The papers in this volume arise from a conference held in Rome in 2019 at the launch of a three-year funded HERA project on Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe. As the editors state in the short preface, the papers are noteworthy for ‘the inhomogeneity of the linguistic / cultural situations examined, and of the different types of modern approach to them’ (p. viii). Indeed, not all the papers even fall within the broad brief of the title, with M. Janse and J. Vandewalle’s contribution dealing with Turkish influence on the Cappadocian variety of modern Greek. Many, but not all, papers are devoted to issues relating to Greek in contact with other languages, and most are concerned in some way with epigraphic texts or corpora.
The two stand-out contributions are co-incidentally both studies of contact between Sicilian Greek and Latin. Cassio considers the similarity between forms such as Syracusan Greek ἑξᾶς ‘sixth part of a litra’ and Latin sextans ‘sixth part (of an as, or weight or measure)’, and M. Weiss writes on the Sicilian Greek for ‘ounce’ ὀγκία and the corresponding Latin term uncia. Both Cassio and Weiss argue against the communis opinio (as reflected in E. Dickey, Latin Loanwords in Ancient Greek: A Lexicon and Analysis [2023], unfortunately published too late for the contributors to this volume) that the Greek words in these equations are borrowings from or influenced by Latin or another Italic language, in line with the colonists’ adoption of an Italian, or perhaps even Sicilian, measurement system. Instead, they propose that the loans went in the other direction: the suffix -ans (and its variant in triens ‘third part’) is a Latin adaptation of Doric Greek -ᾶς, -ᾶντος, which may have stood originally to mark a short form of compounds such as ἑξαμερής ‘having six parts’ (a suggestion that Cassio credits to the late A. Morpurgo Davies); and uncia is a Latin adaption of a Greek derived adjective of the noun ὄγκος, which Weiss takes to have originally meant ‘capacity’ or ‘volume’ after examining both its textual attestations and etymology.
It is worth pausing to consider the implications if both Cassio and Weiss are correct. Latin has demonstrably borrowed terms relating to coinage from Greek: mina and dracuma are straightforward direct borrowings, and nummus ‘coin, money’ (also attested with the same meaning in Umbrian numer) seems to be related to νόμος, which had the meaning ‘coin, money’ in the Greek of Sicily and Southern Italy, although the details are obscure. Greek λίτρα, however, which originally seems to have denoted a weight of bronze used as money in Sicily, cannot be the source of Latin libra, and the usual explanation is that both words are borrowed from a third language, perhaps the indigenous language of Sicily known as Sicel. As O. Simkin pointed out (‘Coins and Language in Ancient Sicily’, in: O. Tribulato [ed.], Language and Linguistic Contact in Ancient Sicily [2012], pp. 162–88, at 174) in contrast to the other borrowed coin terms, in both Latin and Greek libra / uncia and λίτρα / ὀγκία function as a pair, with the larger value composed of twelve parts of the smaller value; for Weiss’s loanword hypothesis to work one would have to imagine a scenario by which the Greeks borrowed first the word λίτρα, then devised their own term for the twelfth part (following local practice), which the Romans then took over independently. It seems easier to assume, with Simkin, that the ancestral terms for both the pound and the ounce evolved together in an Italic language in mainland Italy at the same time as the first Iron Age ‘proto-coinage’.
Four other papers in the volume touch on matters to do with the Greeks in Italy or the languages of the aboriginal Italians. Kaczko notes a late fifth-century bce pelike of Lucanian manufacture found near Heraclea, which bears the legend Ποσδαν next to a depiction of the sea god. She takes this to be a native Italic rendering of the Greek name, prefiguring the development of the place name Posidonia to Paestum. It should be noted that it is also possible that this is an ‘abbreviated writing’, where the vase-painter has used the sign <S> to stand for the syllable σει or σι. M. Mancini writes at length on the etymology of the recently discovered Oscan word pukam, which must mean something like ‘image’. Messapic inscriptions are the subject of papers by S. Marchesini and M. Lombardo & G. Boffa: Lombardo & Boffa discuss a column with an abecedarium and three fragmentary lines, and Marchesini treats a text from the Grotta della Poesia, a maritime cave sanctuary on the Strait of Otranto. Both articles include photographs from inside the Grotta della Poesia, an extraordinarily rich epigraphic site with more than 900 unpublished inscriptions, in Latin and Greek as well as Messapic; the editors explain in the preface that the HERA project allowed the acquisition of 3D images of the inscriptions, and it is hoped that they will soon be published.
Three papers consider the contact situations in Northern Greece and the Balkans between Greek and local languages. E. Crespo tracks the changing dialects featured in inscriptions and Orphic lamellae from the Kingdom of Macedon, showing the complex interplay between different dialects before their eventual replacement by koiné. In Aegean Thrace, as P. Guijarro Ruano shows, there is less dialectal variation before the rise of the koiné, with a greater presence of Attic, although it is possible to find traces of Ionic. P. Filos pays particular attention to naming conventions and onomastic elements in his excellent study of epigraphic texts from North Epirus and South Illyria, which are in Greek but sometimes feature Illyrian names. Filos’s careful analysis shows interesting variations in the data. For example, in Epidamnos (known as Dyrrhachium during the Roman period) the epigraphy indicates that females continued to use local names longer than men, as elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean, but in Apollonia, where proportionately fewer women are commemorated in inscriptions, they almost always bear Greek names and Greek patronymics.
Finally, there are several papers on various themes. I have already mentioned Janse and Vandewalle’s paper on the Cappadocian Greek verb παιρπαίνω ‘take away’ (a combination of παίρω ‘take’ and παίνω ‘go’), which seems to be formed on the pattern of Turkish compound verbs. L. Alfieri takes us to late antiquity, considering two different methods ancient grammarians used to categorise what modern linguists would term nominal derivatives, denoted by the labels divisio latina and divisio graeca. Alfieri shows the continued dialogue between Greek-speaking and Latin-speaking grammarians and their place in the history of linguistics. The Greek of the gospels is the object of the contribution by F. Logozzo and L. Tronci, who consider clauses where a verb of motion or posture is combined with a second verb indicating a specific event or action. The authors add detailed figures to confirm Turner’s observation that Matthew, Mark and Luke employ a participle of the motion or posture verb whereas John generally has parataxis; for conjoined imperatives parataxis is the norm. Finally, C. Bruno gives a detailed and lucid account of the language of dream narratives preserved on second-century bce papyri found in the Memphis Serapeum. A certain Ptolemaios records the dreamers’ experiences using the verb οἴομαι rather than usual δοκέω. As Bruno notes, this may reflect influence of an Egyptian construction, although her interest is more in the use of complementation patterns that may be indicative of changes in Greek syntax.
Overall, the volume is well produced with only minor misprints. There is a short and selective index, which misses a number of things (including all of Filos’s paper and most of Weiss’s). Accordingly, the individual papers are more valuable than the volume as a collection.
