Kitabı oku: «Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin»
AD INFINITUM
A Biography of Latin and the World it Created
NICHOLAS OSTLER
To the memory of my parents
Kenneth MacLachlan Ostler
Yvonne Louise Ostler, née Jolly
DOS EST MAGNA PARENTIVM VIRTVS
The virtue of parents is a great endowment.
Horace, Odes, iii.24
HISTORIAM VERO, QVA TOT SIMVL RERVM LONGA ET CONTINVATA RATIO SIT HABENDA CAVSAEQVE FACTORVM OMNIVM SINGVLATIM EXPLICANDAE ET DE QVACVMQVE RE IVDICIVM IN MEDIO PROFERENDVM, EAM QVIDEM VELVT INFINITA MOLE CALAMVM OBRVENTE TAM PROFITERI PERICVLOSVM EST QVAM PRAESTARE DIFFICILE.
But a history, in which a long, continuous account must be given of so many things at once, and the causes of all the events explained singly, and a judgment offered on each, with its infinite-seeming mass bearing down on the pen, is as dangerous to propose as it is difficult to deliver.
Leonardo Bruni, Historia Populi Florentini, preface
IDEO AVTEM PRIVS DE LINGVIS, AC DEINDE DE GENTIBVS POSVIMVS, QVIA EX LINGVIS GENTES, NON EX GENTIBVS LINGVAE EXORTAE SVNT.
Therefore we have first discussed languages, and only then peoples, because peoples have arisen from languages, not languages from peoples.
Isidore, Etymologiae, ix.1.14
LECTOR INTENDE: LAETABERIS.
Reader, pay attention. You will enjoy yourself.
Apuleius, Metamorphoseon, i.1
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Praefatio
Part I : A Latin World
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part II : Latin Recruits
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part III : Worlds Built On Latin
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part IV : Latin In A Vernacular World
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Praise
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Praefatio
NOWADAYS LATIN SEEMS A comical language. Its antiquity overwhelms us and we are embarrassed. The thing to do with it is make laconic remarks (mea culpa ‘my fault’, carpe diem ‘pluck the day’, veni vidi vici ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, tu quoque ‘you too’), cast spells (reparo ‘I repair’ (my spectacles), expecto patronum ‘I await the master’), or translate children’s classics (Winnie Ille Pu, Alicia in Terra Mirabili, Harrius Potter). Modern English students of Latin receive their lessons by courtesy of a Roman mouse, Minimus Mus. The sheer ponderosity of the Latin word-endings calls forth guffaws in English speakers, whether it is Monty Python’s Pontius Pilate defending the honour of his friends Biggus Dickus and wife Incontinentia Buttox, or anonymous macaronic punsters, providing Anglo-Latin nonsense:
boyibus kissibus priti girlorum
girlibus likibus wanti somorum.
And then there are the associations with anatomy and sex, where Latin seems a whole language provided for purposes of euphemism: fellatio, coitus interruptus, eiaculatio praecox. When Queen Elizabeth II rather poignantly called 1992 her annus horribilis, the Sun newspaper immediately had the vulgar wit to translate it as ‘one’s bum year’.
Latin is often happy to be ridiculous. Plautus’ twenty-one comedies from the third century BC are the first substantial set of texts that have survived in it; and faced with current events, as Juvenal pointed out in the second century AD, DIFFICILE EST SATVRAM NON SCRIBERE ‘it is difficult not to write a satire’.
But it was not always frivolous: for more than two thousand years written Latin was the preeminent mode of serious expression in Europe. That is a long time, and time for a lot of business. Even so, one of its first recorded poets, Naevius, was coyly doubtful of its future:
ITAQVE POSTQVAM EST ORCHI TRADITVS THESAVRO, OBLITI SVNT ROMAI LOQVIER LINGVA LATINA.
And so after he passed to the vault of Orchus [the Underworld], the Romans forgot how to speak the Latin language. (Naevius, 204 BC)
Naevius’ jocular prediction was not borne out. Yet at the other end of its history, there was just as little comprehension of what the future held in store for Latin. Eighteen centuries later and shortly before it was at long last to go out of active use, a disgraced former chancellor of England, expressing relief at the final publication of his work in Latin, had roundly stated his faith in its durability among languages: “For these modern languages will at one time or another play the bank-rowtes [bankrupts] with books; and since I have lost much time with this age, I would be glad as God shall give me leave to recover it with posterity” (Francis Bacon, AD 1623). Those who lived with and in Latin clearly could not see the full trajectory of its history, the strengths and ultimately the weaknesses revealed during these two millennia. But that trajectory is what this book sets out to reveal.
