Latin as an Administrative Language

Assembled from 23 blocks · 3 evidence · 26 related

1. Story
2. Latin was the language of law, the army and western administration - but the empire was never monolingual. Greek remained the language of government, commerce and education across the eastern provinces, and Caracalla's own citizenship edict survives in Greek on papyrus. Aramaic, Punic, Coptic, Egyptian and Celtic languages persisted underneath both. Latin's real afterlife is institutional: it carried Roman law into medieval and modern European legal systems and fragmented into the Romance languages.
3. Knowledge
4. Roman Law
5. Latin as an Administrative Language
6. Connections
7. Alexandria
8. Roman Law
9. Compilation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis
10. Rome
11. Latin as an Administrative Language
12. Justinian I
13. Traditional foundation of the Roman Republic
14. The Augustan settlement: Octavian becomes Augustus
15. The Antonine Constitution (Constitutio Antoniniana)
16. Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I
17. Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
18. Compilation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis
19. Ottoman capture of Constantinople
20. Evidence
21. Roman roads were systematically marked with inscribed milestones recording distances and the emperor responsible for construction or repair. This epigraphic series is the primary dating and attribution evidence for the road network, and the principal proof that road-building was an imperial political act as much as an engineering one.
22. The only near-contemporary text of the edict, in Greek, badly damaged at the top left. It presents the grant of citizenship in providential and religious terms - thanksgiving to the gods for the emperor's preservation - and contains an exclusion clause whose reading (the dediticii) is disputed because the papyrus is broken there.
23. Justinian's compilation preserves the bulk of surviving classical Roman jurisprudence and was issued from Constantinople in the name of the Roman emperor in the 530s CE - fifty-plus years after the conventional 476 'fall'. It is the transmission channel through which Roman law reached medieval and modern European legal systems.