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By Root 700 0

But he does stress the moral impression made by the Romans: ‘Italians in general have a natural advantage over Phoenicians and Africans both in physical strength and personal courage, but at the same time their institutions contribute very powerfully towards fostering a spirit of bravery in their young men.’11 He also cites the Roman fear of divine retribution after death, superstition though it may be, as fostering honesty: ‘At any rate, the result is that among the Greeks, apart from anything else, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and scrupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath.’12 Less cultivated the Romans might be; but there was something about them that impressed the Greeks.

Two hundred years later, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Gaul had been added to Roman domains, and Roman dominance must have come to seem a fact of nature. Nevertheless, even then Greeks did not think of the Romans as quite on a par with themselves. Strabo, in the midst of a review of the geography of the whole world, still sees southern Italy outside the remaining Greek enclaves of Tarentum, Naples and Rhegium as barbarian territory, explicitly because it has been taken over by Romans.13

Ironically, this southern region was the area of Italy that had retained its own language until the first century BC, a language known as Oscan to the Romans, Opic to the Greeks. This language, related to Latin but as different from it as German is from English, had once been spoken far more widely than Latin; it had been the language, for example, of the Romans’ early rivals, the Sabines (whose women the Romans had famously stolen) and the Samnites.

In fact, when they wanted to put them down, the Greeks liked to refer to their Roman masters as Opikoí. ‘They keep calling us barbarians and insult us more foully than others with the name of opics,’ the proverbially stiff Marcus Cato complained.14 The point of this slur seems to have been lack of education, since the word was being borrowed back into Latin as a byword for illiteracy. Juvenal talks about a pedantic lady telling off her ‘opic’ girlfriend for using the wrong word.’15 ‘Opic’ was malapropic. This was another cruel irony. Had they forgotten that the first poet to adapt Greek metrics for use in Roman poetry had himself been an Oscan speaker, Quintus Ennius? Ennius had liked to boast that his three languages gave him three hearts.16 His mother tongue had been Oscan, as he grew up in Calabria, in the heel of Italy; he knew Greek, because his local big city was Tarentum; and he had learnt Latin serving in the Roman army in the war against Hannibal. Two hundred and fifty years later, the last faint echoes of Oscan could still be heard, in the annual mime shows at Rome.17

The Slavs

In a way, trying to get a Greek view of the Romans to compare with their view of the Celts or Germans is unrewarding. The Celts and Germans may have been entertaining strangers, but after the second century BC the relationship between the Greeks and the Romans became more like a marriage (see Chapter 6, ‘A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture’, p. 250). The Slavs, on the other hand, became a factor in the language map of Europe only when they forcibly made their presence felt on the Greeks. Understandably, there is little sympathetic insight in the early Greek descriptions, which were in any case written much later, when they were bearing down on the Balkans and Greece itself (see Chapter 6, ‘Intimations of decline’, p. 262). Prior to this, though, Tacitus (in his Germania, AD 98) has some remarks to make on their ancestors, the Veneti (latterly known as the Wends, or Sorbs) and Fenni (whose name was later given to the Finns, but who may have been Slavs).

The tribes of Peucini, Venethi and Fenni, I hesitate whether to classify as Germans or Sarmatians…18 The Venethi have brought