DESCRIPCIÓN DEL NEGOCIO

Eleanor Dickey

When we think of ancient Latin teaching, we tend to think of little Roman children reading Latin poetry and learning about rhetoric in schools where everyone was a native speaker of Latin.¹Such ancient schools seem utterly different from modern Latin teaching, which since it is always directed at non-native speakers has to concentrate most of its efforts on building basic language skills that Roman children had already acquired before they were old enough to go to school.

Yet not all Latin learners in the ancient world were native speakers: as the Romans conquered other peoples their language spread rapidly around the Mediterranean. The learning of Latin by these other peoples took place in different ways in the various parts of the empire. In the west, entire populations shifted to become Latin speakers: men and women who had grown up speaking Oscan or Gaulish raised their children speaking Latin, and their own native languages died out. In such areas any large-scale non-native-speaker Latin teaching could have occurred only before the shift was complete, for once the non-Roman populations became native Latin speakers the need for teaching geared to non-native speakers would have disappeared.

In the east, by contrast, populations conquered by the Romans did not switch to Latin and instead relied primarily on Greek. Greek was of course not the original language of this whole area, having been imported into most of it by Alexander and his successors, and indeed many people in the eastern empire were not native speakers of Greek. Nevertheless, when populations in the east gave up their native languages and switched to another language for raising their children, the language to which they switched was usually Greek rather than Latin, and therefore native speakers of Latin continued to be relatively rare in that portion of the world.

1 I am grateful to Daniela Colomo, Rolando Ferri, Anna Morpurgo Davies, Siam Bhayro, Philomen Probert, and Jim Adams for assistance with this project.

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Nevertheless, knowledge of Latin as a second language was not uncommon among Greek speakers during the empire (cf. Rochette1997; Rizakis2008). The Roman army, a common path to citizenship and social advancement, was a major source of Latin learning for recruits from the eastern empire and may even have conducted organized Latin classes for these recruits (Adams 2003a: 617–21). The Roman legal system was another source of such learning; prospective lawyers needed to know Latin and for this reason major universities in the east, such as Beirut, offered lectures from professors of Latin. The higher levels of the Roman provin-cial administration were also Latin-speaking, and of course anyone who travelled to the western empire, or interacted regularly with merchants or other travellers from the west, wouldfind Latin useful. The result was that systematic, organized teaching of Latin as a foreign language was far more common in the east than in the west.

How was this teaching conducted? What was the experience of the ancient Latin learner? Our evidence on this point comes principally from Egypt, where numerous papyrus fragments preserve the texts that ancient students used to learn Latin. These texts fall into several distinct groups:

transliterated texts geared strictly to oral proficiency; elementary materials for those attaining literacy in the Roman alphabet; and more advanced texts. Most of them have been studied individually,² but we have little sense of how the different kinds of text fitted together in the ancient curriculum. In what follows I attempt to pull together the information we have about different types of Latin-learning materials and suggest how they complemented each other and what kind of learning experience they gave the ancient Latin student.

Berlitz Latin for Travellers: transliterated texts

A significant number of preserved Latin learning materials have the Latin transliterated into Greek script.³ These texts resemble the phrase books that English speakers sometimes use to get around on short trips to Russia,

2 There has been extensive work on the glossaries (e.g. Kramer1983,2001,2004; Dickey2010a), on the bilingual Virgil and Cicero materials (e.g. Gaebel1970; Maehler1979; Rochette1990; Scappaticcio 2013), and on the Hermeneumata (e.g. Dionisotti1982a; Korhonen1996; Ferri2008; Dickey2012), but much less on the grammatical material (though Bonnet2005provides discussion as well as a text and translation of Dositheus) and the annotated literary texts (though McNamee2007is very helpful). Rochette (1997: 165–210) offers a useful overview of much of the material. For a complete list of the surviving ancient Latin-learning materials, see Dickey2012: 7–10.

3 More than a dozen papyri, including numbers 1, 5–9, 11–13, and 15 in Kramer1983and numbers 3, 6, and 7 in Kramer2001.

China, or another country where a non-Roman alphabet is used; they were clearly designed for use by people literate in Greek who needed some oral proficiency in Latin but did not want to invest time and energy in learning a different alphabet. The transliterated texts are most often classified vocabulary lists; just as a modern Berlitz phrase book might have sections on airport vocabulary, hotel vocabulary, and restaurant vocabulary, so its ancient equivalents might have sections on army vocabulary, religious vocabulary, and terms for different vegetables. Example 1 is an extract from such a classified vocabulary list, from the beginning of a section on military vocabulary; the Greek terms are on the left and the Latin on the right.⁴

1.

