What Did the Ancient Romans Use Latin For?

Someone on Quora has asked: “What was Latin used for in ancient Rome?” At first glance, this question might sound rather silly. After all, it seems obvious that people in ancient Rome used Latin for all different kinds of oral and written communication. This may explain why the people who have answered this question so far have all given brief and flippant responses. I initially thought about giving such a response as well. After a bit of consideration, though, I realized that this is not actually a bad question, or a silly one.

Quite simply, Latin was not the only language that people in the Roman cultural sphere used. There were many Roman people in ancient times who could not speak Latin. Also, many Roman people who did speak Latin spoke it in addition to at least one other language. In this post, I intend to first explain who in ancient Rome actually spoke Latin and then explain in what sorts of contexts multilingual people who knew Latin used it.

What is Latin?

First, let’s cover some very basic background information. The city of Rome is located in a region of central western Italy known as Latium (or Lazio in Modern Italian). The inhabitants of this region were known in ancient times as Latīnī or Latins and the Italic language that was most widely spoken among them was known as Latīnum, which means “the Latin thing,” or lingua Latīna, meaning “the Latin language.” Today, most people just call it Latin. The city of Rome was a Latin city and, as far as we can tell, from its earliest history, most of its inhabitants spoke the Latin language.

From the seventh century BCE onwards, some people began to write Latin in addition to speaking it. As I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2021, the oldest surviving writing in Latin comes not from Rome, but rather from Praeneste, a Latin city located roughly twenty-two miles east of Rome. The writing occurs in the form of an inscription on the Praeneste fibula, which most likely dates to the seventh century BCE. It reads, in extremely archaic Latin:

“MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI.”

This means, in English:

“Manios made me for Numerios.”

There are some other inscriptions in archaic Latin from the seventh, sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE, but the Latin language did not develop its own literary tradition until relatively late, in the third century BCE, under the influence of the much older and already well-developed Greek literary tradition.

The first person who is known to have composed poetry in Latin is Livius Andronicus (lived c. 284 – c. 205 BCE), whose works survive only in fragments, but who is known from historical sources to have mostly written plays that were based on earlier plays in Greek.

In the centuries following Livius Andronicus, Latin literature came to flourish. The historical period lasting from around 70 BCE until around 18 CE has been traditionally—but somewhat simplistically—described as the so-called “Golden Age” of Latin literature. It was during this period that famous poets such as Gaius Valerius Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE), Publius Vergilius Maro (lived 70 – 19 BCE), Quintus Horatius Flaccus (lived 65 – 8 BCE), and Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE) and prose writers such as Marcus Tullius Cicero (lived 106 BC – 43 BCE), Gaius Julius Caesar (lived 100 – 44 BCE), Gaius Sallustius Crispus (lived 86 – c. 35 BCE), and Titus Livius (lived 59 BCE – 17 CE) all produced their works.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Praeneste fibula, which bears the oldest surviving inscription in the Latin language, dating to the seventh century BCE

Meanwhile, the Romans greatly expanded their empire over the course of the third, second, and first centuries BCE, first coming to dominate Italy, then, eventually, the entire Mediterranean world. As they expanded their empire and conquered more and more peoples, Latin spread beyond Latium to the rest of Italy and eventually became the common language throughout the western Mediterranean.

By the late first century BCE, Classical Latin was the spoken and written language of imperial administration, high literature, and the upper-class elites in general all throughout the western Mediterranean, including in Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and western North Africa.

Meanwhile, Koine Greek, which had been spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE and the Hellenistic kingdoms with Greek rulers that came to rule those regions in the centuries after him, remained the dominant language of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, holding a place of prestige similar to the place Latin held in the west.

Literary authors who lived in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, such as the Jewish Middle Platonist philosopher Philon of Alexandria (lived c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE), the Greek biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE), the Greek orator Ailios Aristeides (lived 117 – 181 CE), the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE), the Greek medical writer Galenos of Pergamon (lived 129 – c. 216 CE), the early Christian scholar and theologian Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 CE), et cetera, generally wrote in Greek, rather than Latin.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the Roman Empire in around 330 CE, with the areas where Latin was the dominant language in red and areas where Greek was the dominant language in blue

Regional languages and polyglossia in the Roman provinces

Nonetheless, even in the western half of the Roman Empire, many people, especially those living in the provinces, did not speak Latin and many of those who did speak it spoke it as a second language. Many languages that had been spoken in various lands before the Romans conquered them continued to be spoken in those regions even under Roman rule, including various forms of Aramaic, Nabatean, Egyptian, various Amazigh languages, Punic, Iberian, Aquitanian, Gaulish, Proto-Germanic, Brittonic, Illyrian, Dacian, Thrakian, Phrygian, Galatian, and Classical Armenian.

These regional languages were generally seen as less prestigious than Latin or Greek. Indeed, they were generally associated with the lower classes and the less educated. Nonetheless, they were still widely spoken and there were even many upper-class provincials who could only speak the regional language and hardly knew a word of Latin or Greek.

