Understanding the ancient world through language

Language played a key role in state formation and the spread of Christianity, the construction of ethnicity and negotiating positions of social status and group membership in the ancient world. It could reinforce social norms and shed light on taboos. Yet it is often overlooked as a source for understanding ancient civilisations.

A new book by James Clackson, Reader in Comparative Philology in the Faculty of Classics, uses language as a lens for understanding the ancient world.

Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds is about why some languages - Latin and Greek - grew and others shrank and what language can tell us about the way people lived. The principal focus is the Greek and Roman civilisations between around 800 BCE and 400 CE. The book also catalogues how different states in ancient times managed multilingual populations and it highlights the plethora of different languages that existed at the time. Indeed until the last century of the Roman Republic Latin was a minority language, even in Italy.

The theme of multilingualism is one which has implications for our current preoccupation with immigration and one which Clackson will address in his forthcoming talk on 29th May at the Hay Festival where he is one of many academics speaking as part of the Cambridge Series.

He will draw parallels between current British anxiety about hearing other languages than English and fears about English being bastardised by other languages and concerns of the Romans about the influx of foreign people and foreign words into the Latin langauge. “I am interested in the impact of long-term migration on language. In the end, despite concerns, Latin was enriched by migration. Lots of basic Latin words are Greek words and this has translated into the Romance languages such as French where you can trace the impact of Greek in words such as bras, jambe and parler,” says Clackson.

He compares the approach of Greece and Rome to language. Greece had many many minor states, each with their own dialect and often their own alphabet. He says the Greeks were happy to let people speak in other dialects in public places like the courts and lecture rooms. Multilingualism was not an issue. “It was almost invisible. Ancient writers do not generally talk about interpreters or translations. They take it as natural, as something that doesn’t even need to be mentioned,” he says.

It was not until Roman times that something approaching an official language began to emerge. “Roman magistrates, for instance, spoke Latin, even if the audience was Greek-speaking and the speaker could speak Greek. There are documented instances of this,” says Clackson. “It was a way of letting people know who was boss.”

Those in the audience would have to wait for the translation to understand what was being said.

“You can track in Roman times the discussion about how not to sound Greek. In his public speeches, Cicero [pictured] avoids Greek words as much as possible, but in his private letters he is continually using Greek words and phrases. It’s like a different linguistic persona. He said he would never use Greek words in a Latin sentence, but there is evidence that, in private, he did.”

Clackson adds that there appears to have been a gender difference in how language was used, with women who did not have such a public voice, more likely to use native languages.

Despite these differences, there is no written evidence, says Clackson, that language was associated with political resistance to Roman imperialism. Partly this may be because local languages did not have a written system. “If the Romans conquered you, you had to speak Latin and if you wanted to be educated and get on you had to learn Latin,” he says.

People used language fairly pragmatically according to what would get them the best results, he says. “In Roman law, Latin had to be spoken for contracts to be valid so you would be excluded from the economy if you didn’t use Latin, but there was no centralisation of schooling and attempts to impose language in that way. It was not as associated with identity as it is now.”

Nevertheless, the ability to speak the highest form of Greek was also a signifier of status. Many Romans learnt Greek as they saw it as the language of literature and culture.

Clackson’s research is currently focused on whether the Romans treated Greek differently to other languages, whether they were more open to Greek culture and whether that openness was part of their success.

*James Clackson will be speaking at the Hay Festival at 1pm on 29th May on Migration and Language: Ancient Perspectives.