The Italian Papyri are a source of great importance for the study of variation and change in Late Latin for several reasons. The first is that they show a wide range of Latin stylistic levels that runs from the grammatically correct, even elegant, Latin of the culturally and socially higher contexts of some documents to the more colloquial, even humble, language of the more modest contexts with respect to the rank of peoples involved, their cultural level, and the type and function of the document. Another source of interest is that they bear witness to a considerable number of ‘submerged’ structures that are attested in Early Latin, disappear in texts of Classical Latin, and resurface in post-Classical and Late Latin. A third is that they preserve many structures that are forerunners of patterns occurring in the Romance vernaculars, either as first testimonies or as continuators of ‘submerged’ Latin forms. In this chapter a sociolinguistic method of investigation of the Italian Papyri is presented that combines consideration of the internal and external factors of variation and change. Some results are also presented that deal with the diachronic dynamics of Latin morphological and syntactic structures.

A detailed commentary which covers matters of literary and historical interest in book VII in the context of Herodotos’ History as a whole. Issues treated include style, dialect, language, text (where necessary), political, religious and social history, both Greek and Persian, prosopography, ethnicity and geography.

This chapter deals with the unattributed Latin poem in hexameters preserved in P.Herc. 817 and known as the Carmen de bello Aegyptiaco (or Actiaco). It aims to further the discussion on this text by offering some insights on both the anatomy of the book-roll and the constitution of the text. Moving from the material features of the volumen, the first part of the paper attempts to cast light on the amount of text that survives and on that which was lost. Then, it focusses on the edition of the Carmen de bello Aegyptiaco in CLTP, discussing some textual problems which are still worthy of consideration. Finally, in its third part, the chapter deals with the content of the poem: special attention is paid to the main novelties emerging from the new reconstruction of the roll, with the twofold aim of better understanding the sequence of events displayed in the poem and outlining some future research perspectives.

This introductory chapter serves as a methodological introduction to the significance of literary and documentary texts on papyrus as vital primary sources for linguistics, philology, and literary criticism, as well as for historical and juridical studies. These texts have typically been underutilised by classicists. However, recent re-examination of the available Latin and Graeco-Latin literary and documentary evidence, conducted as part of the ERC Project PLATINUM, has yielded significant results. These findings are briefly outlined here, with a particular emphasis on submerged and previously unknown Latin literature, and Roman wills as sociohistorical sources.

This chapter presents some up-to-date and further reflection on the Latin scrolls preserved in the library of Philodemus (c. 110–40 BCE) found in Herculaneum. The first part takes up the discussion on the better-known and more closely studied (due to its superior material condition) P.Herc. 817 (anonymous Carmen de bello Actiaco) and P.Herc. 1067 (Seneca the Elder, Ab initio bellorum civilium). The supplementary remarks proposed deal with the group of three rolls P.Herc. 78 (falsely assigned to the comic poet Caecilius Statius), P.Herc. 215 (anonymous), and P.Herc. 1475 (anonymous). We now have the benefit of new editions of all of them, completely redone and mostly reliable, insofar as is allowed by the desperately fragmentary source material.All of the Latin scrolls are from the period after Philodemus’ death. It is even possible that, besides the books written in the early Imperial period, there were also older literary texts, or even private or public documents that could have formed a part of the Piso Caesoninus family’s archives. To this day, unfortunately, no trace of either kind of text has come to light.

Latin ostraca were produced in multicultural environments such as Egypt and North Africa, where Latin was often in contact with other languages and scripts. As a result, they sometimes feature the phenomenon of allography, i.e. the use of an uncommon script for a specific language. A categorisation of allographic phenomena is proposed here: taking the sentence as a point of reference, a tripartition is advanced into ‘complete’, ‘partial’, and ‘occasional’ allography, which identifies phenomena acting respectively at the level of the entire sentence, single word(s), and single character(s). The analysis also takes into account background elements such as the competence of the scribes and the reasons that lead to these phenomena.

This chapter takes as its starting point the historiographical aspects of the editio princeps of the two papyri BGU II 611 and 628 and then sets out to investigate the legal profiles of the measures reproduced in them, both relating to judicial reforms carried out during the age of Claudius and later Nero. This investigation also allows us to make some considerations on the relationship between senatusconsulta and normative measures of the imperial chancellery.

One of the results of the PLATINUM Project was a re-evaluation of P.Mich. VII 430, a document dating to shortly before 115/116 CE, described by previous editors as ‘a collection of brief sayings’. Several of the textual remains are consistent with trochaic septenarii, a metre found in early Latin drama and significantly within the tradition of Latin verse maxims attributed to the late Republican poet Publilius the Syrian. This chapter discusses the content of the collection and compares it with other Latin gnomic collections that survive in medieval transmission, including Publilius, and several ancient gnomic collections ascribed to Seneca, Varro, and ‘Caecilius Balbus’.

This study examines the text and vocabulary of two fragments originating from the same first-century scroll. These fragments provide the earliest known example of Latin technical literature found in Egypt, encompassing topics such as cooking recipes, viticultural practices, and wine-based medicinal formulations.

BL 3124 (TM 397934) is a, so far, unique papyrus containing a bilingual, ‘Latin’–Arabic, private letter entirely written in Latin script. The first six lines of the letter itself are in a form of Late Latin/Proto-Romance, while the rest of the text is in Arabic. The first editors dated this document between the end of the seventh and the ninth century and considered it as possible evidence for the existence of Latin-speaking communities in the Near East at the time. This chapter shows that important linguistic and palaeographical features of the letter link both the language of its ‘Latin’ section and its script to Italy and argues that it provides a potential very early document of the evolution of Italian vernacular, as well as suggesting connections between the peninsula and the Near East in this period.

The recto of Hamburg papyrus II 167, dated to the late first century CE, presents an intriguing case study of a text that has so far resisted generic classification. Rhetorical declamation and theatre (fabula togata/mime) are the two literary categories for which scholars have argued most strongly in their attempt to explain the papyrus and understand the story it presents – a conversation between characters with historically attested names involving a journey and family-related motifs, such as a husband’s faithlessness, a father-in-law, and a restored marital relationship: the text gives the impression of a ‘theatricalised’ novelistic tale. The difficulty in reaching consensus on the matter is only partly due to the lacunose state of the papyrus. This chapter favours the interpretation of the text as a theatrical script (an extract from a mime, perhaps written in prose, rather than a fragment from a literary fabula togata), but also points out the unique (dramaturgical, lexical, thematic, and visual) features of the text that challenge our assumptions about viewing Latin theatrical genres as forms of entertainment with fixed and rigid boundaries and about imagining how Latin literature was performed and circulated in antiquity.