This chapter attempts to reconstruct the early history of the ala Apriana, a cavalry unit present in Egypt from the Julio-Claudian period, and of early auxiliary units of the Roman army in Egypt, on the basis of Latin and Greek documentary papyri. It then looks at Claudius’ reorganisation of permanent alae with standardised names, and investigates the identity and role of Aper, the first eponymous commander of the ala Apriana, suggesting an identification with the Gaulish orator Marcus Aper, Tacitus’ teacher and a speaker in the Dialogus de oratoribus.

The use of Latin alongside Greek in Roman soldiers’ private documents on papyrus or tablet has already been approached by modern scholarship. However, new evidence allows a further exploration of this topic and a reassessment of some of the results reached so far. Therefore, this chapter investigates three case studies based on this new evidence: the use of the tribal designation, the use of Latin in marriage agreements, and the use of Latin in Roman testaments. The following questions are addressed: What kind of Latin did Roman soldiers and veterans use? Under what circumstances? And why? What can we learn from new evidence? Does it strengthen or challenge traditional hypotheses? The investigation contributes to our understanding of the significance of written documentation in the daily lives of Roman soldiers and veterans and of the usages of the Latin language, script, or culture in their private documents. The new evidence considered sometimes strengthens and at other times challenges traditional hypotheses, showing how complex the relationship was between the Latin and Greek languages, scripts, and cultures in the Graeco-Roman eras.

This chapter discusses the use of Greek in the Roman judicial system. First, it considers the general question of the role of Latin as an official language of the judicial administration and the permission given to judges to deliver officially their sentences in Greek, at least from the end of the fourth century CE. Secondly, it uses papyrological sources (mostly records of court proceedings on papyrus) to examine traces of the use of Greek in trials before 396 CE. To shed more light on this issue, two reports on papyrus from Kellis are examined: these fourth-century documents provide further evidence of the use of official translations in the judicial system and the fees charged for their production. Furthermore, the analysis of a court record from the Viennese collection may offer additional elements to our knowledge of the subject.

In this chapter, names attested in the new edited ostraca from Gigthi and Assenamat are analysed from the point of view of Palaeo-Amazigh linguistics and in relation to the names of Bu Njem and of Roman Africa as a whole. Special attention is devoted to personal names of carriers involved in commercial exchanges as well as some measures that are unusual in Latin. These new contributions of onomastic material yield some personal names already documented in other regions of North Africa and add new names that can be analysed as Palaeo-Amazigh on phonological, morphological, lexematic, and semantic grounds. The linguistic analyses are put into the geohistorical, cultural, economic, and epigraphic contexts in which Tripolitanian ostraca were written. The study of measures portrays a depiction of Palaeo-Amazigh groups (Garamantes amongst them) as suppliers of grain and other crops cultivated in Phazania (Fazzān) and in northern Sahara to the Roman frontiers thanks, on the one hand, to sophisticated systems of water extraction whose true extent has only recently been revealed by archaeological prospection focused on hydraulic engineering and, on the other hand, to skin or leather bags used as containers for grain, water, and other supplies in Trans-Saharan transportation.

This chapter examines the so-called Hadrianus, a Latin prose text first published in 2010, which has the emperor Hadrian as its main character. The first part proposes some remarks concerning the content, literary genre, narrative form, language, and date of this pseudohistorical tale. The following section discusses some text-critical issues.

This contribution explores the presence of accents in the text of the Catilinarians preserved in the fourth-century CE Codex Miscellaneus of Montserrat. Starting from a general consideration of the sign in the Latin grammatical tradition, where it is closely linked to that of the apex, it moves to the particular analysis of each of the instances of the sign in the text, both from a material point of view and a philological, grammatical perspective. Whereas in fact some of them are proved to be not ink, but papyrus debris, and some others may be doubted as accents by reason of their shape, the remaining cases where an intention on the part of the scribe to write an acutus sign is clear point to a practical, non-erudite purpose for their presence. In accordance with the miscellaneous nature of the codex and its declared educational purposes, the presence of the signs seems to be connected with the earlier stages in Latin learning within the context of the hellenophone provinces of the East after Diocletian’s reforms.

Two papyri dated to the fourth and fifth centuries (P.Vindob. inv. L 103 and P.Oxy. XXIV 2401), prior to the Bembinus codex, transmit the earliest critical edition, corrected and annotated, of Terence: 162 verses from the Andria, that is to say 2.6 per cent of the whole of Terence’s theatrical corpus. This modest papyrological corpus, which is part of a tradition of ancient ecdotics, nourished by several centuries of exegesis, proves to be rich in information: on the text itself and its variants, as well as on its context of use, in a Greek-speaking environment, and for educational purpose. The theatrical, prosodic, and metrical dimensions of the text have been completely ignored in favour of a grammatical approach. Terence has not been performed on stage for a long time; he has become a canonical author of reference for the training of the elite of the Roman Empire, widely used by grammarians and commentators. The two papyri thus have their rightful place in the history of the Latin grammatical tradition, just as they do in the exegetical tradition.

This chapter offers a re-examination of P.Ital. 1 (445–6 CE), the well-known documentary dossier on the Sicilian properties of Lauricius, praepositus sacri cubiculi. More precisely, it aims to propose a new interpretation of a formula in the document 2013 ante barbarico fisco praestabatur – which, according to most scholars, starting with Theodor Mommsen, alludes to the existence of a fiscus barbaricus, a special treasury of the empire intended to collect taxes for the sustenance of non-Roman (i.e. barbarian) troops. The structure of the documents that make up the dossier, and the linguistic variations in the texts, suggest that the formula in question does not refer to a fiscus barbaricus, but rather to the fiscus, i.e. the imperial treasury, on the one hand, and to the barbaricum, i.e. the upheavals in Sicily due to the Vandal incursions in the Mediterranean, on the other.

This chapter presents a survey of the interpunction and abbreviation devices in Latin documents (papyri, ostraca, and tablets) between the first century BCE and the seventh CE, with a focus on the Roman East. The signs are described and catalogued according to their chronological range, the textual typology, and the letter(s) they are associated with. It discusses the origin and the scope of signs; the possible connection with other graphic systems; the influence of bureaucratic standardisation; and the degree of custom and personal taste beyond abbreviating choices. It emerges how the common ancestral punctuation and abbreviation marks in Roman culture, the interpunctum and the titulus, became obsolete or were seldom represented in documentary evidence outside stone from the first century of the Empire; they were finally overtaken by different signs – the high dot, the short oblique stroke – which in turn dwindled to nothing at the dawn of Late Antiquity, when the new generation of bureaucrats started employing the so-called long oblique stroke and the flourish. Any attempt at explaining the origin and reciprocal relationship of these signs must collide with the scarcity of the evidence and its concentration in very specific areas.