Tag: Jerome

Ethiopia, India, Persia—On a Par with Rome

In a long passage to show that different nations have different customs, and what one considers natural is an abomination to another, Jerome talks about cannibalism among barbarians, weird foods people eat, and so on. Then he says, 

The Persians, Medes, Indians, and Ethiopians, peoples on a par with Rome itself, have intercourse with mothers and grandmothers, with daughters and granddaughters. [Against Jovinianus, Book II, 7.]

This is pretty good evidence for my thesis that ancient Romans generally weren’t racists. They could find all sorts of reasons to hate you, but it seems not to have occurred to them that skin color was one of them. Ethiopia was a civilized nation, like Rome or Persia. It had wicked customs, but Jerome would be the first to admit that pagan Romans, and probably even most of the Christian Romans, weren’t any better.

The African Accent in Latin

The Roman province of Africa was noted for producing famous writers and orators in Latin—Apuleius and Augustine among them. But did Latin-speaking Africans have an identifiable regional accent?

It seems that they had, at least by the late 300s. Here are two Latin writers—one African, one not—who both mention it. Augustine, the African, also mentions one of the particular features of the accent.

Augustine: …why should a teacher of godliness who is addressing an unlearned audience shrink from using ossum instead of os, if he fear that the latter might be taken not as the singular of ossa, but as the singular of ora, seeing that African ears have no quick perception of the shortness or length of vowels? (On Christian Doctrine, Book IV, Chapter 10.)

Jerome: There was a man at Rome who had an African, a very learned man, as his grammar teacher; and he thought that he was rising to an equality with his teacher because he copied his strident voice and his faulty pronunciation. (Apology Against Rufinus, Book III, chapter 27.)