This chapter explores the intersections between work by literary scholars with that done in synchronic and diachronic Latin linguistics. As an example of the different approaches and different toolkits employed by the linguist and the literary scholar, I discuss the way linguists have explained the phrase Veneres Cupidinesque in Catullus 3.1, contrasted with interpretations given in commentaries on Catullus and in Latin dictionaries. In the linguists’ account, the phrase is an archaism which continues an earlier Indo-European pattern used to refer to pairs, finding its closest parallels in Sanskrit texts. I then compare literary Latin to other registers and dialects, and discuss the difficulties involved in the term ‘Vulgar Latin’. The chapter also examines other areas in which linguistic scholarship might be usefully consulted by readers of Latin literature: word accent, vowel-length and metre; etymology, semantics and the lexicography; grammars and monographs on morphology, syntax and discourse analysis, including in particular recent approaches using sociolinguistics. Passages from Catullus are discussed throughout.

Handbooks of Latin usually draw attention to the presence of Greek loanwords from the very earliest stages of the Latin language. Greek loans feature in texts of all types, in a wide range of different spheres: words for flora and fauna, food and drink, aspects of trade, law and administration. The last major study of the Greek loanwords in Latin (Biville ) concentrated on the ways in which Greek sounds were represented in Latin, but did not have so much to say about the place of Greek loanwords within the vocabulary of Latin as a whole. This chapter gives a survey of Greek loanwords in republican Latin, in both literary and epigraphic documents, with several different research questions in mind. Is it possible to unearth different chronological strata of loanwords? Can learned and vulgar loans be separated in republican Latin, and how well integrated were Greek loans into Latin? Do phonological and semantic aspects of the words reveal anything about the source of the loans? Why do some Greek loanwords make it into the higher registers of Roman poetry (and sometimes prose) and others not, and how do these conventions come about?

This chapter shows how scholars have both justified, and argued against, the subgrouping of Indo-European in the history of the discipline and sets out the justifications given for methodological choices made by researchers. Since the late nineteenth century, it has been generally agreed that the best supporting evidence for reconstructing a subgroup comprising two or more languages is the presence of non-trivial linguistic innovations which have taken place in common during their prehistory, innovations which were not shared by other languages in the same family. This chapter addresses questions which arise out of this methodology, including whether all shared linguistics innovations should be given equal weight in the assessment of possible subgroups, and whether it is possible to reconstruct dialectal variation in a proto-language.

Artisans and craftsmen in Southern Italy participated in complex networks of interactions which are not yet fully understood. Although we know the broad outlines of the kind of mobility driven by trade, the movements of individual artists or artefacts are much harder to track and, unlike the careers of elite men or soldiers, craftsmen’s lives are rarely memorialised in literature or outlined on gravestones. Instead, their work provides our main insight into how artisans lived, worked and travelled. The style, function and decoration of paintings, ceramics and other products provides some clues, but text is also used for decorative and practical purposes on a wide range of different objects. Many of these inscriptions show the writer’s familiarity with multiple languages, alphabets or dialects and, in some cases, may show evidence for movement across language or dialect boundaries.

The study of migration in the ancient world unexpectedly became a topic of the global news cycle in the summer of 2017. ‘The Story of Britain’, a BBC cartoon for schools that depicted a black soldier in Roman Britain generated Twitter exchanges, subsequently expanded into blogs, newspaper articles and think pieces around the world. Historians, archaeologists, geneticists, statisticians as well as others from outside academia contributed to a debate about the amount of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain and the origin and impact of ancient migrants to the British Isles. The editors of this volume do not expect that it will have an impact equivalent to the BBC cartoon, but we hope that the chapters within it can both contribute to the gradual disentanglement of scanty, sometimes contradictory, evidence and present new ways of looking at ancient migration, while also laying bare some of the tacit or unwarranted assumptions that have been made.

INTRODUCTION

Where does Roman law come from? There are several possible answers to this question. First, it is possible that Roman law is an outgrowth of an oral tradition of law shared with other Indo-European languages. Second, Roman law might reflect legal traditions that developed in Italy over centuries of interaction between local communities; a parallel situation is envisaged to explain the Roman onomastic system, which appears to be the product of a cultural koiné between the peoples of central Italy in the first half of the first millennium BCE. A third possible source of Roman law is the influence from other cultures in the ancient Mediterranean: several ancient Near Eastern cultures had developed sophisticated law-codes already in the second millennium BCE; Greek and Phoenician traders and colonists may well have spread legal traditions and law-codes into the western Mediterranean. The Romans themselves, as is well known, gave various accounts which stressed their debt to Greek law, including the story that Numa had gained his legal learning from Pythagoras, and another that three commissioners responsible for the Roman law of the Twelve Tables were sent by the Senate to copy Solon's laws at Athens and those of other Greek states.

These three possible origins do not necessarily stand in opposition to each other, and there may very well be no single source of Roman law. Whatever the original impetus for legal institutions or practices in Rome was, the Romans adapted these to their own purposes. Indeed, even a very brief examination of the etymology of some Latin legal terminology supports a view that different tributaries fed into the stream of Roman law, and that as these waters merged they gave rise to something new and different. Some Latin words relating to legal concepts and practices are inherited from the vocabulary of the parent language, known as Proto-Indo-European: for example, ius ‘justice’ and iustus ‘just’, words which have parallels in Indo-Aryan and Celtic languages; appear to be shared among the Indo-European languages of Italy, but not further afield in the Indo-European language family, such as lex ‘law’ and derivatives; and there are other words which show shared semantic ranges across Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, such as the terms relating to slavery, and the concept of the familia; finally, a few legal terms are borrowed from Greek, for example, poena ‘penalty’.