We all know that the ancient Romans spoke Latin. If you know one thing about the Romans, it’s that they spoke Latin. As it turns out, that is actually correct. The ancient Romans really did speak Latin. (I know; it’s baffling that something ordinary people believe is actually correct, isn’t it? The very notion seems so foreign.)
Nonetheless, there is a fairly widespread misconception that the upper classes in ancient Rome normally spoke in Greek, not Latin. This misconception has, ironically, been primarily promoted by debunkers of popular misconceptions. This notion that upper-class Romans normally spoke in Greek does, in fact, have a tiny bit of truth to it, but it is largely inaccurate.
The misconception
I will admit that, in my younger years, I myself may have fallen into this misconception a bit, at least partly because it appealed to my philhellenic predilections. I spent most of Wednesday afternoon working on revising an old article I originally published in March 2017 about Julius Caesar’s last words. As I was revising it, I discovered that, in the older version of that article, I had incorrectly claimed that elite Romans normally spoke to each other in Greek when in public. I have now significantly revised the article and removed that rather humiliating bit of false information. (Bear in mind that I was a junior in high school when I originally wrote that article and please do not judge me too harshly.)
I feel a bit less embarrassed knowing that I was hardly alone in believing this. In fact, the idea that elite Romans normally spoke Greek seems to be a bit of a popular factoid. For instance, in this YouTube video from April 2015, Nikolas Llyod (a.k.a. “Lindybeige”), a prominent debunker of historical misconceptions in popular culture, flat-out says that the Roman elites normally spoke to each other in Greek and only spoke Latin if they had to.
You can find similar claims in articles around the internet. I do not remember where I originally heard that elite Romans actually spoke Greek, but I know I read it somewhere, possibly in a book. (I definitely did not hear it from Lindybeige, since I only recently discovered him while I was working on an answer on Quora a few weeks ago about flaming arrows. I have no memory of having ever seen any of his videos before that.)
ABOVE: Screenshot from a YouTube video by Lindybeige in which he incorrectly states that elite, educated Romans spoke in Greek “most of the time.” I used to think that too—before I started reading letters written by elite, educated Romans in Latin.
Debunking the misconception
As it turns out, most of the time, most elite Romans really spoke Latin. We know this because they also wrote in Latin. Not only have many texts written by elite ancient Roman writers survived, but so have some of their private letters. These surviving letters give us an idea of what language elite Romans used when speaking or writing among themselves.
The surviving letters and other writings from the Roman aristocracy are almost invariably in Latin. It was after we read some of these letters in my Latin classes that I gradually came to realize that most elite Romans did, in fact, normally speak and write in Latin—even among themselves.
For instance, Pliny the Younger (lived 61 – c. 113 AD) was just about the most elite Roman you could possibly imagine; he was both very well-educated and very high-status. If it were really true that Roman aristocrats normally spoke Greek, we would certainly expect Pliny the Younger’s letters to be in Greek. Nonetheless, many of Pliny the Younger’s private correspondences have survived and they are all in Latin.
Likewise, the Roman orator and senator Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 – 43 BC) was an extremely well-read upper-class Roman who was fluent in Greek and highly knowledgeable of Greek philosophy, but even he wrote almost exclusively in Latin—although he does occasionally salt his letters with occasional words or phrases from Greek. The simple fact is that the vast majority of elite, educated Romans spoke and wrote in Latin the vast majority of the time.
ABOVE: Photograph of a medieval manuscript of one of Pliny the Younger’s epistles. Pliny’s letters are all in Latin, even though he was a very elite and well-educated Roman.
Where does this misconception come from?
The popular misconception that elite Romans usually spoke in Greek among themselves is the result of several factors. Firstly, there are a few elite Roman writers who did write in Greek. For instance, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (lived 121 – 180 AD) famously wrote his Meditations in Greek. Similarly, the surviving writings of the Roman orator Claudius Aelianus (lived c. 175 – c. 235 AD) are all in Greek. These writers, however, represent exceptions and not the rule.
Secondly, Greek really was the everyday spoken language of most people, especially the educated elites, in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. Indeed, nearly every major writer from the eastern part of the Roman Empire whose writings have survived wrote in Greek. These people, though, were not of Roman descent and their cultures significantly differed from the culture of Roman Italy.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing areas throughout the eastern Mediterranean where Greek was predominately spoken. Greek really was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, but that does not mean native Romans from Italy like Cicero and Caesar normally conversed in it.
For instance, the surviving writings of the biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD), who lived in the Roman Empire and was a Roman citizen, are all in Greek. That is because Ploutarchos was Greek who was born in the Greek city of Chaironeia in Boiotia and lived nearly his entire life in Greece. The fact that native Greek-speakers in the east normally spoke Greek does not prove that elite Romans in the west, who were native speakers of Latin, would have normally spoken Greek also.
Thirdly, many Roman aristocrats did know Greek and did occasionally use it. I have already mentioned how the Roman orator Cicero sometimes uses words or phrases from Greek in his writings. Similarly, Ploutarchos records in his Life of Julius Caesar that, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon on 10 January 49 BC, he shouted out a line from the Greek comic playwright Menandros: “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος” (anerríphthō kýbos; literally: “Let the die be cast!”) Ploutarchos specifically records that Caesar quoted the line in the original Greek. Despite this, the Latin translation of the line has become more famous: “Alea iacta est.”
Nonetheless, using Greek occasionally is very different from using Greek “most of the time.” We have plenty of evidence that elite, educated Romans occasionally spoke in Greek, but you have to realize that there is a huge difference between Caesar having (at least supposedly) quoted a two-word phrase from Menandros in Greek when he crossed the Rubicon and Caesar speaking in Greek on a regular, daily basis.
ABOVE: Illustration of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon from 1849, published in a book by the children’s author Jacob Abbott
Conclusion
It turns out I (and Lindybeige and a bunch of other people) made a mistake. Elite, educated Romans normally spoke Latin. This goes to show that even debunkers sometimes need to be debunked. We all make mistakes, but the important thing is that we learn from them. Sometimes, we have to be willing to correct ourselves.
Without going into detail here, it only makes sense that Romans were bilingual, especially trades men, philosophers, scientists, researchers, politicians etc. I would assume your every day soldier or a drunkard in the slums of Rome would not speak Greek, however, anyone with a formal education, usually by Greek Orators, would speak and sometimes communicate with each other in fluent Greek. Latin itself is a blend of Greek and Etruscan (I might be wrong here), and Romans were well aware of this; they did not shy away from the influence of Greek in their language or culture. It is a common mistake to think that Rome or Athens or Massalia or any other city was isolated from each other. Even up to this day in Southern Italy there are peoples who speak Greek, 2500+ years later with a Doric dialect! Consider how amazing that is.
Rome did not become a world power out of nowhere. It was a small city state that probably at some point it was a Hellenistic city-state, just like so many others.