Meta Description: Join Ad Navseam Ep. 229 as Dr. David Noe and Dr. Jeff Winkle return to H.I. Marrou, exploring Roman bilingualism, Cicero’s Greek, and the ancient language question!
Welcome, classical gourmands, to episode 229 of the Ad Navseam podcast! Prepare to get your fill with another delectable discussion of Greco-Roman civilization, stretching from the ancient Minoans and Mycenaeans through the Renaissance and right down to the present.
Broadcasting directly from Parnassus Vomitorium Central—the bunker on the grassy slopes of Mount Parnassus—Dr. David C. Noe welcomes his co-host, Dr. Jeffrey T. Winkle. It is the first official day of autumn, the autumnal equinox, and Persephone is descending once again. As the weather turns blustery and rainy in West Michigan, the hosts joke about Starbucks spelunkers striking a fresh vein of pumpkin spice that runs all the way to Seattle, and discuss early rumors about an upcoming El Niño winter.
In the classroom, Dave is continuing to teach Latin, moving his students into the Fabulae Faciles to tackle the adventures of Perseus and the Gorgons. He tried out a classroom joke noting that the Gorgons’ bronze hands (manus etiam ex aere factae erant) must have functioned like rigid Lego hands, though it was met with dead silence from the room!
George Thorogood, Preserving Freshness, and Tabasco Sauce
Before turning to the books, Dave jokingly refers to Jeff as his “formerly fabulous” co-host. The label stems from a pre-show conversation about George Thorogood’s six-minute hit “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” which Jeff admits to finding utterly unlistenable. Dave notes that his own curmudgeonly skepticism toward serious academic matters is matched only by Jeff’s discerning curmudgeonly standards for popular music.
Dave also shares a food-related grievance encountered while eating outdoors with a bottle of McIlhenny jalapeño Tabasco sauce. Compelled to read every word of fine print on the label, Dave was disturbed to find an additive accompanied by the phrase “to preserve freshness” printed in literal scare quotes! Dave wonders what McIlhenny is actually implying with those quotes, joking that it reads like an ironic euphemism or a personal catchphrase.
Romanitas and the Bilingual Imperative
Turning to scholarly history, the hosts pause their voyage through the Argonautica to return to H.I. Marrou’s monumental work, A History of Education in Antiquity, tackling Part 3, Chapter 3: “The Language Question: Greek and Latin”. Jeff introduces an opening quote from J.N. Adams’s 2003 Classical Quarterly article, “Romanitas and the Latin Language”, which considers whether the ability to use Latin was considered an essential component of Roman identity, both from the perspective of native Romans looking outward and conquered outsiders looking in.
Marrou points out that from the time of Horace onward, an educated Roman was expected to be proficient in both languages—utriusque linguae (“of both tongues”). The Romans never suffered from cultural arrogance regarding language; instead, they harbored an enduring inferiority complex toward Greek. Conquered militarily by Rome, Greece captured its conqueror culturally, leading Romans to constantly deplore the “poverty” of lingua Latina compared to the richness, precision, and philosophical subtlety of Greek.
Hands-Off Imperialism: Why Latin Did Not Supplant Greek
Marrou observes a striking historical reality: the Roman state never made any serious, systematic attempt to impose Latin upon its eastern provinces. While Latin remained the official language of imperial administration, law, the military, and public inscriptions, everyday culture in the eastern Mediterranean remained thoroughly Hellenized. Conquered peoples were never subjected to forced linguistic conversion. When Emperor Hadrian visited Athens in the 130s AD, he wore a Greek beard, spoke fluent Greek, and lavished resources on Greek monuments without facing accusations of having betrayed his Roman identity.
The empire thus remained cleanly divided into two linguistic and cultural zones:
- The West: Regions like Gaul, Spain, Britain, and North Africa embraced Latin, largely because their indigenous Celtic or Iberian dialects lacked an equivalent literary tradition.
- The East: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt maintained Greek as the undisputed cultural lingua franca.
Even when Diocletian and Constantine established a Latin administrative presence in Constantinople in the 4th century, the initiative failed to take permanent root. By the reign of Justinian in the 6th century, imperial legislation (Novellae) was officially conducted in Greek.