Ad Infinitum tells the story of how Latin spread, first as the speech of an unremittingly aggressive and expansive city-state, Rome, then as the lingua franca of the barracks, farming estates, and urban trading centres that its empire established across the lands of the whole western Mediterranean; and of how much later it would spread as the medium of a Christian church that went even farther, seeking converts out to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, the fjords of Norway, and the plains of eastern Poland. Latin was a language spread by force of arms, colonial settlement, trading networks, cultural diffusion, military recruitment, and religious conversion. The character of the civilization expressed in this language changed over time, but there were elements—associated with Latin—that did not change.
This common thread of Latin, once the sound of Europe’s distinctive view of the world, is now a universal academic code, but also a thing of nostalgia. Latin, having been the no-nonsense, hectoring voice of Roman power, and then the soaring mood-music of the Catholic Church, has ended up being used above all to provide the scientific formulas that characterize every life-form on earth. But it is also a language of the heart: the foundation for romance—in all its senses—and a common cultural basis for Europe, the ultimate classic of education.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin came to be a schoolmaster’s language, passed on exclusively in the classroom by the inculcation—literally ‘trampling in’—of rules of grammar. (Not that this limited its prospects, or its utility in the wider world of power and propaganda: its influence was undiminished even a millennium later.) The popularity of favourite textbooks could be amazingly long-lasting: the record must be held by one of the first, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, still being given to pupils twelve hundred years after it was first written in the fifth century AD, but honourable mention is due also to Alexander’s Doctrinale (279 editions all over Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries), and William Lily’s Short Introduction of Grammar, which was still regularly being used by English speakers everywhere two centuries after its first edition in 1511. By these standards, Benjamin H. Kennedy’s Latin Primer (first issued in 1866 but still in use today) is a mere latecomer. I was brought up on Kennedy, as was my father before me, and very likely my grandfather too (though I never asked him).
We were latecomers to Latin, then; but also at a turning point. The British Empire, which my father and grandfather had fought to defend, in India and in Africa, was dissolved into the Commonwealth while I was growing up in the 1960s. Right on cue, elementary Latin had ceased to be a requirement for entry to any British university by the end of the same decade. British imperialists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had modelled themselves on the Romans, just as Spanish imperialists had in the sixteenth, and indeed American constitutionalists in the eighteenth. Europeans have in fact been enthralled by the memory of Latin ever since it ceased to be our working language. But in the 1960s the world was turning its back on it.
This Latin winter was sharp. Yet new and rather different institutions were already establishing themselves as the last of the European empires were passing to the vault of Orcus. The new world status of the United States of America after the Second World War was widely characterized with the Latin phrase Pax Americana; here was a new imperial order, but one declaredly without colonies. Could the Roman model apply to it—whether of Empire or Church? And a Europe newly determined to abolish war among its nations has transformed itself into a European Union, choosing for itself a new Latin motto, In varietate concordia. In the twenty-first century, breakdowns in good governance in countries all over the world have tempted foreign-policy makers to reexamine the virtues of imperial-style intervention. The Roman model remains implicit, and that is one reason why Latin’s importance remains controversial to this day. It is time to examine the character of an empire, of a church, of a civilization, whose life was in Latin.
The language itself remained curiously unchanged throughout its long active career. Naevius’ and Bacon’s works are written in a common code, whose stable rules were transmitted intact through eighty generations of grammar school classes: contrast English, which has only existed at all for sixty generations, and which in its modern form has only lasted for twenty. What has changed has been in the handwriting, epigraphy and typefaces that have represented the eternal words on the page. The SQVARE CAPITALS* of the Roman Republic and Empire,
INMORTALES MORTALES SI FORET FAS FLERE, FLERENT DIVAE CAMENAE NAEVIVM POETAM.
which are represented straightforwardly in the first nine chapters, yielded to a variety of rounder and more cursive scripts beginning in the fourth century. First there is rustic:
In the fifth century this was largely replaced by uncial, in the main a Christian innovation:
Then, in the late eighth century, Carolingian style took over, and this lasted for more than four centuries:
But in the thirteenth century this in turn was succeeded by the new Gothic, or Blackletter, style:
Gothic was still in place when the Germans of the fifteenth century invented the first typefaces for printing, and it became the model for them (e.g., for Gutenberg’s Bible). Italians, however, soon attempted to reinstate the old styles that they found in old (uncial and Carolingian) manuscripts and attributed to their beloved Ancients, inventing for the purpose the italic and Roman styles, which have remained characteristic of western European (and hence American) printing to this day.