(P.Strasb.inv. g 1173 (M-P³2134.61, LDAB 9218),⁶i i i – i v c e, ed. Kramer2001: no. 6, lines 24–34)

Another standard feature of a modern phrase book is a conversational section giving the basic greetings and other phrases necessary for having civil interaction with speakers of the other language. Such works also existed in antiquity; example 2 is an extract from the Latin and Greek sections of a trilingual conversation manual. This work now survives in three columns: Latin on the left (in Greek script), Greek in the middle,

[περ]ι στρ[ατιωτων] δη μι ̣[λιτι]βους About soldiers:

[στ]ρατι[α] μιλ[ιτι]α warfare

παρε[μβολη] καστρα camp

ταφρ[ος] φοσσα ditch

ηγεμ[ων] δουξ leader

αυτοκ[ρ]α ̣τωρ ι ̣μπερατωρ emperor

χιλια ̣ρ ̣χος τριβουνους μελιτου ̣μ military tribune στρατοπ̣εδαρχης φρενεκτους κα[στ]ρωρου[μ] camp prefect⁵

πρωροσ̣τ ̣ατης πρινκιψ commander

σκηναι ταβερνακουλα commander’s tent

στρατοπ̣αιδον εξερκιτους army

4 In transcriptions of papyri, dots under letters indicate that only part of the letter is preserved, square brackets indicate letters no longer visible on the papyrus but presumed to have originally been present, and round brackets indicate expansion of abbreviations.

5 Surprisingly,φρενεκτους is for Latin praefectus. This is not the place to discuss the spellings of the transliterated Latin and how much they can tell us about the evolution of spoken Latin in the later empire, but much has been written on this important aspect of these texts; see Adams (2003a: 40–63) and the commentaries by Kramer (1983,2001).

6 Because papyri are often difficult to identify precisely, for all papyri quoted I shall give both the number in the Mertens-Pack database of literary papyri (M-P³) and the number in the Leuven database of ancient books (LDAB); the former database can be found atwww2.ulg.ac.be/facphl/

services/cedopal/pages/mp3anglais.htmand the latter atwww.trismegistos.org/ldab/index.php.

and Coptic on the right. The Coptic seems to be a translation of the Greek, and it is thought that the work was probably adapted from a bilingual manual by the addition of the Coptic column for the benefit of Copts whose Greek was not up to learning Latin through the medium of Greek. The columns are very narrow, containing only one to three words per line and thereby causing individual phrases to be divided between two or more lines; on each line the Greek exactly matches the Latin. This type of layout was the norm in ancient phrase books. It has the advantage of allowing the reader to understand each component of the phrase and thereby to modify it if necessary.

2.

(P.Berol.inv. 10582 (M-P³3009, LDAB 6075), vi ce, ed. Kramer2010: lines 42–64. Diacritics are original but punctuation editorial.)

Another feature of the transliterated texts is grammatical information.

Greek speakers, being used to an inflected language with even more verb forms than Latin, were not frightened by the concept of foreign inflections.

Even learners who did not want to read and write felt a need to know some grammar, as illustrated by the alphabetically ordered verb conjugation table in transliterated Latin given asexample 3.⁷

σερ ̣μ ̣ω ομι ̣λια Daily conversation:

κω[τιδια]νους· καθημερινη·

κοι̇δ φακιμου ̣ς ̣, τι ποιουμεν, What (shall) we do,

φρα[τε]ρ; αδελφε; brother?

[λι]βεντε]ρ τη ηδεως σε I am glad

βιδεω. ορω. to see you.

ετ εγω δη, καγω σε, And I (am glad to see) you,

δομ ̣ι ̣νε. δεσποτα. sir.

ετ νως και ημεις And we (are glad to see)

βως. ημας. you (plural).

νεσκ[ιω] ουκ οιδα Someone

κοις τις

οστιουμ την θυραν is knocking on the door;

πουλσατ· κρουρει·

εξιε ̣ιτο εξελθη go

κιτω φορας ταχεως εξω quickly outside

ετ δισκε και μαθε andfind out

[κο]ις εστ. τ ̣ι ̣ς ̣[εσ]τιν. who it is.

