Events Calendar – British School at Athens

image: Funerary inscription for Domitia Saturnina Apollonis (Corinth 8.1.134), source: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Corinth Excavations

Upper House Seminar

Dr Laura Nastasi (BSA), “Language Set in Stone: Graeco-Latin Bilingualism and Writing Culture in Roman Corinth”

Abstract: The commonly accepted view about Corinth in the Roman period is that the foundation of a Roman colony on the seat of the destroyed Greek city made the city entirely Roman for almost two centuries, between the foundation in 44 BCE and the reign of Hadrian. After that, the city supposedly went back to being entirely Greek. More recent contributions (e.g. Millis 2010) have noticed that such a narrative is not exactly accurate. Even if the public domain shows a predominance of Latin in the first two centuries and of Greek afterwards, this does not necessarily mean that the existing Greek element did not show itself in the epigraphic material of the city at the beginning of its history and, vice versa, the Roman element disappeared after two centuries. This paper offers a reappraisal of the information we can gain by studying the inscriptions from Roman Corinth from a sociolinguistic and sociocultural point of view. In particular, the study of monolingual texts (in Latin and Greek) shows that linguistic and cultural interaction between Greekness and Romanness was continuous in the inscriptions from the area at all times, making the label ‘bilingual’ appropriate for Corinth in the Roman period.

Bio: Dr. Laura Nastasi is the Cary Fellow at the BSA for 2024-2025. Laura’s primary interest is the study of Roman Greece, using inscriptions as the main source. This resulted in her doctoral thesis, Greek and Latin in Roman Corinth: Language Use and Language Contact, which she completed at the University of Manchester in 2024. Laura came to the BSA to work on the monograph arising from her PhD dissertation and also to expand her findings by focusing on the writing culture and writing habits detectable in inscriptions not only from Corinth but also from other areas of the Roman province of Achaia. Before moving to the UK for her PhD, Laura completed a BA and MA in Classics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, where she trained both in epigraphy and linguistics.

Hybrid lecture. This lecture will not be recorded.

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