Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The official language used across the Roman Empire was Latin. This did not mean that every person from Antioch to St. Albans spoke to one another in the epigrams of Martial: the classical Latin of the great Roman poets, philosophers, and historians was of no more use to ordinary day-to-day speakers than the syntax and vocabulary of Shakespeare’s sonnets would have been to an innkeeper or goatherd in Elizabethan England. In the east of the empire, Latin competed with Greek for the position of the most prevalent, admirable, and useful language, particularly after the empire was formally partitioned in the early fourth century a.d. In the west, Latin was adopted, adapted, and interbred with local tongues across the empire—a process that produced what would eventually become the great Romance languages of the second millennium a.d. But if it was not exactly a universal tongue, Latin certainly was the first language of official imperial business, which allowed educated Romans everywhere to communicate with one another and to advertise their status as sophisticated beings.