Mysterious Facts and Discoveries of Ancient Rome
Not all Romans spoke Latin
Latin is now considered a dead and ancient language, although some still know and speak it, like priests, but it’s not used for conversing. During ancient times, it was the language spoken by Roman, or so we think. As it turns out, not all Romans spoke the Latin language back then. The Roman empire back then is not only the Rome that remains now. It stretched from the Atlantic to the Tigris, tallying up the number of people considered Romans to a whopping 65 million. Latin was the language only used in Roman Law and by the army. The rest of the people around the empire spoke their native languages like Cappadocian, Thracian, Syriac, and Celtic. The Roman elite did not just speak Latin, they were bilingual and spoke Greek, which was seen as a badge of status at the time. It’s been said that some of the senators who assassinated Julius Caesar shouted not in Latin, but in Greek.
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