Linguistic Adaptation as Cultural Adjustment: Treatment of Celtic, Iberian, and Latin Terminology in Arrian’s Tactica

Abstract

At the beginning of the section of the Tactica concerning the Ῥωμαῖα ἱππικὰ γυμνάσια, Arrian states that it will be hard to explain the terms adopted in cavalry exercises, as the majority of them are of Celtic and Iberian origin ( tact . 33, 1). This sounds like an hyperbole, because just three Celtic terms (πέτρινος, ξύνημα, τολούτεγον) and one Iberian term (Κανταβρικὸς κύκλος / Κανταβρικὴ ἐπέλασις, which rather refers to an Iberian practice) occur. The Celtic terms are lexical (ξύνημα and τολούτεγον) or semantic (πέτρινος) hapax legomena . Even if a linguistic analysis (Holder, Dottin, DeVoto) would lead to the supposition that these are loan words – rather than foreign words –, literary and epigraphic clues will show that Arrian’s direct acquaintance with Iberian’s and Celts’ reality is not implausible. To the subject of Arrian’s description a transposition of the terminology from Latin to Greek was also required. Such a transposition can be clearly noticed not only in the “panegyric on Roman borrowings from other peoples” (E.L. Wheeler) – which includes easy identifiable Realien – but also in the description of the army officers involved in the γυμνάσια ( tact . 42, 1). The identification of these figures is, at face value, quite hard: the terminology reflects Arrian’s difficulty translating into Greek the titles of figures who were peculiar to the Roman army (i.e. duplicarius, sesquiplicarius ). It is only through later lexica and Latin sources that we can understand to whom Arrian is referring. The Tactica was perhaps conceived by Arrian as a literary re-elaboration of the Adlocutio Hadriani in Lambaesis and a subtle encomium to emperor Hadrian. Therefore, such a presence of multilingual loan words and calques seems peculiar to Hadrian’s opening to foreign military cultures that Arrian praises at the end of his treatise ( tact . 44, 1–2).