An grammaticorum, quorum propositum videtur fuisse ut linguam latinam dedocerent? An denique rhetoricorum, qui ad hanc usque aetatem plurimi circumferebantur, nihil aliud docentes nisi gothice dicere?
Italice loquentem soli Itali intelligent; qui tantum Hispanice loquatur inter Germanos pro muto habebitur; Germanus inter Italos nutu ac manibus pro lingua uti cogetur; qui Gallico sermone peritissime ac scientissime utatur, ubi e Gallia exierit, saepe ultro irridebitur; qui Graece Latineque sciat, is, quocunque terrarum venerit, apud plerosque admirationi erit.
Aside from the square capitals of Rome’s Republican and Imperial language, this book systematically represents Latin in italics. Other languages that crop up—such as Etruscan, Greek, German, Hebrew, and the many varieties of Romance that have culminated in modern western European languages—are also set down in an italic transcription, but where a text is quoted in extenso at the head of a chapter, the authentic script is occasionally used.
Although plenty of Latin is cited in the text—and even more in the endnotes—the book does not aim to give you the rudiments of the language. For that—in default of a serious Latin course—you must consult Tore Janson’s Natural History of Latin, Harry Mount’s Amo, Amas, Amat … and all that, or indeed dear old Benjamin Kennedy himself. What this book aims to do, rather than to give a halting competence in the language, or re-create an echo of the experience in a grammar-school classroom, is to show what the career of Latin amounted to; and wherever possible, to infer the character, the respected ideal, that grew up within the tradition of the Latin language. This is partly an inspiration to us, but also a warning.
For although it claimed to be universal, Latin always indicated Rome as the fixed point of reference for its world. Latin knew no boundaries because it was looking inward, back towards the Eternal City. Perhaps the effort to understand a language and a civilization that were so polarized may reorient our own sense of direction.
I owe thanks to my agent, Natasha Fairweather of A. P. Watt, for assurance that now is the time for a book about Latin, and to my publishers, George Gibson of Walker & Company and Richard Johnson of HarperCollins, for encouragement to see it through. To Natasha I have looked for SEMINA RERVM, discussing themes, to George for the LABOR IMPROBVS of detailed criticism, to Richard for AEQVVS ANIMVS in grand strategy. My background resources have been the London Library of St James’s Square (as ever, my flexible friend), the Sackler and Bodleian libraries of Oxford, and the unexpected riches of the Hitotsubashi University Library in Kunitachi, west of Tokyo. I depend here on all I learned from Latin teachers over the 1960s and early 1970s: Michael†, Eric†, and Maurice† Bickmore, Geoffrey Allibone, James Howarth†, Jack Ind, Michael McCrum†, Robert Ogilvie†, Eric Smalman-Smith, Jasper Griffin, Anthony Kenny, Oliver Lyne†, Anna Morpurgo Davies, John Penney, Harald Reiche†, and Jochen Schindler†. Friends too over the years have injected and interjected much wit: I think especially of David W. Bradley†, Charles and Francis Montagu, Jeremy Lawrance, David Nash, Harald Haarmann, and Jonathan Lewis. My wife, Jane, and daughter, Sophia, have endured, inspired, and sweetened all my necessary absences.
HOC ILLVD EST PRAECIPVE IN COGNITIONE RERVM SALVBRE AC FRVGIFERVM, OMNIS TE EXEMPLI DOCVMENTA IN INLVSTRI POSITA MONVMENTO INTVERI; INDE TIBI TVAEQVE REI PVBLICAE QVOD IMITERE CAPIAS, INDE FOEDVM INCEPTV FOEDVM EXITV QVOD VITES.
This is what is beneficial and good for you in history, to be able to examine the record of every kind of event set down vividly. Here you can find for yourself and your country examples to follow, and here too ugly enterprises with ugly outcomes to avoid.
