This volume presents a collection of studies focusing on various topics related to the languages and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, especially on the so-called fragmentary corpus languages, which are given special attention among the different contributions. Some of the chapters started out as presentations at a 2016 conference held in Cambridge, but they have been integrated in an extremely coherent volume thanks to impeccable editorial work.
Ten essays, preceded by an introduction, are united under an ambitious title. Certainly, a lot of attention is paid to Greek and Latin (six chapters), whose speakers – native or otherwise – were particularly active and mobile ‘in and around’ the Mediterranean during the period under scrutiny (roughly, seventh century bce to third century ce, with the chapters ordered along this chronological line). However, the (Central and Eastern) Mediterranean serves rather as a general frame for displacements to and from the Italian peninsula, as the exploration of Italy's linguistic situation throughout antiquity lies at the heart of the book. This explains why the other languages covered in detail are Etruscan (D.F. Maras) and Oscan (Tagliapietra, K.W. Tikkanen and Zair), and also why the Mediterranean frame can be abandoned northwards to follow the displacement of Roman legions into Pannonia along the Amber Route (R. Mairs). Other geographical areas outside Italy are restricted to sites where Italians (alongside others) would pilgrim or trade, such as Delos (F. Rovai) or various locations in Egypt (James). As the editors put it, ‘the geographical focus of the first and last chapters is central Italy, while … the intervening chapters move the story to the south of Italy and then to Italians and others in the east’ (p. 22). This ‘happy outcome’ (ibid.) underscores Italy as the axial territory on which the volume's manifold migrants conduct their lives or the symbolic Ithaca to which they eventually return – as does the volume's cyclical narrative – after conducting their business elsewhere.
One might therefore wonder whether in and around ancient Italy would not have been a more appropriate locative for a volume where most of the Mediterranean is actually left unmentioned. Far more importantly, the book indeed honours the first part of its title: it is entirely about mobile individuals or groups and the traces they left in the form of documents in their own native languages, the languages of the communities where they integrated or with whom they merged, or a combination of both. It is, thus, a book about language contact, switching and even mixing in a significant portion of the ancient world throughout a whole millennium, and the authors have committed to identify, describe and analyse such unstable and often evasive situations out of the philological comfort zone of long-established corpora, fully-fledged texts and neatly delimited varieties. Their effort proves extremely rewarding, for two facts emerge as obvious from even a superficial reading: first, mobility, hence language contact, was more normal than exceptional in antiquity and was accepted quite naturally in the absence of the strong monolingual prescriptiveness characteristic of modern Europe; second, migration and linguistic contact in and around Italy took place constantly, and in many different geographical areas, from the earliest written attestations of Etruscan to the dawn of the Roman Empire. The volume as a whole thus advocates for a dynamic vision of language usage and variation that is increasingly breaking through in the field of historical linguistics.
One of the most original and genuine features of the volume is its ability to question the boundaries of historical linguistics. In fact, what at first sight appears to be a collection of linguistic studies reveals itself as a much more interesting exploration into the lives of the human beings who once spoke those languages. This ‘anthropocentric turn’ endows the studies in this volume with special insights beyond the usual scope of linguistic research, since, besides their contribution to linguistics (and all the chapters are relevant up-to-date pieces of linguistic scholarship), they propose pathways to trace back people's stories across the material evidence on which those contributions are based.
The book has plenty of such stories, and obviously not all of them can be summarised in this review, but for the sake of illustration it is worth noting one or two of them. For instance, the story of Plator, the Oscan vase painter who decided to sign his work in a bilingual format, including Oscan (πλατωρ ουψε) and Greek (πλάτωρ ἐποί[η]σε). K. MacDonald and Clackson (pp. 84–6) revisit in their chapter the use of both languages in the signatures of paintings and ceramics from Southern Italy and offer different explanations, beyond the mere constatation of the mobility of craftsmen. By signing the plate in both languages, Plator is not necessarily aiming at exporting his goods to the outer Hellenic world; he is probably appealing to the local Hellenised elite by offering ceramics that appear intended for Greek speakers.
One of the most interesting stories is that of Quintus Atilius Primus, an interpreter and mediator from the Danubian area in the early second century ce (Mairs). A thorough and accurate analysis of the epitaph of this retired centurion allows Mairs to question the consideration of such interpretes from the Pannonian area as a mobile population. Provided that many of the military population arrived as migrants alongside legions – Q. Atilius is probably of Northern Italian origin –, the familial links mentioned in the epigraph suggest a stable situation and a high integration of the Roman interpreter and centurion into the local community, instead of the itinerant condition that one might assume at first glance.
