Opuscula: Essays chiefly Philological and Ethnographical

by R. G. Latham

It is almost unnecessary to say that the exact conditions under which Britain was reduced were not those of any other Roman Province.

In respect to Spain, the Roman occupancy was early, having begun long before that of Northern and Central Gaul, having begun during the Punic wars, and having become sufficiently settled by the time of Augustus to command the attention of Strabo on the strength of the civilization it had developed. In Spain, then, there was priority in point of time to account for any extraordinary amount of Roman influences.

Gaul, with the exception of the earlier acquisitions in the Narbonensis, was the conquest of one of the most thorough-going of conquerors. The number of enemies that Cæsar slaughtered has been put at 1,000,000. Without knowing the grounds of this calculation, we may safely say that his campaigns were eminently of a destructive character.

The conquerors of the Breuni, Genauni, and similar occupants of those parts of Switzerland where the Rumonsch Language (of Latin origin) is now spoken, were men of similar energy. Neither Drusus nor Tiberius spared an enemy who opposed. Both were men who would "make a solitude and call it peace."

That Trajan's conquest of Dacia was of a similar radical and thorough-going character is nearly certain.

Now, the evidence that the conquests of the remaining provinces were like those of the provinces just noted, is by no means strong. At the same time, it must be admitted that the analogy established by four such countries as Gaul, Spain, Switzerland, and Moldo-Wallachia is cogent. What was the extent to which Africa, Pannonia, Illyricum, Thrace, and the Mœsias were Romanized? Of Asia? I say nothing. It was sufficiently Greek to have been in the same category with Greece itself, and in Greece itself we know that no attempts were made upon the language.

Africa was Latin in its literature; and, at a later period, pre-eminently Latin in its Christianity. But the evidence that the vernacular language was Latin is nil, and the presumptions unfavourable. The Berber tongue of the present native tribes of the whole district between Egypt and the Atlantic is certainly of high antiquity; it being a well-known fact, that in it, several of the names in the geography of classical Africa are significant. Now this is spread over the country indifferently. Neither does it show any notable signs of Latin intermixture. Neither is there trace, or shadow of trace, of any form of speech of Latin origin throughout the whole of Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers or Morocco.

In Pannonia and Illyricum, the same absence of any language of Latin origin is manifest. Pannonia and Illyricum have had more than an average amount of subsequent conquerors and occupants—Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgarians, Slavonians, Hungarians, Germans. That the Slovak, however, in the north, and the Dalmatian forms of the Servian in the south, represent the native languages is generally admitted—now, if not long ago. These, then, have survived. Why not, then, the Latin if it ever took root?

In respect to Thrace, it is just possible that it may have been, in its towns at least, sufficiently Greek to have been in the same category with Greece proper. I say that this is just possible. In reality, however, it was more likely to be contrasted with Greece than to be classed with it. One thing, however, is certain, viz.:—that the country district round Constantinople was never a district in which Latin was vernacular. Had it been so, the fact could hardly have been unnoticed, or without influence on the unequivocally Greek Metropolis of the Eastern Empire.