How bilingual was the Eastern Roman Empire in late antiquity? Greek-speaking Easterners who made careers in the West included the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the poet Claudian, Pope Zosimus and the emperors Constans, Julian, Honorius and Anthemius. Latin-speaking Westerners who made careers in the East included the historians Eutropius and Marcellinus Comes, the grammarian Priscian, the poet Corippus and the emperors Constantine, Valens, Marcian, Leo I, Theodosius, Justin and Justinian. Latin was the official language of the law and the army in both East and West until Justinian's reign. Yet today's scholarly consensus is that the vast majority of Easterners, including most churchmen and intellectuals, knew little if any Latin. This volume, seemingly the first book on the subject, is welcome for providing evidence to help resolve this apparent paradox. The quality of the scholarship is generally high, but the coverage is predictably uneven, since the book collects 25 papers by different scholars (in English, Italian and French, with English abstracts), most of them from colloquia held in Rome (‘Il Latino a Bisanzio’, 2015) and Paris (‘Le Latin à Byzance’, 2016). The Roman numeral ‘I’ in the title presumably means that a second volume is contemplated, though this is not explained.

After a brief preface by the three editors, G. Cavallo provides some introductory remarks. Next, under the heading of ‘General Framework’, Silvano depicts the history of Latin in the East after Diocletian as one of decline and ultimately ‘fall’, and Garcea provides a concise survey of the Eastern Empire's ‘imperfect bilingualism’. Since the remaining five sections group largely unrelated papers under somewhat contrived titles (e.g. ‘The Laws of the Language and the Language of the Laws’), they can be conveniently summarised here in a modified order.

Several papers show that a number of Easterners did know Latin, especially in the earlier period. Thus G. Nocchi Macedo documents how the government supported Latin at Constantinople (though his remark in a footnote that Tiberius II was the first emperor whose native language was Greek overlooks Anastasius and arguably Theodosius II and Zeno). A. Pellizzari records the complaints of Libanius, who resisted learning Latin himself, that ambitious students were eager to acquire the language. J. Signes Codoñer examines several grammars for teaching Latin to Easterners (and the virtual absence of grammars for teaching Greek to Westerners). T. Ernst van Bochove supplies a detailed account of the transition from Latin to Greek in Justinian's legislation. V. Zarini cogently defends the traditional view that Corippus travelled to Constantinople from Africa to recite his Latin poems for Justin II. L. Mecella demonstrates the extensive knowledge of Latin of the sixth-century Peter the Patrician, whose history has now been conclusively identified with the fragmentary Anonymus post Dionem by T. Banchich (The Lost History of Peter the Patrician [2015]). A. Capone describes a fairly accurate anonymous translation of some of the works of Gregory of Nazianzus into Latin. M. Miglietta calls attention to the importance of the sixth-century Greek paraphrase of Justinian's Institutes attributed to Theophilus for later Byzantine law. J. Niehoff-Panagiotidis identifies several spoken Latin loan words in Byzantine Greek. All these papers suggest that knowledge of Latin in the East was significant.

Other papers, however, minimise the Byzantines’ knowledge of Latin. J.-L. Fournet describes the vestigial use of Latin in Egyptian papyri, chiefly for legal terms. C. Rapp finds that most users of Latin in Eastern monasteries were native Latin-speakers, like St Jerome. M. Rosellini and E. Spangenberg Yanes observe that Priscian's Grammatical Institutes refers to a surprisingly limited range of Latin authors. M. Baratin argues convincingly that the scholarly bureaucrat John Lydus never mentions Priscian because the grammarian had been associated with supporters of the failed Nika Revolt against Justinian. F. Biville discusses the ritual acclamations in Latin that continued to be shouted by Constantinopolitans who knew no Latin. A. Rhoby similarly notes that almost all the relatively few Latin inscriptions in Constantinople are of an official and ceremonial character (though Constans II was the grandson, not ‘son’, of Heraclius). J.-D. Rodríguez Martín shows how the Byzantine treatise De actionibus reveals increasing misunderstanding of Latin legal terms up to the ninth century. P. Schreiner shows that the persistence of vestigial Latin in Byzantine documents and coins implies no actual knowledge of the language (though his conclusion that Latin was unknown at Constantinople after the 580s is surely overstated). B. Rochette discusses the scarcity of translations from Latin into Greek. G. Agosti persuasively disputes the idea that some Greek poetry in late antiquity imitates Latin models. C. Gastgeber suggests that the anonymous author of the Chronicon Paschale (c. 630) had no real knowledge of Latin; but this conclusion would require a refutation (not supplied here) of the plausible hypothesis that the chronicler used a lost Latin ‘city chronicle of Constantinople’. By this time many readers will feel understandable confusion about how prevalent Latin was in the East.