Some of the regional languages that were spoken within the Roman Empire even have descendant languages that are still spoken today. For instance, modern Amazigh languages are derived from ancient Amazigh languages spoken in North Africa, Modern Welsh and Breton are both derived from Brittonic, Modern Armenian is derived from Classical Armenian, Modern Basque is most likely derived from Aquitanian, and Modern Albanian is most likely derived from some variety of Illyrian, Thrakian, or Dacian. (For more about Albanian in particular, see this article I wrote in March 2021.)

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing just a few of the languages that were spoken in various regions throughout the Roman Empire in around 150 CE

Some famous provincial Romans who spoke Latin as a second language

Many upper-class, educated people who lived in the provinces of the Roman Empire were bilingual or even trilingual; many were able to speak the regional language that was spoken in the province where they lived, along with Latin and/or Greek. Knowing Greek and/or Latin was considered a tremendous mark of prestige and provincials who could speak and write these languages well were typically very proud of their abilities.

To give a famous example, Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE) was born in the town of Madauros in what is now northern Algeria. He was of Amazigh ancestry and his native language may have been Punic, but he became extremely fluent in Latin and Greek and became a highly accomplished writer of Latin prose. He is best known today for his novel The Golden Ass, which is the only novel written in the Latin language in ancient times that has survived to the present day complete. (I’ve written about The Golden Ass before, including, perhaps most extensively, in this article I wrote in June 2021.)

In 158/159 CE, Apuleius’s young stepson Sicinius Pudens, represented in court by his uncle Sicinius Aemilianus, accused him in the city of Sabratha before the proconsul Claudius Maximus of using magic to seduce Sicinius Pudens’s mother Pudentilla, a wealthy widow. In his defense, Apuleius delivered a speech known as his Apologia, which he evidently published in written form afterwards. In his Apologia 98.8–9, Apuleius seeks to discredit his stepson by showing his lack of education, declaring that he only speaks Punic and maybe a little bit of Greek, but not a word of Latin. He says:

“Loquitur nunquam nisi Punice et si quid adhuc a matre graecissat; enim Latine loqui neque vult neque potest. Audisti, Maxime, paulo ante (pro nefas!) privignum meum, fratrem Pontiani, diserti iuvenis, vix singulas syllabas fringultientem. . .”

This means, in my own English translation:

“He never speaks except in Punic and, if there is anything still from his mother, he speaks Greek. Truly, he neither wants to speak Latin, nor is he able to. You have heard, Maximus, just before (for the wicked deed!) my stepson, the brother of Pontianus, the eloquent youth, barely stammer single syllables. . .”

Thus, Apuleius positions himself as better than his stepson because he can speak and write eloquently in both Latin and Greek, while his stepson only speaks Punic fluently, a language that Apuleius positions as inferior.

ABOVE: Roman medallion dating to the fourth century CE bearing a probably fictional portrait of the writer Apuleius (We can’t really be sure what Apuleius looked like.)

Another example of a famous Roman provincial who managed to learn to speak Latin very well as a second language is Septimius Severus, who, as I discuss in this article I wrote in September 2019, was born into a family of equestrian rank in the city of Leptis Magna on the northern coast of what is now Libya in 145 CE. His mother Fulvia Pia was from an Italian patrician family that had settled in North Africa and his father Publius Septimius Geta was a provincial of Punic and possibly also Amazigh ancestry.

The emperor Commodus appointed Septimius Severus as the governor of the province of Pannonia Superior in 191 CE. Then, Commodus was assassinated on 31 December 192 CE. There are several different accounts of how this happened, but, according to the most famous story, which is told by the Greek historian Kassios Dion (lived c. 155 – c. 235 CE) in his Roman History 73.22.5, a wrestler named Narcissus strangled him in his bathtub.

Pertinax, Commodus’s immediate successor, was, in turn, assassinated by the Praetorian Guards on 28 March 193 CE. A man named Didius Julianus bribed the Praetorian Guards to make him emperor, but Septimius Severus swiftly marched his legions to Rome and seized the throne from Didius Julianus. Over the following years, Septimius Severus successfully defeated two rival claimants to the throne, the generals Pescennius Niger and Clodius Albinus. He ruled until his death in 211 CE. He was the first (but not the last) Roman emperor to come from North Africa.

The Epitome de Caesaribus, an anonymous account of the reigns of Roman emperors written in the late fourth century CE, records that Septimius Severus was trilingual in Punic, Latin, and Greek, but that he spoke Punic best, since it was his first language. The Epitome de Caesaribus 20.8 states:

“. . . Latinis litteris sufficienter instructus, Graecis sermonibus eruditus, Punica eloquentia promptior, quippe genitus apud Leptim provinciae Africae.”

This means, in my own translation:

“He was well instructed in Latin literature, educated in Greek manners of speaking, and more prompt in Punic eloquence, since he was born in Leptis in the province Africa.”

