law in Latin on the reverse; but this region had legally been under Roman control since the end of the Third Samnite War in 290. Old loyalties in the region continued to die hard; Venusia, just twenty kilometres northeast up the Via Appia, was the one Latin colony to side against Rome when the non-Latin peoples of central and southeastern Italy rose up to demand citizen rights in the so-called Social War of 90–89 BC.
This war, fought two centuries after Italy was supposedly subjected to Rome, actually used language to crystallize resistance. The belligerents characterized themselves on their coins as eight warriors, for the Marsi, Picentes, Paeligni, Marrucini, Vestini, Frentani, Hirpini, and Samnites. These all had originally spoken languages closely related to Oscan, though Latin seems by then to have penetrated the northerly regions (the Marsi and Picentes). They designated a new capital, the Paeligni’s city of Corfinium, sited strategically to the north on the Via Valeria, but renamed it Italia or VÍTELIÚ, the name for the country in Oscan. 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