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, preface
PART I A LATIN WORLD
CHAPTER 1
Ad infinitum—An Empire Lived in Latin
… HVMANITAS VOCABATVR, CVM PARS SERVITVTIS ESSET.
… called “civilization,” when it was just part of being a slave.
Tacitus, Agricola, xxi
THE HISTORY OF LATIN is the history of the development of western Europe, right up to the point when Europe made its shattering impact on the rest of the world. In fact, only seen from the perspective of Latin does Europe really show itself as a single story: nothing else was there all the way through and involved in so many aspects, not Rome, not the Empire, not the Catholic Church, not even Christianity itself.
For the people who spoke and wrote it, the language was their constant companion; learning it was the universal key for entry into their culture; and expression in it was the unchanging means for taking social action. And this relationship with Latin, for its speakers and writers, lasted for two and a half thousand years from 750 BC. There was a single tradition through those millennia, and it was expressed—almost exclusively until 1250, and predominantly and influentially for another five hundred years thereafter—in Latin. Romans’ and Europeans’ thoughts were formed in Latin; and so the history of Latin, however clearly or vaguely we may discern it, is utterly and pervasively bound up with the thinking behind the history of western Europe.
Latin, properly understood, is something like the soul of Europe’s civilization. But the European unity that the Romans achieved and organized was something very different from the consensual model of the modern European Union. It was far closer in spirit to the kind of unity that Hitler and Mussolini were aiming at. No one ever voted to join the Roman Empire, even if the empire itself was run through elected officials, and LIBERTAS remained a Roman ideal. ROMANITAS—the Roman way as such—was never something voluntarily adopted by non-Roman communities.* Conquest by a Roman army was almost always required before outsiders would come to see its virtues, and knowledge of Latin spread within a new province.
At the outset, the Latin language was something imposed on a largely unwilling populace, if arguably—in the Roman mind, and that of later generations—for their greater good. There was no sense of charm or seduction about the spread of Latin, and in this it differs from some other widespread languages: consider the pervasive image of Sanskrit as a luxuriant growth across the expanse of India and Southeast Asia, or indeed the purported attractions of French in the nineteenth century as an alluring mistress. Speakers of Latin, even the most eloquent and illustrious, saw it as a serious and overbearing vehicle for communication. In the famous words of Virgil:
| TV REGERE IMPERIO POPVLOS, ROMANE, MEMENTO | you, Roman, mind to rule peoples at your command |
| —HAE TIBI ERVNT ARTES—PACISQVE IMPONERE MOREM | (these arts will be yours), to impose the way of peace, |
| PARCERE SVBIECTIS ET DEBELLARE SVPERBOS | to spare the conquered, and to battle down the proud.1 |
EXPOLIA, “Strip him.”
The most excellent Flavius Leontius Beronicianus, governor of the Thebaid in southern Egypt in the early 400s AD,† ruled a Greek-speaking province. Greek had been the language of power there since the days of the Ptolemies more than seven centuries before, but the judicial system over which he presided was Roman. Its official records were kept in Latin, even of proceedings that actually took place largely in Greek and perhaps marginally (and through Greek interpreters) in Egyptian. The record we have, apparently verbatim, is in a mixture of Latin and Greek. Fifteen centuries later, it turned up on an Egyptian rubbish dump.
Slaves called to witness in Roman trials had always been routinely beaten, in theory as a guarantee of honesty; but on this day Beronicianus seems to have been in two minds. EXPOLIA. The governor was speaking Latin, and so the first the witness would have known of what was to happen was when his shirt was taken off him. The governor went on in Greek, “For what reason did you enter proceedings against the councillor?” remarking to the staff officer (also in Greek), “Have him beaten.” The record states that the witness was thrashed with ox sinews, and then the governor said in Greek, “Don’t beat free men.” And turning to the staff, PARCE, “Leave off.”2
What was it like having your life run for you in Latin? Even after three centuries of Roman rule, Latin stood as a potent symbol of irresistible, and sometimes arbitrary, power, especially to those who did not know the language.