A major controversy, the so-called Johannesfrage, affects the two remaining papers, by U. Roberto on John of Antioch and O. Gengler on John Malalas. Both scholars accept the nineteenth-century theory that the fragmentary seventh-century chronicle of John of Antioch is derived from the closely related sixth-century chronicle of Malalas. This theory requires us to assume that John of Antioch rewrote Malalas’ popular Greek in Attic Greek, correcting Malalas’ many absurd errors and adding new material from Cassius Dio, Ammianus, Procopius and other authors, then continued Malalas’ narrative to 610 in popular Greek. But why should John of Antioch have adopted as his main source a history that he knew to be full of errors, and why would he have converted that history's popular Greek into Attic but continued it in popular Greek? This bizarre theory has survived its opponents’ attacks for over a century only because the alternative theory – that Malalas copied John of Antioch – requires arbitrarily rejecting the attribution to John of Antioch of large parts of the abundant extracts in our main source, Constantine VII's Excerpta. Among other problems, neither theory explains the striking resemblance between the many, often obscure sources cited by Malalas and John of Antioch and a long list of sources cited by Evagrius Scholasticus from a lost history by Eustathius of Epiphania.

My own answer to the Johannesfrage (see The Early Byzantine Historians [2007] and International History Review 29 [2007]) is that Malalas and John of Antioch copied Eustathius. While John of Antioch virtually transcribed Eustathius’ original Attic before continuing it in popular Greek, Malalas paraphrased Eustathius in popular Greek, adding his own inventions to bolster his claims that he had consulted Eustathius’ sources directly. After thirteen years nobody has yet refuted this theory; some have accepted it; but some (including Roberto and Gengler) still resist its implications. If it is correct, the substantial knowledge of Latin and Latin culture that Roberto ascribes to John of Antioch and that Gengler ascribes to Malalas should be ascribed to Eustathius instead. This example of proficiency in Latin is therefore Eustathius c. 526, not Malalas shortly thereafter or John of Antioch as late as 610. The assertions by Malalas that puzzle Gengler – that Cicero and Sallust were ‘most learned Roman poets’ and that Livy and Virgil wrote during the ‘18 years’ of Julius Caesar's rule as sole emperor – are among the many erroneous elaborations that Malalas (but not John of Antioch) added to Eustathius’ account. The main obstacle to accepting such conclusions seems to be the persistent but misplaced loyalty that many specialists in Malalas and John of Antioch feel to their chosen authors.

Eustathius, as transcribed by John of Antioch, was evidently the source of the passages that summarise Books 14–25 of Ammianus in John Zonaras’ twelfth-century Byzantine chronicle and in several other Byzantine histories. Moreover, Eustathius almost certainly summarised material from the lost Books 1–13 of Ammianus that is preserved by John of Antioch, Zonaras and others (see my paper in B. Outtier et al. [edd.], Armenia between Byzantium and the Orient [2020]). Eustathius, usually through John of Antioch, served later Byzantines from Procopius onwards as a major source of information about Roman history.

Even if a contribution on Eustathius might be too much to expect of this collection, the absence of extended discussions of Ammianus, Claudian, Eutropius, Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius I is rather disappointing. All (or nearly all) of these men seem to have been or become truly bilingual, and we know enough about them that we should be able to make plausible conjectures about how the Greek-speakers learned their Latin and the Latin-speakers learned their Greek. While the assumption in this volume appears to be that Ammianus and Claudian should be considered Westerners, both of them evidently had an excellent knowledge of Latin before they left Antioch and Alexandria. Eutropius, though certainly a Westerner, accompanied Julian on his invasion of Persia, served Valens as a senior secretary and proconsul of Asia, and was a friend of Libanius. For that matter, Procopius was a Palestinian with little knowledge of Latin literature but, perhaps because he had studied the law, seems to have had no trouble communicating with Africans and Italians during his campaigns with Belisarius. Although the emperors could of course rely on interpreters, the process by which the dynasties of Constantine, Theodosius, Justin and even Heraclius became Hellenised and the extent to which they retained their knowledge of Latin can presumably be clarified further than has been done thus far. More focused treatment of the study of Latin at Constantinople and at the law school at Beirut should also clarify where many Easterners acquired their Latin. Such topics may well be considered in a Volume II of Latin in Byzantium and would probably be of much more interest than further examination of the vestiges of Latin in the middle Byzantine period.

Outside the mainly Latin-speaking parts of Illyricum, the numbers and composition of the fairly small minority of Latin-speakers in the Eastern Empire obviously varied a great deal by time and place. We can reasonably conclude that after a gradual decrease up to the end of Justinian's reign the use of Latin fell off sharply and by the mid-seventh century nearly vanished. Latin was most commonly spoken and written at Constantinople and was used somewhat less at Antioch, which was the empire's virtual capital during much of the fourth century and still an important administrative centre later. Establishing much more than these broad generalisations would require surveying a large and scattered body of evidence in a way that is scarcely possible in a series of limited studies by different specialists. A scholar like Garcea, whose introductory essay shows a fine grasp of the evidence and the problems, should be encouraged to write a comprehensive study, with no more than one or two collaborators, of knowledge of the Latin language and Latin culture in the Eastern Roman Empire