Similar instances could be multiplied. Meet the eparchos Gaius Iulius Papeis, a visitor to the temple of Isis at Philae, whose tria nomina, together with the names of his sons, reveal a Greek-speaking Egyptian with Roman citizenship (James, pp. 248–50). There is the haruspex Laris Pulenas, a descendant of a Greek immigrant linguistically (and hence socially), naturalised via an Etruscan praenomen and the use of the suffix -na to form a local gentilicium (Maras, pp. 33–4). Enter Nerius, a Roman actor at Delos, and Augias, the Greek attendant who took the pain to inscribe a laudatory or imprecatory graffito in Roman characters that reveals (through the form uneo for unio) his exposition to a non-urban, probably Praenestine variety of Latin (Rovai, pp. 187–92). All these studies are based on careful examination of onomastic sources, and a manual on onomastic methodology and good practice could be extracted from the rich observations contained in these chapters (cf. e.g. McDonald/Clackson's remarks on ‘onomastic phallacy’, pp. 77–9, James's notes on ethnonyms as evidence, pp. 236–7, or Maras's careful classification of Etruscan nomenclature). Most significantly, such recurrent instances of individual migrants adapting to non-native languages while at the same time disclosing their own linguistic or ethnic personality, constitute a most appealing form of bringing to the reader a lively depiction of multilingualism at the level of micro-exchanges in the ancient world, a hazardous region of research where no one can venture without an accomplished expertise in different fields. This is historical sociolinguistics at its best, delving deep into particular historical contexts, social networks and communicative needs that determine a flexible and multifarious linguistic usage far beyond pre-established categorisations.
Another remarkable achievement, which stands as a methodological claim of its own, of the studies presented is the successful combination of literary and material sources in the proposed analysis. In particular the chapters by E. Isayev, based on the Plautine comedies, and Zair, about the Mamertine soldiers, stand out for their relevant use of literary texts in combination with archaeological sources in order to shed light on the mobility of people in ancient Italy, showing the benefits of a multi-source approach to ancient communication, especially in not so well-documented languages.
Not only languages, but also the cultural practices that represent them may travel and adapt. A very cogent double example of this is provided with regard to Oscan, preserved by migrants into southern Italy in a Greek script that poses many challenges to phonetic (particularly vocalic) interpretation (Tagliapietra), but also in an Etruscan alphabet with Greek elements (for voiced plosives) employed by Oscan-speaking groups in Campania, which seems to have come into existence as the Samnites moved into the area in the late fourth century bce (Tikkanen). These two chapters conduct unprecedented in-depth analyses of both systems to show similar difficulties and efforts in fitting a native variety into the bed of Procrustes of an originally alien set of signs.
The authors do not make it a priority to discuss aspects of the theory of language change, language contact or language variation overall, and any readers hoping for the now common ‘theory presides data’ approach will find themselves somewhat at a loss. This does not mean readers will not be confronted with seriously structured considerations on such subjects, from McDonald/Clackson's observations on dialect mixing and accommodation (pp. 90–6) to the ‘linguistic landscape’ methodology of O. Elder's enquiry into the extant epigraphic records of migrants to Rome (pp. 282–90), through Rovai's vision of contact as involving not just linguistic systems, but complex dia-systems in which different sociolectal or dialectal layers contribute their own elements, which can, in turn, change status via contact, to name but a few salient examples. In most cases, current theoretical debate is subtly integrated into the discussion of the examples at stake, and a substantial reflection can often be found hovering at the loose end of a paragraph (e.g. p. 89 on the Greek alphabet ‘as a mode of communication across language barriers’) or encapsulated in a footnote (e.g. pp. 186–7 on koiné).
In sum, this is not only a book about Oscan and Etruscan, Greek and Latin; it is about Mamertine soldiers, Pannonian translators, Italian potters: individuals as well as groups and entire populations are on display, moving back and forth in and around Italy in a Mediterranean context, which was much more dynamic and fluid than we usually imagine. It is also a deeply philological book, one that privileges finely conducted textual and contextual hermeneutics over pretended ‘theoretical’ novelty. As such, it certainly demands a certain amount of Nietzschean effort from readers to peruse it ‘mit zarten Fingern und Augen’ and absorb its rich information and many findings slowly, without much explicit guidance from the authors and sometimes between the (footnote) lines. The benefits of its reading are definitely worth the effort, and we can only hope this will be the first volume of many to come, for we feel, with the editors (p. 21), that linguistics has far more to offer to the study of mobility and migration than it hitherto has.
