confronted Latin in a great many of the western, southern, and northern
provinces, the fact that Latin subdued all these different tongues, and
became the every-day speech of these different peoples, will be recognized
as one of the marvels of history. In fact, so firmly did it establish
itself, that it withstood the assaults of the invading Gothic, Lombardic,
Frankish, and Burgundian, and has continued to hold to our own day a very
large part of the territory which it acquired some two thousand years
ago.

That Latin was the common speech of the western world is attested not only
by the fact that the languages of France, Spain, Roumania, and the other
Romance countries descend from it, but it is also clearly shown by the
thousands of Latin inscriptions composed by freeman and freedman, by
carpenter, baker, and soldier, which we find all over the Roman world.

How did this extraordinary result come about? It was not the conquest of
the world by the common language of Italy, because in Italy in early days
at least nine different languages were spoken, but its subjugation by the
tongue spoken in the city of Rome. The traditional narrative of Rome, as
Livy and others relate it, tells us of a struggle with the neighboring
Latin hill towns in the early days of the Republic, and the ultimate
formation of an alliance between them and Rome. The favorable position of
the city on the Tiber for trade and defence gave it a great advantage over
its rivals, and it soon became the commercial and political centre of the
neighboring territory. The most important of these villages, Tusculum,
Præneste, and Lanuvium, were not more than twenty miles distant, and the
people in them must have come constantly to Rome to attend the markets,
and in later days to vote, to hear political speeches, and to listen to
plays in the theatre. Some of them probably heard the jests at the expense
of their dialectal peculiarities which Plautus introduced into his