7 Morgan (1998: 162–9) has argued that the ancients did not use grammatical tables as a part of basic language instruction, but this view is difficult to reconcile with the existence of documents such as this one and that inexample 7. Such evidence clearly indicates that Greek speakers learning Latin did

3.

(P.Strasb.inv. g 1175 (M-P³2134.71, LDAB 9217), iii–iv ce, ed. Kramer2001: no. 3, lines 3–11, 60–2, 72–7)

This table shows a good knowledge of both Latin and Greek idiom. Verbs in both languages are given in the tense and voice that would actually be used, even if those do not match each other: thus Latin novit is correctly given in the perfect as the equivalent of the Greek presentγι(γ)νώσκει, and salutat is correctly active as the equivalent of the Greek middleἀσπάζεται, while nascitur is correctly deponent. At the same time, the table is unusual in a number of ways: it has only singular verbs, and it presents the forms in the order third person, second person, first person. In both Greek and Latin grammar the normal order is first person, second person, third person, but in Semitic languages it is traditional to start with the third person singular.⁸It is possible that this text was designed by, or designed to be used by, someone whose main education had been in a Semitic language (Aramaic?) rather than in Greek– though the writer must have been literate in Greek as well.

ασπ̣αζεται σαλουτατ he greets ασπαζεις σαλουτας you greet ασπαζομαι ̣ σαλουτω I greet βασιλ[ε]υ[ει] ρηγνατ he rules βασ̣ιλ[ε]υ[εις] [ρ]ηγνας you rule βασιλευ[ω] ρ ̣ηγνω I rule βα[σ]ανι[ζει] τορκ[ε]τ ̣ he tortures βασανι[ζει]ς τορκες you torture βασαν[ιζ]ω τορκεω . . . I torture

γινωσκει νοουιτ he knows

γινωσκεις νοουις you know

γινωσκω νωουι . . . I know γηρασκει σ[ε]νησκιτ he grows old γηρασκεις σενησκ ̣ις you grow old γηρασκω σ[ε]νησκω I grow old γενναται ν[α]σκιτουρ he is born γεννασαι νασκαιρης you are born

γεννωμαι ν[ασκορ] I am born

use grammatical tables, even at a stage when they were not yet learning the alphabet. See also Rochette1997: 179–81.

8 Personal communication from Siam Bhayro.

Elementary Latin literacy

The number of transliterated texts could give the impression that Egyptian Greek speakers were only interested in oral proficiency in Latin and never learned to read it, but such was not the case. The majority of Latin-learning papyrus texts have the Latin in its own alphabet, and a number of fragments show how Greek speakers learned that alphabet. The teacher would write out the new alphabet, either in capitals or both in capital and in lower-case forms, and the student would then copy it out repeatedly; students also copied out one or two lines of verse to help them learn to use the letters in context.⁹

Example 4 shows such a learner’s alphabet and line of verse (Virgil, Aeneid 4.129); someone (one hopes it was the student rather than the teacher) has written Greek equivalents over the Latin letters but made the mistake of equating Greekη (a vowel) with Latin h (a consonant).

4.

[Oceanum inter]ea surgenhsi Aurora [reliquit]

(P.Oxy. 10.1315 (M-P³3013, LDAB 4163), v–vi ce, ed. Kramer2001: no. 2) The student also learned the Latin letter names; an alternative way of learning the alphabet was to write these over the Latin letters in Greek script, as inexample 5.¹⁰

5.

(O.Max. 356 (M-P³3012.01, LDAB 10791), i–ii ce, ed. Cuvigny2003: 445) Once the ancient Latin student had learned the alphabet, he (or perhaps she?) needed the same basic materials as a modern student: some grammar, some vocabulary, and a text to read. All these types of material have been found both

]γη ῾ ι κα ιλ μ εν ω πη κου ρ ες τη ου ξη

]G H I K L M N O P Q R S T U X Y Z

[α β κ δ] ε φ γ η ι κ λ[

[A] B C D E F G H I [K L]

]V X Y Z

[α β] κ δ ε φ κ η ι κ[

a b c d e f g h [i] k l m n o p q r[

9 Clarysse and Rochette (2005: 75) propose a different system of alphabet learning, but their arguments have been refuted by Feissel (2008).