By the nature of things, we do not have many direct accounts of being on the receiving end of government administered in Latin. Our sources are writings that have survived, whether on papyrus and parchment through two millennia of recopying, or on scraps of masonry that have directly defied erosion and decay. And where Latin was dominant, Latin users largely monopolized literacy. We seek almost in vain for non-Latin attitudes to the advent of Latin.
In fact, some of the most vividly subjective statements of the impact of Roman rule and the advent of Latin come from the pen of a man who had held the highest elective office in the Roman state, the historian Cornelius Tacitus. He described the British in the second century as ready to tolerate military service, tribute, and other impositions of empire, up to but not including abuse, “being already schooled to obey, but not yet to accept slavery.”* He also articulated the anti-Roman arguments of those who backed the British queen Boudicca’s revolt, after a first generation of Roman rule: “Once we used to have one king at a time, but now we get two imposed, the legate to ravage our lifeblood, and the procurator our goods, one served by centurions, the other by slaves, all combining violence with insolence … and look at how few the invaders are, compared with our numbers.”3
Clearly, the major inconveniences of life under the Empire were taxes and military conscription, and neither was helped by the manifestly arbitrary way that those in charge could abuse their offices. But for many in the first generation to be conquered, the far greater threats were of personal enslavement and deportation, a life made up of all duties and no rights, next to which this “moral slavery” that exercised Tacitus was no slavery at all. This very real prospect, aggravated by the thought that the new recruits would always be the worst treated, was something else that he imagined looming large in the minds of Calgacus and his army of North Britons about to make their last stand against Rome.4
On the other hand, once the immovability of the Roman yoke had become established, there were compensations, if only for those nearer the top in their societies.* Tacitus also commented cynically on the efforts made by the British elite to accommodate themselves to Roman control (PAX ROMANA). The governor Agricola, he said, in a deliberate policy of flattery, “instructed the sons of the chiefs in liberal arts, and expressed a preference for the native wit of the British over the studies of the Gauls, so as to plant a desire for eloquence in people who had previously rejected the Roman language altogether. So they took to our dress, and wearing the toga. Gradually they were drawn off into decadence, with colonnades and baths and chic parties. This these innocents called civilized life [HVMANITAS], whereas it was really part of their enslavement.”5
So language was early seen as one of the benefits of the new dispensation. Later, this enthusiasm threatened to get out of hand: Juvenal, a contemporary of Tacitus’ at Rome, commented on the Empire-wide popularity of the Romans’ traditional education in rhetoric:
Today the whole world has its Greek and Roman Athens; the eloquent Gauls have taught the British to be advocates, and Thule is talking of hiring an oratory teacher.6
In the early days, even some Romans bore the linguistic brunt when the spreading PAX ROMANA temporarily outran the sphere of Latin’s currency. Ovid was the very model of Roman urbanity, a leading poet and wit in the time of Augustus, HOMO EMVNCTAE NARIS as they would have put it, ‘a man with an unblocked nose’. With a divine irony, if not poetic justice, he was exiled in AD 8 to Tomi, a town on the western coast of the Black Sea (modern Constantsa) with less than a generation of Romanization behind it. Evidently, he suffered from the lack of Latin there. There was so little of it that his reputation counted for nothing. Instead, he described rather vividly the typical problems of a visitor who “does not speak the language”: “They deal in their own friendly language: I have to get things across through gestures. I’m the barbarian here, uncomprehended by anyone, while the Getans laugh witlessly at words of Latin. They openly insult me to my face in safety, perhaps even twitting me for being an exile. And all too often they believe the stories made up about me, however much I shake my head or nod at their words.”7
But these were just transitional difficulties for Latin speakers in the empire’s borderlands. Over the long centuries of Roman domination, the language, even in its written form, came to be used at all levels, perhaps even among building workers. At Newgate in London, a tile has turned up with the graffito AVSTALIS DIBVS XIII VAGATVR SIB COTIDIM ‘Gus has been wandering off every day for thirteen days’.8 One hundred and fifty miles away, in the health resort and holiday centre that Romans developed at Bath, a hundred ritual curses and oath tokens have emerged from the waters, written in Latin (sometimes backward): DOCIMEDIS PERDIDIT MANICILIA DVA QVI ILLAS INVOLAVI VT MENTES SVA PERDET OCVLOS SVS IN FANO VBI DESTINA ‘Docimedis has lost a pair of gloves. May whoever has made off with them lose his wits and his eyes in the temple where (the goddess) decides’. Although the British language was never fully replaced in Britain (as the modern survival of Welsh and Cornish show), the rulers’ language, Latin, clearly came to penetrate deeply into the days and ways of ordinary life.
