southern Italy, were
people who spoke Oscan and the other Italic dialects, which were related
to Latin, and yet quite distinct from it. In the seaports of the south
Greek was spoken, while the Messapians and Iapygians occupied Calabria. To
the north of Rome were the mysterious Etruscans and the almost equally
puzzling Venetians and Ligurians. When we follow the Roman legions across
the Alps into Switzerland, France, England, Spain, and Africa, we enter a
jungle, as it were, of languages and dialects. A mere reading of the list
of tongues with which Latin was brought into contact, if such a list could
be drawn up, would bring weariness to the flesh. In the part of Gaul
conquered by Caesar, for instance, he tells us that there were three
independent languages, and sixty distinct states, whose peoples doubtless
differed from one another in their speech. If we look at a map of the
Roman world under Augustus, with the Atlantic to bound it on the west, the
Euphrates on the east, the desert of Sahara on the south, and the Rhine
and Danube on the north, and recall the fact that the linguistic
conditions which Caesar found in Gaul in 58 B.C. were typical of what
confronted Latin in a great many of the western, southern, and northern
provinces, the fact that Latin subdued all these different tongues, and
became the every-day speech of these different peoples, will be recognized
as one of the marvels of history. In fact, so firmly did it establish
itself, that it withstood the assaults of the invading Gothic, Lombardic,
Frankish, and Burgundian, and has continued to hold to our own day a very
large part of the territory which it acquired some two thousand years
ago.

That Latin was the common speech of the western world is attested not only
by the fact that the languages of France, Spain, Roumania, and the other
Romance countries descend from it, but it is also clearly shown by the
thousands of Latin inscriptions composed by freeman and freedman, by
carpenter, baker, and soldier, which we find all over the Roman world.

How did this extraordinary result come about? It was not the conquest of
the world by the common language of Italy, because in Italy in early days
at least nine different languages were spoken, but its subjugation by the
tongue spoken in the city of Rome. The traditional narrative of Rome, as
Livy and others relate it, tells us of a struggle with the neighboring
Latin hill towns in the early days of the Republic,