THE COMMUNITY OF NEGOTIATORES AT DELOS

Delos provides an interesting case study of bilingualism in the public domain in a trading community in which Romans and Italians were prominent in the last centuries of the Republic. Trade is an activity in which cross-language communication is essential. Two separate trading or commercial communities, in which Roman linguistic attitudes differed markedly, are the subject of chapters in this book. In the pottery at La Graufesenque there is no sign of Italians learning Gaulish. Gaulish went on being used by Celts, but there are indications that they were also learning Latin. But on Delos the Roman/Italian attitude to the other language was far more deferential. Italians were happy to have themselves presented as Greek-speaking in formal texts, though the situation was complex, as we will see.

Delos was the site of the earliest and largest Roman–Italian commercial community in the Greek world. After 167 the senate expelled the Delians and the island became a free-trade centre under nominal Athenian supervision. Many inscriptions, in Greek, Latin and both languages, distributed for present purposes from the second century BC onwards into the early Imperial period, attest the activities of Latin-speaking, or, one should more accurately say, bilingual, negotiatores, and raise fundamental questions about the relationship between the two languages, the motivations of language choice, if only in public documents (for ‘private’ language use, see the discussion below (VI) of the Myconos curse tablet), and the character of the bilingualism of the traders.