Vtroque sermone nostro, the main title of this (appropriately multilingual) collection, is a quotation from the emperor Claudius who, according to Suetonius (Claud. 42.2), expressed his surprise at the fact that a ‘barbarian’ was fluent in Greek as well as in Latin. By referring to these as ‘both our languages’, Claudius acknowledged the prevailing bilingualism in the Roman Empire, even though he lost no opportunity to declare his preference for the Greek language and its superiority. Greek–Latin bilingualism was epitomised in another set phrase utraque lingua, attested many times in Latin literature and used as the main title of recent works dealing with Greek–Latin bilingualism, for example C. Nicolas (1996) and T. Fögen (2003). The relation between East and West in the Roman Empire is the central idea behind the research project GRAECAPTA of the University of Navarra. The present volume collects revisions of eight papers presented at an international workshop in Pamplona (2009). The original title of the workshop was Vtraque lingua but changed to Vtroque sermone nostro for the published collection. Contributions are in English, Spanish, French and German, but Spanish and English abstracts are provided at the end of the volume, which also has an index rerum ac nominum and an index locorum.

The volume opens with a brief introduction by T.G. with the punning title ‘Imperialis diglossia’. The majority of the papers deal with social and literary aspects of Greek–Roman biculturalism. Two are devoted to Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae. In ‘La simbiosis greco-romana en el siglo II: Las Noctes Atticae’, C. Castillo discusses aspects of the cultural life of the Antonine period on the basis of ‘los amigos de Gelio’, particularly the use of Greek as a ‘genre language’ in the philosophical and medical discourse of Arrian and Favorinus. F. García Jurado analyses Gellius' conception of litterae Graecae et Latinae in ‘Qué entiende Aulo Gellio por “literatura griega” y “literatura latina”?’. He concludes that Gellius advocates ‘una visión acumulativa de la literatura’, based on parameters which are partly language-independent such as the distinction between classici (Latini) and idonei (Graeci), poetae recentes et ueteres and patria lingua et electa. T.G. studies the ‘Roman Elements in Annaeus Cornutus's ἐπιδρομή’. Elements betraying the ‘Romanness’ of Cornutus include the use of Δεύς instead of Ζεύς and θρίαμβος in the sense of triumphus, and the attribution of a common ritual to Dionysus and Aphrodite on the analogy of the Roman Bacchanalia. M. Hose considers the Roman histories of Appian and Ammianus Marcellinus as ‘beachtenswerte Zeugnisse für einen erfolgreichen Akkulturations geschichte’ in ‘Appian und Ammian: Griechisches historisches Denken in zwei Sprachen’. He discusses the techniques used by Appian to create a ‘gemeinsame Reichsgeschichte’ with which both Greeks and Romans could identify. Ammianus' use of exempla from both Greek and Roman history is considered indicative of the fact that the unification of the Empire had been achieved by the fourth century. The article contains an interesting analysis of Ammianus' frequent use of proverbs and proverbial expressions, which are said to derive from both Greek and Latin sources in the main text, but claimed to be ‘part of the Greek cultural tradition’ in the abstract. Á. Sánchez-Ostiz explores Juvenal's influence on Claudian in ‘Reading Juvenal: Roman Satire in Claudianus's Invectives against Rufinus and Eutropius’. He focusses on Claudian's imitation of expositional structures used by Juvenal and argues at length that Claudian must have used a text pre-dating the so-called ‘Nicaeus emendation’.

The remaining papers present a more linguistic perspective on questions of bilingualism. In ‘Le bilinguisme et la politique linguistique des empereurs romains sous le principat’ B. Rochette analyses the use of Greek and Latin in official documents during the Principate. Following an overview of the ‘balanced bilingualism’ of emperors like Claudius, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius as opposed to the ‘dominant bilingualism’ of the likes of Augustus, he discusses the use of both languages in various imperial constitutions. Whereas the bilingual publication of official texts was exceptional, the choice for Greek or Latin depended on three factors: the nature of the document, the geographical region to which the constitution pertained and the language of the addressee. This last factor is particularly evident in the case of official letters, for which the emperor availed himself of two separate offices: ab epistulis Graecis and ab epistulis Latinis. For the imperial constitutions, unless they had universal application, the choice was dictated by the geographical region to which they applied. Rochette discusses several edicta, decreta and mandata, written directly in Greek or translated from a Latin original, pertaining to cities or regions in the eastern provinces. Special attention is devoted to the ‘translation Greek’ of the so-called ἀποκρίματα of Septimius Severus (P. Col. VI 123), published in Alexandria and written in Greek, very likely on the basis of a Latin original because of their legal content. L. Rodríguez-Noriega Guillén, ‘Greek and Latin in the Late Second and Early Third Centuries ce: Athenaeus of Naucratis and Claudius Aelian’, discusses aspects of bilingualism such as borrowing and code-switching. In the first part, she identifies possible signs of knowledge of Latin as a spoken language in Athenaeus' Δεινποσοϕισταί. She distinguishes between loanwords and instances of ‘intrasentential code-switching’, the latter often accompanied by a metalinguistic reference to the spoken language, for example δηκόκτα / decocta, III 121E–122A. She also identifies cases of ‘Roman Greek’ defined as ‘terms which, despite being Greek both in etymology and formation, are not considered to be Greek, but explicitly assigned to the language of the Romans’, for example καλλιστρούθια / callistruthia, III 75E. In the second part, she reviews some possible interferences of Latin in Aelian's Greek.

In ‘Bilingualism in the Pseudo-Epigraphical Correspondence between Seneca and Paul’ I.L.E. Ramelli rejects the traditional thesis that the correspondence between Seneca and Paul was originally written in Greek and clumsily translated into Latin by a ‘Medieval barbarian’. The question is, of course, why the correspondence should have been written in Latin rather than in Greek, given Seneca's ‘balanced’ as opposed to Paul's ‘dominant’ bilingualism. Assuming that Paul wanted to practise his Latin for missionary purposes during his stay in Rome, Ramelli goes on to explain some alleged Graecisms in his part of the correspondence: lexical, syntactical and ‘obscure and awkward sentences’. These are said to be typical of ‘a person who thinks in Greek’ or, alternatively, ‘a person who does not think in Latin’ (p. 35). Her conclusion is that Paul, ‘who thought in Greek’, ‘had to write in Latin’ and, ‘knowing it very little … transposed Greek terms and constructs into it’ (p. 34). I am not convinced by Ramelli's argumentation. Among the lexical Graecisms, for instance, sophia is mentioned as a ‘manifest loanword from Greek … employed in Letter XIV instead of Latin sapientia’ (p. 32). Sophia is, of course, unquestionably a Greek loanword, but why should Paul have avoided it since it is acknowledged to be ‘pivotal in Paul's thought, especially in the Epistles to the Romans and the Corinthians’ (ibid.). In a footnote on the same page, Ramelli quotes Paul's addressee Seneca who asserts: Sapientia est quam Graeci σοφίαν uocant. Hoc uerbo quoque Romani utuntur (Ep. 89). The syntactical Graecisms are said to be ‘even more revealing, in that a forger would have needed much more competence and subtlety to reproduce such details, to an extent that seems almost unthinkable’ (p. 32). The ‘translation Greek’ of the Septuagint, as well as the ‘translation Latin’ of the Vetus Latina should warn us against drawing such conclusions. In her overzealous effort to prove the originality of the correspondence, Ramelli seems to have ignored systematically all the elements that could point in the opposite direction (including the possibility that Paul's letters might have been translated at the time of their composition).