Bilingual Education: Greek in the Roman Schoolroom
For Roman aristocrats, bilingualism began in the nursery. Wealthy Roman families hired Greek nurses (fräuleins or foreign governesses) so that children learned to speak Greek before they even tackled Latin! In fact, Quintilian warned parents not to delay Latin instruction too long, lest young Romans speak their native tongue with an affected foreign accent.
Roman boys progressed through parallel tracks of study:
- Elementary grammar under both a Grammaticus Graecus and a Grammaticus Latinus.
- Advanced rhetoric under an Orator Graecus and an Orator Latinus.
- Exercises in syncrisis (comparison), translating passages back and forth between Demosthenes and Cicero, or Homer and Vergil.
Archeological discoveries of papyri in Egypt reveal how Greek students learned Latin using bilingual, two-column school manuals. The Latin text was written on the left, with a crude, word-for-word colloquial Greek translation running parallel on the right.
Cicero and the Peak of Latin Hellenism
Latin Hellenism reached its apex in Marcus Tullius Cicero. Having studied Attic rhetoric in Athens and florid Asiatic oratory in Rhodes, Cicero possessed a total, effortless mastery of Greek. He translated Plato and Aratus, declaimed like a Greek sophist, and peppered his private correspondence to Atticus with Greek idioms and quotations, creating what Marrou calls “the perfect consort dancing together”.
Following Cicero, however, genuine bilingualism slowly declined in the West. By the time of Pliny the Younger in the early 2nd century AD, quoting Homer in the Senate or writing Greek epigrams had become an aristocratic affectation—a self-conscious imitation of Cicero rather than a living, spontaneous habit.
By the late 4th century, the linguistic divide between the Latin West and the Greek East had hardened into a theological wall. During the Arian controversy, Pope Damasus in Rome and Saint Basil in the East struggled to communicate because the two sides could no longer grasp each other’s philosophical terminology (such as the theological distinction between ousia and hypostasis). The Western Church maintained Latin, laying the historical groundwork for why Latin, rather than Greek, survived in European and American educational institutions.
Sponsors and Support
Before escaping the vomitorium to avoid angry representatives from the McIlhenny Tabasco family, the hosts thank their sponsors:
- Hackett Publishing: Explore their expansive catalog of classical translations, philosophy, and history at hackettpublishing.com! Use coupon code AN2026 for a newly increased discount of 25% off your entire order! Be sure to check out their handsome Hackett Signature Editions Collection featuring Aristotle, Augustine, and Nietzsche.
- Ratio Coffee: Elevate your morning brew routine with the Ratio 4, Ratio 6, or flagship Ratio 8! Experience automated pour-over perfection featuring a Fibonacci showerhead that off-gasses CO2 into the biosphere without scorching heating elements. Head to ratiocoffee.com/adnavseam and use code ANRATIO2026 for $20 off your machine.
To master lingua Latina or Greek, visit latinperdiem.com! Check out Dr. Noe’s MossMethod for Greek (Module IV is nearing completion, offering 163 graduated stories) and his Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata series. Use coupon code 10PLUS for 10% off. Keep an eye out for the upcoming spoken Latin app, Loqvax, and subscribe to Dr. Noe’s YouTube channel (youtube.com/latinperdiem) as it approaches 10,000 subscribers!
Credits & Gustatory Parting Shot
A heartfelt thank you to sound engineer Mishka, and congratulations on her recent marriage!
Additional thanks to guitarist Jeff Scheetz (jeffscheetz.com) for providing the rock tracks Thrill Seeker and Rush Hour.
Before signing off, the hosts share a note from ‘Local Will’, who provided an early 1910 advertisement for Fisher’s Blend Flour, tracing the historical origin of “all-purpose flour” (which survives today primarily in scone mixes!).
Write to the hosts at dave@adnavseam.com or jeff@adnavseam.com (remember the ‘V’ in Navseam!). Next week, the podcast returns to Book 3 of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica!
We leave you today with our bilingual Gustatory Parting Shot from Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder (Book 8, translated by Bernadotte Perrin):
xαλεπὸν μέν ἐστιν, ὦ πολῖται, πρὸς γαστέρα λέγειν ὦτα οὐκ ἔχουσαν.
(“It is a hard matter, my fellow citizens, to argue with the belly, since it has no ears.”)
Thanks for listening, and we will catch you next week for Episode 230!
