Heikki Solin

On the Use of Greeek in Campania

(in «Variation and Change in Greek and Latin» a cura di M. Leiwo, H. Halla-aho e M. Vierros, Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at Athens, vol. XVII, Helsinki 2012, pp. 97-114

The present article examines the use of Greek and Latin in Campania. This is a topic which offers many interpretative challenges, whilst also providing valuable insights into historical, demographic and sociolinguistic research. Thus far, this topic has not been the subject of comprehensive research. Martti Leiwo has made a promising start with Neapolitana (1995a), but Naples is a different matter, as it is a city that remained substantially Greek for a much longer period than any other major early Greek settlement in Magna Graecia. Additionally, Leiwo’s analysis suffers from a certain lack of material completeness in demographic and onomastic matters. These issues, however, can now be dealt with in a better way thanks to the recent publication of the corpus of the Greek inscriptions of Naples by Elena Miranda. Hopefully Leiwo will resume his study on Naples on the basis of Miranda’s excellent new corpus.

It is very difficult, in the absence of comprehensive source material, to trace an exact history of the language shift from Greek or Oscan to Latin in different parts of Campania. When inscriptions begin to increase in number during the Imperial period, Latin (for the most part) already had the upper hand as the language of inscriptions.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to get an exact picture of how the evolution took place. Even in Naples it has proven impossible to fix the exact chronology of language-use at different levels of civil life and society. The fact that there are lots of inscriptions from the Imperial period, especially public inscriptions written in Greek (or bilingual inscriptions), does not prove that the majority of the city spoke Greek as their native language. Also, in certain cases, the use of Greek in an old Greek centre in the Imperial period should not be taken as proof of a concrete preponderance of Greek in that region. Velia, the early Greek Phocaean colony of Elea, was the home of Parmenides and his school. It was conquered by Rome in 90 BC and became a municipium in 89 BC. It became fashionable as a resort spa in the Augustan period, and is supposed to have retained its Greek culture until the st century AD and to have hosted a medical school (where Greek should have been the central means of communication). This old theory has, however, been discredited and is no longer tenable. Excavations at Velia have produced, among other interesting finds, several statues with Greek inscriptions of the type Οὖλις Εὐξίνου Ὑελήτης ἰατρὸς φώλαρχος ἔτει τοθ’, ‘Oulis son of Euxinus from Velia, doctor and pholarchos, year 79’ (SEG XXXVIII 0 0 = Vecchio 00 , 86–96), which may have been engraved around AD 0, but the persons recorded in them belong to much earlier periods. It is important to note that Velia, at this time (i.e. AD 0), was merely a village with a very small population and the number of inscriptions from the site is minimal. So, what can we say about the language-use of the few inhabitants of the village (in summer, the presence of Roman holiday makers rendered the spa almost entirely Latin-speaking)?

Another difficulty lies in the fact that the language of an inscription and the language of the person involved in the raising of the inscription do not always coincide.

That is to say, the author of a Latin inscription could be a native speaker of Greek or of another foreign language and vice versa, a Greek inscription could have been raised by a ‘proper’ Roman. This holds true for Rome, and perhaps even more so for Campania, where old Greek cultural traditions could also favour the use of Greek in a document produced by a Latin-speaking person or in a Latin-speaking environment...

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