Bilingualism in Ancient Rome:
The Fusion of Latin and Greek

The Roman Empire was a unique multilingual state, where bilingualism became a necessary characteristic of cultural and social life. The phenomenon of simultaneous knowledge of Latin and Greek permeated all levels of Roman society, from aristocratic families to slaves and freedmen. This linguistic dualism formed a special cultural environment, where the two great languages of antiquity coexisted, actively interacting, enriching each other and creating the basis for the development of European civilization.

Defining Bilingualism in the Roman Context

Bilingualism in ancient Rome differed significantly from modern notions of bilingualism. Canadian linguist William Mackay defines bilingualism as the ability to use two languages alternately, regardless of their frequency of use. Swiss scholar François Grosjean describes bilinguals as people who use several languages equally in everyday life. In the Roman context, bilingualism took on specific forms conditioned by the social, cultural, and political factors of the empire.

The official languages of the empire were Latin and ancient Greek. The use of these two most important languages within the empire was differentiated geographically and functionally. During the heyday of the empire, members of the upper classes sought to master both official languages. This linguistic situation created a unique form of diglossia – a special version of bilingualism, in which two languages coexist in a certain territory, used in different functional spheres.

In the western part of the empire, Latin became the most important language of legal proceedings, education, and then religion. In the eastern part, similar official functions were assumed by the ancient Greek language. According to Cicero, it was permitted to speak Greek in the Roman Senate, including without an interpreter. This indicates a high level of proficiency in Greek among the Roman political elite.

Historical roots of Greco-Latin bilingualism

The influence of the Greek language on Latin manifested itself several centuries before our era. Lively economic exchange between the Romans and the Greeks, the similarity of the structures of both languages, the noticeable superiority of the Greek civilization - all this determined the linguistic borrowings from Greek, made the Greek language one of the sources of enrichment of the Latin language.

The oldest known text in the Greek alphabet was found at ancient Gabii near Rome and dates to around 770 BC, fifteen years before the city was founded. It is clear from the archaeology of early Rome and Latium that Greek culture was present there from the very beginning. Many scholars believe that the relatively high level of knowledge of Greek among slaves and the lower social classes is evidenced by the frequency of Greek words and loanwords in the plays of Plautus.

In the second century, knowledge of Greek language and literature among the Roman elite can be demonstrated by diplomatic contacts and epigraphic evidence. The Romans spoke Latin, enriched by Greek, Sabine, and Etruscan words. They may have used writing as early as the eighth century BC. The Latin alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet, but the Etruscans were involved in transmitting the Greek written tradition.

Early contacts and cultural interactions

The first examples of bilingualism can be found in ancient civilizations. In ancient Greece, where different Greek dialects coexisted, many citizens were bilingual and spoke different varieties of Greek. In the Roman Empire, Latin was the language of education and administration, but many Romans also spoke different vernacular languages.

Greek words, getting into the language of the Romans, changed their sound appearance in accordance with the phonetic laws of the Latin language. They were subjected to morphological adaptation. Together with the phonetic and morphological assimilation of Greekisms, their introduction into the semantic systems existing in the Latin language took place.

Social stratification of bilingualism

The language requirements for those wishing to assimilate into the Greek environment were very high, which made it difficult not only for non-Greeks to assimilate, but also for them to acculturate. In the younger Romance environment, the language requirements were less stringent: here, the process of acculturation took place first, in the form of adopting Roman customs, and linguistic Romanization was its logical conclusion.

Modern scholars tend to believe that Romanization was an initiative not of the Roman conquerors, but of the population conquered by Rome, which largely determined for itself whether it was advantageous for them to switch to Latin. The Roman conquest did not lead to immediate assimilation, but to the emergence of communities mixed in linguistic and ethnic terms, in which Latin was used for a long time rather as a lingua franca.

The Role of Slaves and Freedmen in the Spread of Bilingualism

Some Hellenes were enslaved and became home tutors for Roman aristocrats. Many of them were later granted the status of freedmen. Teachers were usually chosen from slaves who were unsuitable for other work but were distinguished by their loyalty to the home. Usually these were foreigners - Thracians or Asians, who often spoke poor Greek.

At the end of the Roman Republic, the custom of keeping a teacher in the family passed to the Romans, especially for teaching Greek. The teacher carried out his duties until the pupil reached the age of maturity. There were also female teachers, teachers of Greek for small children. During the Empire, slaves were also called teachers, who taught young purchased slaves all the duties and techniques of slave service.

