CULTURE 219sources partially lift the veil, but in the Phoenician cities continuity with the
pre-Greek past in the areas of language, political institutions, cults, literary
and documentary tradition, and historical consciousness can be identifi ed
with different degrees of certainty. Moreover, toward the end of our period
there were emperors and courtiers who, because of their backgrounds,
were particularly well informed about the vitality of Phoenician and other
Near-Eastern cultures. The jurist Ulpian, who boasted Tyre as his place of
origin, entertained the idea that Punic and Aramaic (‘Assyrian’) might be
chosen as alternative languages to Latin or Greek for certain legal
transactions ( Digest 45.1.1.6). Punic- speaking Tripolitania produced the
family of Septimius Severus, and an Aramaic- speaking area of Syria that of
his second wife, Julia Domna.^26
The survival of Phoenician culture has important implications for the
extent not only of Hellenization in the East but also of Romanization in the
West. The potency of Greek culture is established by its continuous and
lasting infl uence on the culture of Rome, and also its survival in various
outposts in the West from Sicily to Spain, most dramatically in Naples, ‘a
Greek shop window 150 miles from Rome’. The survival in north Africa of
the other ‘colonial’ culture, Phoenician, is proven by hundreds of Neo-Punic
inscriptions (many of them offi cial, as in fi rst- century Lepcis Magna and
fi rst- and second- century Maktar) and by literary evidence from Statius in
the second half of the fi rst century to Augustine in the early fi fth. Apuleius’
disparaging comment about his renegade stepson Pudens of Oea in
Tripolitania, that he never spoke anything but Punic, may not be fair to
Pudens, but is acceptable for its implication that Punic in the mid- second
century was a living language among the propertied classes as well as the
unlettered townsfolk. Elsewhere, evidence of the staying- power of Phoenician
culture in an urban setting is harder to fi nd, but the neo-Punic inscription
from Bitia in Sardinia should occasion no surprise. Finally, even without the
evidence of the inscriptions in Libyan, or Ulpian’s remark that the Celtic
language might be admissible in Roman civil law ( Digest 32.11 pref.), or the
quantity of onomastic evidence from the north and north- western provinces,
it would be reasonable to expect indigenous languages to have survived the
impact of Romanization as languages of ordinary discourse, and not only
among the lower classes, in the urban setting.^27
The limits of Romanization: countryside
City and country formed to some extent a continuum. Cities typically served
as the geographical and economic axis of a rural territory, as the domicile of
a portion of the agricultural work- force, and as a social and religious centre
for all and sundry. Again, the city and the ‘villa- belt’ around it may be
thought of as a unity from the point of view of the landowning urban
aristocracy. Yet in Antioch and Hippo Regius, Syriac- and Punic- speaking