The Historia Augusta v. Septimius Severus, a partly fictional biography of Septimius Severus written in the late fourth or early fifth century CE, additionally claims at 15.7 that, when his sister came to Rome, he was embarrassed by the fact that she could only speak Punic fluently and spoke only broken Latin. It also records at 19.9 that Septimius Severus himself “Afrum quiddam usque ad senectutem sonans” (i.e., “sounded like someone African all the way until old age”), indicating that he spoke Latin with a distinct Punic accent.

ABOVE: Photograph I took myself (and have uploaded to Wikimedia Commons) showing a Roman marble bust of the provincial emperor Septimius Severus—who was trilingual in Punic, Latin, and Greek—currently held in the Eskenazi Museum of Art in Bloomington, Indiana

Clearly, some upper-class, educated Roman provincials like Apuleius or Septimius Severus who could speak Latin and/or Greek fluently took great pride in their Latin and/or Greek abilities and had disdain for and embarrassment about their own native languages.

Nonetheless, both Apuleius’s stepson and Septimius Severus’s sister provide evidence that even some close relatives of upper-class provincials who spoke Latin and Greek fluently may not have been able to speak these languages—or at least not been able to speak them fluently—and may have only been able to speak the regional language of where they grew up.

It is therefore likely that even many upper-class, educated provincials who could speak Latin and/or Greek fluently had no choice but to speak their regional language when they were interacting with friends and family members who only spoke the regional language. It is likely that many such people used their local language much of the time and only used Latin or Greek when they were interacting with other upper-class, educated people who happened to know those languages or with people who actually came from Italy or Greece.

Of course, for most of the Roman Principate, most provincials did not hold Roman citizenship. There were some who did, but, in most cases, they were exceptions. In 212 CE, though, Septimius Severus’s son Caracalla granted full Roman citizenship to all freeborn inhabitants of the Roman Empire through an edict known as the Constitutio Antoniniana or “Antonine Constitution.”

As a result of this decree, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Mediterranean became Roman citizens, most of whom probably did not speak Latin as their primary language and many of whom could not speak even a word of Latin at all.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait bust of Septimius Severus’s son Caracalla, who issued the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 CE

Vulgar Latin

Even many of the people in the Roman Empire who spoke Latin probably didn’t speak the same highly polished form of Classical Latin that highly educated, upper-class authors like Cicero, Caesar, Vergil, Ovid, and Apuleius used in their writing, which is the kind that Latin students still learn in classrooms across the western world today.

Instead, from the first century BCE onward, various dialects of what modern classicists have dubbed “Vulgar Latin,” which often differed quite drastically from the standard Classical Latin that the educated, upper-class elites used in their writing, became increasingly widely spoken colloquially among common people in the western Mediterranean, gradually supplanting regional languages first in Italy, then in Iberia, North Africa, Gaul, and eventually Dacia.

Contrary to popular belief, the term Vulgar Latin does not refer to a specific variety of Latin, but rather to the continuum of diverse regional dialects of the Latin language that were spoken colloquially among common people in territories under Roman rule. At first, these dialects of Vulgar Latin seem to have had much in common with each other and, indeed, they seem to have had more in common with each other than with standard Classical Latin. Over time, though, they drifted further apart, drifting away from both standard Classical Latin and other dialects of Vulgar Latin.

Eventually, by roughly the late Early Middle Ages, these dialects of Vulgar Latin would evolve into the Romance languages, the most widely spoken of which today are Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. (For more on this subject, I discuss the development of the Romance languages in greater depth in this article I posted in June 2021 about why Latin is considered a “dead language.”)

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the Romance languages that are spoken in Europe today, all of which are derived from Vulgar Latin

Conclusion

To return back to the original question that was asked about what Latin was used for in ancient Rome, the answer very much depends on who a person happened to be, where they happened to live, and in which time period they happened to live. If you happened to be an upper-class, well-educated person living in Roman Italy, you probably would have used standard Classical Latin for almost all forms of communication.

If you were a lower-class person in Italy, you probably would have spoken some variety of Vulgar Latin on a daily basis. You would most likely (although not certainly) be illiterate. Depending on your level of exposure to the standard Classical Latin used by the upper classes, you might be able to “code-switch” between Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin, or you might not be able to speak Classical Latin at all.

If you were an upper-class, well-educated person from the western provinces, there’s a fairly high chance that you would have learned standard Classical Latin, either as a first or second language, and you would probably use it when interacting with other upper-class, well-educated provincials or with people you might know who came from Italy. You would most likely have no choice but to use the regional language of where you lived, though, to communicate with people around you who couldn’t speak Latin. If you were from the eastern provinces, then you would be in a similar situation, only you would most likely be speaking Greek with your upper-class, educated companions instead of Latin.

Finally, if you were a lower-class provincial or even an upper-class provincial in the earlier periods of the Principate who wasn’t very well educated, then it is probable that you wouldn’t have spoken very much Latin at all. Indeed, Latin might be even more foreign to you than it is to most English-speakers in the United States today.

If you lived in certain regions like Iberia, western North Africa, Gaul, or Dacia during the later Principate or the Dominate, then you might speak some variety of Vulgar Latin, with pronunciation and vocabulary probably influenced to some extent by the language that was spoken in the region where you live before the Roman conquest.