All over the empire, from Britain to Africa, and from Spain to Asia, men were joining the army, acquiring a command of Latin, and when they settled at the end of their service—sometimes in colonies far from their origins—planting it there. The new Latin speakers made their mark permanently all over the Empire in the spread of their inscriptions. They are typically on tombstones, but the Mediterranean civic life that the Roman veterans brought to their new homes across Europe left written memorials of many kinds. And from these, it is clear that the language spread from military fathers to other members of the family.
Memorial to Annia Buturra. Although the legend is in Latin, the imagery is Basque: the red heifer of Mari and the thistle-head ‘flower of the sun’ eguzki-lorea.
In Isca Silurium (Caerleon in south Wales), for example, a daughter, Tadia Exuperata, erected beside her father’s grave a memorial to her mother, Tadia Vallaunius, and her brother Tadius Exuperatus, “dead on the German expedition at thirty-seven.”9 At the spa of Aquae Sulis (Bath), where Romans tried to re-create a little luxury to remind them of home, the armourers’ craft guild recorded the life of “Julius Vitalis, armourer of the twentieth legion recruited in Belgium, with nine years’ service, dead at twenty-nine.”10 Some inscriptions give glimpses of domestic sagas: Rusonia Aventina, visiting from Mediomatrici (Metz) in Gaul (perhaps to take the waters?), was buried at the age of fifty-eight by her heir L. Ulpius Sestius.11 Some read more like statements by the proverbial “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”: “C. Severinus, Regional Centurion (retd), restored with virtue and the spirit of the emperor the purity of this holy place wrecked through insolence.”12
In Gastiain, Navarra, Spain, a memorial to a daughter reads, “To the Gods and Spirits (DIIS MANIBVS). Annia Buturra, daughter of Viriatus, thirty years old, placed here.” The opening phrase is classic for a Latin epitaph, but the effigies of a young woman seated on a ledge above, and a heifer looking out mournfully below, all surrounded by a frieze of vine leaves and grapes, show belief in a Basque underworld.13
Across Europe in Liburnia, modern Croatia, fragments of a sarcophagus no older than the second century AD have been found, this time recording a highly distinguished military career. The inscription reads:
To the spirits of the departed: Lucius Artorius Castus, centurion of the III Legion Gallica, also centurion of the VI Legion Ferrata, also centurion of the II Legion Adiutrix, also centurion of the V Legion Macedonica, also primus pilus of the same, praepositus of the Fleet at Misenum, praefectus of the VI Legion Victrix, dux of the legions of cohorts of cavalry from Britain against the Armoricans, procurator centenarius of the province of Liburnia, with the power to issue death sentences. In his lifetime he himself had this made for himself and his family.14
This sums up the life of an officer who evidently served right across the Empire: He had tours of duty with increasing seniority in five regular legions, as well as a naval command at Rome’s prime naval base near Naples, and active service as leader of British native troops in a campaign in Brittany. His last military command had been as praefectus in Britain, commanding the VI Victrix Legion at York, south of Hadrian’s Wall. But the final post of his career, in the area where his sarcophagus was found and where he presumably retired, was a high civil appointment (reserved for EQVITES—Roman ‘knights’) on the northerly coast of the Adriatic.
And in the great theatre of Lepcis, in Libya, an inscription was placed in AD 1–2 by the theatre’s local patron: “Annobal Rufus, son of Himilcho Tapap, adorner of the fatherland, lover of concord, flamen, suffete, captain of ritual, had it built at his own expense, and dedicated the same.” (It was dedicated to the honour of “the god’s son Augustus,” a nice touch that dates it, since Julius Caesar’s deification had by then been achieved, but not yet that of his adopted son, the emperor Augustus.) Its bicultural credentials were advertised in two ways. He took both Roman and Phoenician priestly titles (flamen like the Roman priests of Jupiter and other major gods, and suffete, no different from the Hebrew shophet, the title of Israel’s ‘judges’). And the Latin inscription was immediately followed by a Punic equivalent, which actually omitted the loyal references to Augustus. Lepcis had been a relatively free ally of Rome since 111 BC.15