10 The most famous example of the writing of Latin letter names in this fashion is P.Ant. 1 fr. 1 verso (¼ Kramer1999,2001: no. 1). But because this example occurs in a shorthand manual, it is not clear that it was a teaching tool.

on papyrus and in medieval manuscripts whose contents are likely to be ancient.

Example 6comes from a manuscript copied around 900 ce, but the material in it is certainly ancient, because part of this text has also been recovered on papyrus (see Dickey and Ferri2012). It is an extract from the Colloquium Harleianum, one of a group of six colloquia that contain dialogues and narration of scenes from everyday life. In medieval manuscripts the collo-quia are part of a body of bilingual language teaching materials known as the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (because in some manuscripts they are attached to the grammar of Dositheus, for which see below, though they were not composed by Dositheus). In the medieval west the Hermeneumata collection was used as a unit to teach Greek to Latin speakers, but the different elements of which it is made up were probably separately com-posed, and many of them were originally created in antiquity for teaching Latin to Greek speakers.¹¹The colloquia include descriptions of getting up in the morning, going to school, having lunch, visiting friends, banking, shopping, going to court, trips to the public baths, dinner parties, and finally going to bed in the evening; they also contain collections of phrases to use in various situations, such as when engaged in a brawl, dealing with a recalcitrant servant, excusing oneself for not having done something, etc.

6. Χαῖρε, Ave,

κύριε domine

διδάσκαλε, praeceptor,

καλῶς σοι bene tibi

γένοιτο. sit.

ἀπὸ σήμερον ab hodie

φιλοπονεῖν studere

θέλω. volo.

ἐρωτῶ σε οὖν, rogo te ergo, hδίδαξόν μεi Ῥωμαϊστὶ hdoce mei Latine

λαλhεiῖν. loqui.

Διδάσκω σε, Doceo te,

ἐάν με πρόhσiσχῃς. si me attendas.

Ἰδού, προσέχω. Ecce, attendo.

καλῶς εἶπας, Bene dixisti,

ὡς πρέπει ut decet

τῇ εὐγενείᾳ σου. ingenuitatem tuam.

ἐπίδος μοι, παῖ, porrige mihi, puer, τὸ ἀναλογεῖον. manuale.

11 On the nature and history of the Hermeneumata see Dickey2012: 16–44, Korhonen1996, Dionisotti 1982a, and Goetz et al.1888–1923: vols. 1 and 3.

(Colloquium Harleianum 4a–5d, ed. Dickey forthcoming. Diacritcs and punctuation are editorial.)

“Hello, sir teacher! May (all) be well for you. From today I want to work hard. So please teach me to speak Latin.” “I (shall) teach you, if you pay attention to me.”

“Look, I’m paying attention.” “You have spoken well, as befits your good birth.

Boy, hand me the book-stand. So, quickly hand (me) the book, turn (to the right page), read aloud, open your mouth, count. Now mark the place well, so that you may write an exercise.”

These colloquia have short sentences, simple syntax, and common every-day vocabulary. (The words in them often appear strange to modern readers, because most of the Latin we are used to is both earlier in time and concerned with other topics, but in most cases the words that appear unfamiliar to us can be shown to have been in use during the empire.) They are thus ideal reading material for the early stages of learning the language.¹²It is likely that students memorized sections of the colloquia in Latin, using the Greek translation to make sure they understood the Latin, and then recited these extracts to the teacher, either individually or with several students performing a dialogue.¹³

This system was an excellent way to learn basic vocabulary in context, but nevertheless the colloquia were no substitute for a real dictionary, as they could not easily be used to look up a specific word. Lexica, therefore,

ταχέως οὖν cito ergo

ἐπίδος porrige

τὸ βιβλίον, librum,

ἀνείλησον, revolve,

ἀνάγνωθι lege

μετὰ φωνῆς, cum voce,

ἄνοιξον aperi

τὸ στόμα, os,

ψήφισον. computa.

ἄρτι καλῶς modo bene

ποίησον fac

τόπον, locum,

ἵνα γράψῃς ut scribas

ἅμιλλαν. dictatum.

12Although the colloquia have generally not been used for language teaching since the sixteenth century, they remain potentially useful even today: see Debut1987on the advantages for today’s Greek teachers of the Greek half of the colloquia. I have used slightly adapted extracts from the Latin half of the colloquia with afirst-year Latin class at the University of Exeter and found the material to be excellent for modern students, provided the vocabulary is adequately glossed.

