‘In both our languages’: Greek–Latin code-switching in Roman literature

Abstract

After a short introduction to code-switching and Classics, this paper offers an overview of the phenomenon in Roman literature with some comments on possible generic restrictions, followed by a survey of Roman attitudes to the practice. The analysis then focuses on Roman letter writing and investigates code-switching in the secondcentury correspondence of Fronto (mainly letters between Marcus Aurelius, who became Emperor in AD 161, and his tutor Fronto). This discussion uses part of a new detailed database of Greek code-switches in Roman epistolography and is largely sociolinguistic in approach. It makes reference to comparanda in ancient and modern corpora where possible and highlights the value of code-switching research in responding to a range of (socio)linguistic, literary and historical questions. KeywordsGreek; Latin; code-switching; Roman literature; letters; Fronto; Cicero; Pliny Code-switching and ClassicsThe interaction of Greek and Latin languages and cultures is a defining feature of the Roman World and the majority of well-educated members of the western Roman elite were likely competent in both Latin and Greek language and literature (utraque lingua docti 'learned in both languages') during a large part of the late Republican and Imperial periods. Despite this, attitudes towards the Greek language oscillated between disdain and respect for what was considered one of their two languages. Roman commentators discussed this complex relationship and, though there was no rigid official linguistic policy, occasionally even Emperors made pronouncements on the appropriate use, or avoidance, of Greek: Tiberius, for example, rejects a Greek word in a senatorial decree and forbids testimony in Greek from a soldier (Suetonius Tiberius 71; Rochette, 1997).Studying Classics has always entailed an appreciation of this biculturalism but it is only more recently that we have fully engaged with modern bi-and multilingualism theory and practice and have more systematically extended our perspective beyond Latin and Greek, 1 literature and the elite (Adams, 2003;Biville et al., 2008;Cotton et al., 2009; Mullen and James, 2012;Mullen, 2013a). 3All the direct sources of linguistic code-switching for Classicists are written. Scholars have been at pains to demonstrate that the terminologies, models and concepts designed for bilingual speech can be applied, with caution, to the written evidence. In more optimistic moments some have ventured to suggest that our evidence might even be easier to handle than oral output. Swain notes that, whilst literature suffers from generic / stylistic interference effects and oral output is plagued by Labov's 'Observer's Paradox', ancient corpora such as Cicero's correspondence (that of a highly proficient balanced bilingual, written outside the constraints of 'high literature' and probably not intended for publication) might come 'close to solving a problem that besets research into oral communication ' (2002: 145 and spontaneity of the language of the author? Sociolinguists strugg...

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