Among the slaves were also those Greek intellectuals who made Roman culture what we know it as. Scientific evidence suggests that Greek was in Rome even before Rome was founded, and some of these proto-Romans were Greek-speaking. In this sense, one could say that Rome began with Greek and ended with it.

Educational system and bilingualism

The Greek model of education began to establish itself in the Roman state from the 2nd century BC and was finally formed in the Latin world by the beginning of our era. Cato the Elder in his essay "To his son" claimed that a citizen of the Republic should be a warrior during war, and a worthy farmer during peace. He needed knowledge of military art, agronomy, medicine and eloquence.

During the Empire, legal sciences came to the fore. The study of languages and literature – Latin and Greek – was conducted in parallel with the study of history, which was considered part of eloquence. An educated person also had to master fencing, horse riding, and swimming. Roman citizens who wanted to obtain a higher rhetorical education, as a rule, completed it in the largest Greek intellectual centers, especially Athens and Alexandria.

Elementary and secondary education

Elementary education taught writing, reading and arithmetic skills, along with gymnastics and music. Secondary education, beginning in the Hellenistic era, was acquired in gymnasiums, public institutions with a strict academic schedule. At this stage, the emphasis was on grammar, rhetoric and mathematics, while sports and music classes were conducted at a higher level.

Higher education was seen as the culmination of the entire educational process; its ultimate goal was the formation of a philosopher or rhetorician. The largest schools of these trends competed with each other. A single direction of the classical education tradition was supported in the Roman era by Cicero, Quintilian and St. Augustine, who were guided by the standards laid down in classical Greece.

Literary heritage and cultural transformations

In the 3rd century BC, Roman literature developed under the influence of the Greeks. Greek writers, historians and philosophers visited Rome as ambassadors of their states. In the field of literature, Roman authors learned from Greek writers and competed with them. The beginning of the Roman epic was laid by the Greek freedman Livius Andronicus with the translation of the Odyssey into Latin.

Cicero acknowledged the positive results of Greek cultural influence on Roman society over a number of centuries. This primarily concerned the sciences and arts, and then some religious cults. The orator was forced to acknowledge the primacy of the Greeks in the sphere of sciences and arts. He was aware that the "pitiful Latin copyists" could not be worthy rivals in the pen of the great number of writers who made Greek literature famous.

Cicero and Greek Education

Cicero contrasted Greek "learning" with traditional Roman values, asserting the absolute superiority of the Romans over other nations in the area of civic virtues. Having left the Romans with priority in the area of civic virtues, the orator was forced to acknowledge the primacy of the Greeks in the sphere of sciences and arts. Only primacy in oratory did he consider the Romans’ unconditional achievement, equal in significance to the Greeks’ indisputable superiority in philosophy.

Cicero tried to explain the cultural lag of the Romans behind the Greeks by the fact that Greece was much "older" than Rome. In one of his letters to Quintus Cicero, the orator highly valued the role of Greek education in the formation of personality and pointed out to his brother how much they both owed to Greek education.

Phonetic and morphological adaptations

Despite the fact that both Greek and Latin belonged to the same language family and even to the same "centum" group, the phonetic systems of these languages differed from each other. Latin and Greek reflected the Indo-European voiced aspirates differently: in Greek they turned into voiceless aspirates, in Latin at the beginning of a word they turned into f, h, and in the middle - into d, b, g.

When borrowing Greek words containing aspirates, they were historically rendered differently in Latin. Until the second half of the 2nd century BC, they were rendered by the corresponding voiceless stops. From the end of the 2nd century BC, aspirate consonants were introduced into Greek borrowings to render the corresponding Greek aspirates.

Sound changes in borrowings

In colloquial language, old Latin forms of borrowed words were preserved without aspiration. And in literary language, aspiration by analogy spread to some Latin words. Very early borrowings, which were already perceived as our own, did not receive aspiration.

Some Greek consonant combinations in borrowings into Latin received an inserted vowel. This concerned the combinations bd, chm, mn. Lexical borrowing was a complex phenomenon. Greek words, getting into the language of the Romans, changed their sound appearance in accordance with the phonetic laws of the Latin language, and were subjected to morphological adaptation.

Epigraphic evidence of bilingualism

Epigraphic evidence from public and private sanctuaries in ancient Italy includes dedicatory and votive inscriptions written in more than one language. These bilingual inscriptions, dating from the 3rd century BC to the imperial period, had different functions and meanings depending on the historical and cultural context in which they were written.

