GREEKWEST · Greek in the West: language communities, migration and the transformation of society in western Europe, 300–700 CE

This project reconstructs the place of Greek in the sociolinguistic landscape of western Europe during Late Antiquity (300–700 CE). Integrating textual and epigraphic evidence, it will trace the evolving use and knowledge of Greek in literary and political culture, religion, and daily life. This period witnessed transformations that would change the shape of European history: the rise of Christianity, the fragmentation of the western Roman empire, the introduction of new political and economic institutions, and the resulting restructuring of civic society. Views on the place of Greek in the late antique West still centre around deterministic narratives of ‘decline and fall’, leading to instances of Greek knowledge being dismissed as outliers, thus missing opportunities to examine the period’s continuing cultural, political, and linguistic interactions between ‘East’ and ‘West’. Challenging this consensus, GREEKWEST is ground-breaking in that it is the first study to examine Greek’s changing role in the late antique West and to do so across multiple social contexts. Spoken by roughly half the empire’s inhabitants, Greek had long occupied a central role in Roman society. On the one hand, Greek was seen as a language of high culture and prestige, and educated elite Romans were expected to be bilingual in Latin and Greek. At the same time, Greek was often associated with people from less privileged parts of society: slaves, performers, and merchants. This project seeks a) to establish who knew and used Greek in the late antique West and what sectors of society they came from, b) to reconstruct the motivations for using and learning Greek, and c) to trace how individuals and communities in the West learned and accessed Greek knowledge. This research will fundamentally change our understanding of the social history of language and migration, late antique intellectual and political culture, and the paradigms by which we view the transformations of the Roman world.