- Roman Life And Society
(By John Matthews)Distances and Diversity
In the year A.D. 333 a Christian pilgrim set out from his home city of Bordeaux for the Holy Land. Measuring the early stages of his journey by the 'leagues' still at
this late date in use in south-western Gaul, he travelled by land across the Alps and north Italy, through the Balkans to Constantinople, and from there through
Anatolia and Syria until, 170 days and 3,300 Roman miles (about 3,100 modern miles) after his departure, he came to Jerusalem. The pilgrim's journey is not merely
testimony to the long-distance travel possible, and frequently undertaken, in all periods of the Roman Empire; it is also a challenge to the imagination. How did the
pilgrim react to the different landscapes through which he travelled, the languages he heard spoken, the cities, towns, and way-stations in which he lodged as he
passed from Bordeaux, penetrated by the Atlantic tides, to the edge of the Judaean wilderness?
The modern historian, influenced perhaps by the Mediterranean perspective of his ancient informants and by his own knowledge of the future, tends to see the
history of the Roman Empire in terms of the relationship between East and West, Greek and Latin; but a journey not much shorter than that of the Bordeaux pilgrim
could be made from north to south, beginning at the militarized frontier region of Hadrian's Wall and passing through Celtic Britain and Gaul through Romanized
north Africa to the edge of the Sahara. Such a journey might take in the capital of the Empire and, in southern Italy and Sicily, enclaves of Greek speech in the west
surviving from the colonial period. The traveller would find diversities of dress no less striking than those of climate and geography, from the wool-clad, hooded
countrymen of the cool northern provinces, as we see them on grave reliefs and wall-paintings, to the bright oriental silks of a family from Edessa, shown with its
Syriac names on a mosaic pavement from that city.
The jurist Ulpian pronounced that it did not matter in what language certain legal documents were framed, citing Punic and Celtic as examples of languages that
might be used, and in another he considered the legal status of statements made in Punic or Syriac 'or any other language' in reply to questions asked in Latin. If
modern scholars are hesitant as to the actual extent of the franchise of Celtic and Punic by the time of these pronouncements in the early third century, no such
uncertainty attends Syriac (better called Aramaic), a language spoken in its various dialects by Levantine easterners for centuries before its rise to become a great
literary language. The same is true of Egyptian demotic, a spoken language for long before it acquired a script and, as Coptic, became a language of the written
word. Celtic leaves no indigenous literature from ancient (as opposed to medieval) times, nor at any time does the language which modern scholars sometimes,
though misleadingly, call 'Berber'-an indigenous African language commemorated on hundreds of inscriptions from one end of Roman north Africa to the other, and
by a distinctive nomenclature attested as late as the fourth century.