Bilingual texts often aimed to appeal to different audiences, reflecting the role of the cult site as a meeting point for different ethnic and social groups. In other cases, the adoption of multiple languages reflected the gradual linguistic shift that followed Roman expansion and, later, the granting of Roman citizenship to the peoples of Italy.

Bilingual documents and their social significance

The choice of languages in these inscriptions was not random, but rather a deliberate means of managing the “common ground” between the various cultural participants. The use of bilingual inscriptions in cult sites was more than a pragmatic response to linguistic diversity. Sometimes it could be traced to the individual choice of devotees who consciously preferred it to other viable options.

Regional differences in bilingualism

In the eastern part of the empire, the Greeks traditionally preferred to settle on the islands and in the coastal regions of the Mediterranean. Therefore, despite the partial Hellenization of the autochthonous elites during the reign of Alexander the Great, in the eastern part of the empire, many ancient regional languages from the depths of the continent competed more than successfully with the ancient Greek language: Aramaic, Coptic, Armenian.

In everyday life, speakers of Latin and ancient Greek communicated most actively with each other in the northern Balkan Peninsula along the so-called Jireček Line, as well as in Sicily and southern Italy. Ultimately, this led to the gradual separation of the western and eastern parts after 395.

Latinization of the Western Provinces

Due to the strength of Roman military expeditions and the active mixing of Roman soldiers and colonists with the indigenous population, popular Latin rapidly spread as a native language deep into the continent, displacing many local languages. This situation contributed to the further spread of Romance languages: in the modern world, over 1 billion people speak Romance languages.

The only exceptions were the outlying areas of Britain and Africa, where the local languages — Celtic and Berber — were well preserved. The autochthonous languages in these communities survived for quite a long time, and the total Romanization of their population occurred in the Middle Ages, when the Roman Empire no longer existed.

Religious sphere and linguistic diversity

Bilingualism was not a hindrance in religious terms, since both cultural languages, Greek and Latin, were considered almost equally imperial languages. It became a hindrance only with the division of the empire. Political cosmopolitanism prepared the way for religious cosmopolitanism. Developing for five centuries in a single empire, Christianity acquired such a strong cosmopolitan character that it preserved it for a millennium among politically disunited nations.

In addition to the absence of political barriers within the empire, the consciousness of universal humanity was also reinforced by the multi-ethnic composition of the population in more or less large political centers. Cities such as Rome, Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Milan, Lyon, had almost no specific national coloring. Italians, Greeks, Jews lived here mixed with a more or less significant native contingent.

Specific inscriptions from the provinces

The Latin text makes one of the inscriptions found unique and quite unusual for Hegra, a city where the languages spoken were mainly Nabataean, Lihyan and, rarely, Greek. In this case, the use of Latin was explained by the participation in the construction of the Roman army. The letters are carefully carved, although the layout of the text is not particularly thoughtful.

The Latin was generally literate, but there were two errors in the form of words. This Latin inscription was not the only one found in the Arabian Peninsula. In particular, two Latin inscriptions from the first half of the second century CE were recently discovered in the Farsan Islands.

The Impact of Bilingualism on Cognitive Processes

Modern research shows that bilinguals have flexible and vividly expressed creative thinking, well-developed verbal memory, are more psychologically stable, attentive and organized. There are even studies that prove that bilinguals are less susceptible to heart disease, recover faster from stroke and their brain ages more slowly.

Although such a phenomenon as bilingualism has been known since ancient times, it began to be studied only at the end of the 19th century, and the peak of research came in the middle of the 20th century. At that time, bilingualism was considered almost a gift and a phenomenon. But this concept was also treated very strictly: bilinguals had to not only speak, read and write freely in two languages, but also think in two languages, build intonation correctly and understand humor.

The interaction of Latin and Greek created a unique linguistic environment, where the two great languages of antiquity not only coexisted, but mutually enriched each other. This process affected all levels of society, from emperors and senators to slaves and freedmen.

The spread of bilingualism in the Roman Empire demonstrates how language policy can serve as an instrument of cultural integration and political unification. Greek retained its prestige as the language of education, philosophy, and high culture, while Latin was established as the language of administration, law, and warfare. This functional division created a stable diglossic situation that facilitated cultural synthesis.

Epigraphic monuments and literary sources indicate that bilingualism was not an exception, but rather the norm for educated Romans. Even in the remote provinces of the empire, traces of bilingual communication can be found, indicating the deep penetration of this phenomenon into everyday life.