Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [168]
Latin among the Basques and the Britons
Surrender, then, or perhaps even enthusiastic take-up, was the majority option when the inhabitants of ancient western Europe were brought into the Roman empire. But it is worthwhile sparing a moment to consider two cases where this option was not taken.
One was Basque, presumably the language of the Aquitanians of southwest Gaul* (and the Vascones in Iberia) in Caesar’s time, which survived the influx of Latin to replace its Gaulish and Celtiberian neighbours, as it has survived everything else that history has thrown at it in the last two thousand years. It is the special case, par excellence, of European language history, since it pre-dates all the Indo-European languages. There are records of Basques serving in the Roman army (indeed, a group of them travelling with the over-mighty general Marius allowed him to mount a brief reign of terror in Rome in 86 BC;38 others are known to have served on Hadrian’s Wall in Britain), but their identity proved equal to the challenge of Roman rule. They borrowed the words for ‘olive’ and ‘oil’ (oliva, olio), and ‘statue’ (estatu), showing the acceptance of certain aspects of Roman life that had been new to them, but otherwise show no effect from five hundred years of presence in the Roman empire.
The more complicated case is that of language survival in Britain. We have already seen from the evidence of place names that a language either very like Gaulish, or a dialect of it, was spoken here at the time of the Roman invasions. Personal names tell the same story: among the names of noted kings and queens among the Britons we have Cassi-vellaunos (’oak-dominator’), Tascio-vanos (’badger-slayer’), Cuno-belinos (’dog of the god Belinos’—Shakepeare’s Cymbeline), Caratacos (’beloved’), Boudicca (’Victoria’—cf. Irish búadach, ‘triumphant’).
* Names mentioned in Aquitanian inscriptions appear to have Basque roots, e.g. Cison, Andere, Nescato and Bihoxvs beside Basque gizon, ‘man’, andere, ‘lady’, neskato, ‘girl’, and bihotz, ‘heart’ (Gorrochategui 1995: 38).
After the conquest of AD 43, which led to full-scale permanent occupation, the Romans made a conscious effort to spread Latin, and indeed Roman education, among the British elite. Tacitus comments cynically on the education plans of Agricola (governor of Britain from 77 to 84 and, as it happened, his father-in-law):
he instructed the sons of the chiefs in liberal arts, and expressed a preference for the native wit of the British over the studies of the Gauls, so as to plant a desire for eloquence in people who had previously rejected the Roman language altogether. So they took to our dress, and wearing the toga. Gradually they were drawn off into decadence, with colonnades and baths and chic parties. That was called a civilized life [humānitās] by these innocents, whereas it was really part of their enslavement.39
In a bitter irony, these studies were initiated in the winter after Agrícola had finally obliterated, with much carnage, the centre of Druidical learning on the Isle of Anglesey.
Although they had started from the same language, we can detect, from the odd remark made by Romans, that the British were bracketed with, but not quite up to, the continental Gauls in their adoption of Latin. In a satire on the way the world had gone mad, Juvenal (a contemporary of Tacitus in the second century AD) wrote:
Today the whole world has its Greek and Roman Athens; the eloquent Gauls have taught the British to be advocates, and Thüle is talking of hiring an oratory teacher.40
The mention of Thüle here, which as far as the Romans were concerned might have been the North Pole, shows that Juvenal is thinking in terms of extremes. This is the condescension of the Roman establishment, showing much in common between old and more recent imperialisms: the conquerors might well tell subject minorities that their only hope lay in civilising themselves, but would never take them seriously when they tried to make good on this aspiration.