Linguistic Diversity in Rhegium during the Principate: Evidence from Funerary Inscriptions

This paper aims at examining the contribution of the corpus of funerary inscriptions from Rhegium (Reggio Calabria) to our understanding of linguistic diversity during the end of the last century BCE and the three first centuries CE. The continued presence of Hellenistic traditions under Roman rule is corroborated by epigraphic evidence. It appears that Rhegium has maintained some Greek public magistracies, as Neapolis did, during the 1st century CE. Moreover, as a former polis of Magna Graecia, the city of Rhegium was not entirely Latinised following the Roman conquest, as Greek continued to be used there. However, most of the tituli sepulcrales of Rhegium that have survived are written in Latin. In accordance with Strabo (VI, 1, 6), the city was repopulated by Octavian with veterani classiarii (tōn ek tou stolou tinas) in 36 BCE. It seems reasonable to suggest that this Latin-speaking population partly had an influence on the epigraphic habitus of Rhegium. To illustrate to what extant Roman practices had an impact on our corpus, the Latin formulary translated into Greek (Theois Katakhthoniois) has become embedded in funerary inscriptions from the 2nd century CE onwards. Furthermore, a study of these testimonies reveals a variety of bilingual phenomena, as categorised by James N. Adam’s typology of bilingual texts, revised by Alex Mullen. The presence of Latinised Greek names, Greek Latinised cognomina, and Greek Latinised names, as well as intra-sentential code-switching, demonstrates the intricate cultural dynamics of Rhegium. As the evidence of the tombstones can be read as a representation of how the dead wished to be viewed, this modest corpus (more or less thirty items) of funerary inscriptions sheds light on cultural interactions in an area where the Greek cultural substrate was considered by ancient authors to be enduring.