Fifteen Eighty Four

‘The boundaries of the city of Rome are the same as those of the world’ (Fast. 2.684): Ovid’s striking claim about Rome’s global reach evokes the image of Rome as Cosmopolis—a centre of power whose influence radiated across the known world. This reach extended over a connected Mediterranean landscape, itself constantly reshaped by diverse cultural, social, and geographical groups and identities. Language policies and the circulation of Latin literature both acknowledged and reinforced this influence. While the idea of Rome’s ‘collective identity’ has been the focus of rich historical inquiry over recent decades, the central role played by the Latin language and its literary culture in shaping this identity has only more recently gained scholarly attention. New critical perspectives on the ancient Mediterranean have begun to foreground its inherent complexity—approaching it through pressing modern concepts such as multilingualism, cross-linguistic interaction, multiculturalism, and cross-cultural dynamics.

The Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (CLTP) aligns with this renewed scholarly direction, offering exceptional insights into cultural interactions across the ancient Mediterranean. At first glance, the words Latin and papyrus may seem an unlikely pairing. ‘Papyrus’ readily conjures images of Egypt—Pharaohs, hieroglyphs, and temple walls—yet it is easy to forget that papyrus was among the most widespread writing materials of antiquity, and that its use endured well beyond the rise of parchment. With the notable exception of the carbonised scrolls from the largely philosophical library of an elite villa at Herculaneum—preserved, paradoxically, by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, and including a minority of Latin texts—climatic conditions meant that only arid regions such as Egypt and the eastern frontier zones could preserve papyri archaeologically. Though long overlooked, these Latin papyri have recently emerged as an invaluable corpus, offering a rich and varied body of material that illuminates both the cultural role of Latin and the dynamics of Rome’s relationship with the imperial periphery. In these contexts, Latin functioned as both a linguistic and a cultural medium.

The Corpus of Latin Texts on Papyrus (CLTP) brings together nearly 1,500 Latin papyrus texts in 6 volumes, offering a comprehensive, up-to-date, and uniquely valuable reference across six volumes. This is not a tool designed solely for specialists: each critically edited text is accompanied by an introduction and an English translation, allowing a wider audience—including linguists, historians, legal scholars, and all those curious about human connectivity in antiquity—to discover and appreciate these materials. Whether literary or documentary in nature, the Latin language appears on papyri in remarkably diverse forms.

Some texts are entirely in Latin, while others are bilingual—most commonly Graeco-Latin, with translations, adaptations, or formulaic ‘linguistic fossils’ reflecting the practicalities of multilingual communication. The CLTP also documents rarer bilingual combinations such as Latin-Demotic, Latin-Coptic, Latin-Gothic, and Latin-Arabic, providing a remarkable window into the linguistic complexity of the ancient world. These bilingual—and even trilingual—documents contribute vitally to our understanding of ancient multilingualism: the coexistence of languages (and, thus, cultures) across different domains, periods, and spaces.

Spanning from the first century BC to the early seventh century AD, the texts range from fragments of Virgil to legal proceedings, from school exercises to letters and receipts. Together, they offer not only new insights into the transmission and reach of Latin literature, but also into the wider cultural, educational, economic, and social life of the ancient Mediterranean. Above all, the CLTP opens a new chapter in our understanding of Latin as both a language of empire and a medium of everyday interaction.