up of natives who, at the close of their term of service, were probably
able to speak Latin, and when they settled among their own people again,
would carry a knowledge of it into ever-widening circles. We have no exact
knowledge of the number of the auxiliary troops, but they probably came to
be as numerous as the legionaries.[6] Soldiers stationed on the frontiers
frequently married native women at the end of their term of service,
passed the rest of their lives in the provinces, and their children
learned Latin.

The direct influence of the government was no small factor in developing
the use of Latin, which was of course the official language of the Empire.
All court proceedings were carried on in Latin. It was the language of
the governor, the petty official, and the tax-gatherer. It was used in
laws and proclamations, and no native could aspire to a post in the civil
service unless he had mastered it. It was regarded sometimes at least as a
_sine qua non_ of the much-coveted Roman citizenship. The Emperor
Claudius, for instance, cancelled the Roman citizenship of a Greek,
because he had addressed a letter to him in Latin which he could not
understand. The tradition that Latin was the official language of the
world was taken up by the Christian church. Even when Constantine presided
over the Council at Nicæa in the East, he addressed the assembly in Latin.

The two last-mentioned agencies, the Latin of the Roman official and the
Latin of the church, were the influences which made the language spoken
throughout the Empire essentially uniform in its character. Had the Latin
which the colonist, the merchant, and the soldier carried through Italy
and into the provinces been allowed to develop in different localities
without any external unifying influence, probably new dialects would have
grown up all over the world, or, to put it in another way, probably the
Romance languages would have come into existence several centuries before