13 See Dickey2012: 52–4.

existed in abundance.¹⁴Many were classified word-lists, like the transliter-ated text in example 1; others arranged words in alphabetical order.

(Ancient alphabetical order did not necessarily mean full alpabetical order of the kind used today; often words were grouped together by their first two or three letters without regard for the other letters in the words, as in example 3above. See Daly 1967.) Ancient lexica, like modern ones, came in a variety of sizes, ranging from small to large. Example 7 is a short extract from the largest known ancient bilingual lexicon; this work is not fully preserved, but it can be estimated that when complete it had c. 32,000 entries, divided roughly equally between Latin-Greek and Greek-Latin sections.¹⁵

7.

(Folium Wallraffianum (M-P³2134.4, LDAB 6279), vi ce, ed. Kramer1983: no 4, lines W48–56)

In addition to vocabulary, an ancient Latin learner needed grammar.

Example 8 comes from a table of noun inflections designed for Greek speakers learning Latin. The text, as usual in antiquity, is written in the target language rather than the learner’s native language; not only the noun declensions themselves, but also the headings and accompanying

παρες omitte let go!

παρεσκευασατο adparuitπ̃ adiunxit he prepared, he added

παρεστη ads[i]stit he stood by

παρεστησεν obtuliṭadprova[v]ị[t] he offered, he agreed παρεστω adsit p̣raesto sit let him be present

παρεστραμμενον reviminatum hemmed

παρετυχεν [inter]fuit he was present

παρευρησις κ[αιρος] [o]c ̣c ̣ạsio pretext, opportunity

παρεχει praestat praebet he provides

14 For further information on them and onexample 7, see Bataille1967; Kramer1983,1996,2001, 2004; Dickey2010a,2010b,2012: 11–12, 20–4.

15 From the distribution of words on the three preserved fragments, it has been calculated that the Greek-Latin half would have comprised approximately 200 folios or 400 pages (Preisendanz1933: 25), and it is believed that the Latin-Greek half could not have been much shorter (Kramer1983: 45).

The only intact leaf has 80 entries (40 on each side), yielding a calculation of 800 x 40¼ 32,000.

Preisendanz does not state how he arrived at thefigure of 200 folios, but he may have used Heraeus’

Greek-Latin index to the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum (Goetz et al. 1888–1923, vol. 7, pp. 441–687). The surviving leaf of the Greek-Latin half of the ancient lexicon, containing 80lines with entries fromπαραχιμαζει to παροιμεια, covers material that takes up one and a quarter of the 246 pages of Heraeus’ index; if the complete lexicon had approximately the same percentage of words beginning withπαρ- as the index, it would have had 246/1.25 ¼ 197 leaves. But suchfigures can only be very approximate, as different results are obtained from different Greek lexica: the ninth edition of LSJ, for example, yields a result of 2042/11.3¼ 181 leaves, while the smaller abridged edition (Oxford 1871) gives 804/4.7¼ 171 leaves.

grammatical information are in Latin. The text’s orientation towards Greek speakers is revealed only by the Greek glosses that accompany each word.

8.

(papyrus of v–vi ce (M-P³2997, LDAB 6148), ed. Dickey, Ferri, and Scappaticcio 2013: lines 42–58. Diacritics and punctuation are original.)

The nouns are divided into categories by their genders and terminations, as usual in both Greek and Latin grammar, since words with the same gender and the same termination normally decline in the same way. The cases are indicated by forms of the demonstrative hic, haec, hoc; again this is a standard feature of Latin grammars. In ancient Greek grammars inflected forms of the article are used as an efficient way of indicating gender, number, and case; whereas a modern teacher has to spell out “feminine dative plural,” our ancient counterparts could simply use ταῖς. The

The nouns are divided into categories by their genders and terminations, as usual in both Greek and Latin grammar, since words with the same gender and the same termination normally decline in the same way. The cases are indicated by forms of the demonstrative hic, haec, hoc; again this is a standard feature of Latin grammars. In ancient Greek grammars inflected forms of the article are used as an efficient way of indicating gender, number, and case; whereas a modern teacher has to spell out “feminine dative plural,” our ancient counterparts could simply use ταῖς. The

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