Siculi bilingues? Latin in the Inscriptions of Early Roman Sicily

Introduction At Metamorphoses 11.5.22, Apuleius famously calls the Sicilians trilingues, an epithet which seems to suggest that they were then known to be speakers of Greek, Latin and a third language, possibly Punic. The ancients were aware that classical Sicily constituted a special linguistic environment, in which different languages were mixed under the hegemony of Greek. After Sicily fell under Rome's control, this hegemony was seriously challenged by Latin, which gradually acquired prestige in bureaucratic and official communication. However, the nature and extent of the interaction between Greek and Latin in Sicily– the spheres of influence of each language and their use on the part of distinct communities– is a topic the exact contours of which elude easy definition, to the point that it would be controversial to call Sicilians of the Roman period bilingues without adding the necessary caveats. In this chapter I wish to contribute to the question of the nature of the Sicilian Greek–Latin bilingualism by focusing on the early Roman period, in order to offer a critical overview of what we know about the linguistic situation at the time of the first contacts between Greek speakers and Latin speakers in the island. My choice of topic stems from the observation that while Imperial Sicily has attracted the attention of linguists, Republican and Augustan Sicily has generally been neglected. In the past, this was justified by the paucity of texts for the period when compared to the wealth of evidence from Imperial and Christian Sicily. In recent years, however, the publication of new inscriptions and new corpora of texts has made the work of linguists more feasible: an analysis of these new texts vis-à-vis what we already know about the later chronological phase opens new perspectives on Greek–Latin language contact in the island.