Speakers | Conférencier·ère·s – Language and Identity in Antiquity

Keynote speakers | Conférencier·ère·s invité·e·s

Prof. Dr. Andrea Cuomo (Universiteit Gent)

Semiotic Poetics: The inclusive exclusivity of Byzantine texts

Medieval Greek writers, regardless of linguistic register, relied on an already thousand-year-old literary tradition. With greater or lesser awareness, they alluded to, reused, readapted, and cited the literary models they shared with their readers. The result is extremely simple and at the same time extremely complex texts, as their reading and interpretation requires from simple linguistic skills to the most complex knowledge of literary models.

In my paper I will present four case studies––from Homer and Lukianos, to Tzetzes and Planoudes––which allow us to illustrate: (1) how the Byzantines read and quoted model texts; (2) the concept of dialogism and intertextual irony; (3) the semiotic and pragmatic function of intertextuality; and (4) to consider the semiotic approach to the interpretation of Byzantine language and literature.

Prof. Dr. Katherine McDonald (Durham University)

Reconsidering multilingualism and enslavement in antiquity

Enslaved people were one of the largest groups of migrants into and around the Roman world, but their status as language learners and second-language speakers has never been examined in detail. This paper examines some of the epigraphic and literary evidence for mobile slaves in the Latin West over a broad period, centring the experiences of enslaved people and exploring how their language use, and the language used about them, was affected by their multilingualism.

Scheidel estimates that an average of 10,000 slaves per year came into Italy in the late Republican period, a total of two to four million in the period 200-1 BCE, exceeding the number of voluntary migrants (Scheidel 2005). This was perhaps the most intensive period of slave migration in the Roman period, but slaves were nevertheless subject to involuntary migration throughout ancient times. Despite this, slaves and freed slaves are often sidelined in studies on both migration and multilingualism. Slaves’ removal from their language communities must have had a profound effect on them, and Bradley (1994: 46-7) and Noy (2000: 37) are two of a handful of authors on ancient slavery to note the ‘cultural and psychological dislocation’ (Bradley) of this aspect of slavery. Scholarly interest in ancient slavery, and particularly in the agency and identity of slaves, is currently growing exponentially (Vlassopoulos 2021); as yet, linguistic studies have yet to make a major contribution to this field.

In this paper, I seek to take some preliminary steps towards a wider discussion of the language of slaves, and to explore how our evidence can help us to understand slaves’ and freed slaves’ experiences. Case studies will include the inscribed statue based dedicated by Kanuta from Campo della Fiera (Etruscan, late sixth century BCE), the epitaph of Regina from South Shields (Latin and Palmyrene, second century CE), and Livy’s account of the bilingualism of Marcus Fabius, his slave and their wetnurse in the fourth century BCE (Livy 9.35.8–36.7). I will bring sociolinguistic perspectives to bear on the surviving evidence, and I will show how we can use these sources to explore the history of multilingualism from below.

References
Keith R. Bradley (1994) Slavery and Society at Rome, Cambridge.

David Noy (2000) Foreigners at Rome, Swansea.

Walter Scheidel (2005) ‘Human Mobility in Roman Italy, II: The Slave Population’ Journal of Roman Studies 95: 64-79.

Kostas Vlassopoulos (2021) Historicising Ancient Slavery, Edinburgh.

Prof. Dr. Andreas Willi FBA (University of Oxford)

Marginal Greekness

While many different kinds of – especially social – identities can of course be encoded in language, the interaction of linguistic choices and ethnic identity has long been of particular interest in the study of the ancient world. That ‘Greekness’ somehow presupposes the ability of speaking Greek is stated in rather uncertain terms already by Herodotus (8.144). On closer inspection, however, certain issues come to the fore: How exactly is this linguistic condition to be defined and determined and how malleable is it?

Looking at various passages in ancient literature that explicitly deal with, or presuppose, some notion of an interconnectedness of language and ethnicity, I will investigate to what extent there is still room for manoeuvre – for marginalising and de-marginalising – even when the apparently ‘objective’ linguistic core requirement of Greekness is not itself called into question.