Between the fifth and the fourth centuries BC, Oscan-speaking populations from the area of Samnium, in Central Italy, spread into the south of the Italian peninsula; here they came into close contact with the Greeks of Magna Graecia. The Greek language with which Oscan speakers interacted in this area was by no means homogeneous. In fact, the Greeks who had founded colonies in South Italy had come from various areas of mainland Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, and, as a result, the forms of Greek across this region differed significantly: Ionic around the bay of Naples and in Rhegion, on the strait of Messina; Laconian Doric in Taras and its sub-colony Heraclea, both on the Gulf of Taranto; Achaean Doric in a number of colonies in south Campania, Lucania and Bruttium; Northwest Greek in Locri Epizephyrii, in the toe of the Italian peninsula; and possibly Attic-Ionic in Thurii, a Panhellenic colony founded in the fifth century under the leadership of Athens. Then, towards the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century, the local forms of Greek became increasingly exposed to the influence of the koine, the new ‘standard’ variety of Greek based on the dialect of Athens and employed by the increasingly dominant Macedonians.

Recent studies have evaluated the patterns and extent of migration to Rome and highlighted the presence of groups with different, but intersecting, social, cultural and legal statuses. In the late Republic and Early Empire there was a continual influx of foreigners from Italy and further afield, both slaves and free, leading to ancient and modern characterisations of the city as a diverse and multicultural cosmopolis. In the late second or early third century AD, Athenaeus described Rome as ‘the epitome of the whole world’, the city that contained all others within it. Edwards’ and Woolf’s volume, Rome the Cosmopolis, opens with the spectacle of the games at the Colosseum, the spectators coming from right across the Roman Empire: ‘Marked out by their exotic clothing and hair arrangements, their incomprehensible speech, these people embodied the vastness and diversity of Roman territory, their presence in the heart of the city underlining Rome’s power to draw people to itself’. Language is here given as one of the markers of the city’s cosmopolitan character.

In the aftermath of Rome’s defeat of Macedonia at the Battle of Pydna, which established the Republic as a major power in the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenistic Delos lost its formal independence (it was under the patronage of the Antigonid monarchy) and was placed by Rome under the rule of Athens in 166 BC.

The landscapes of the Italian peninsula, no less than others in the ancient Mediterranean of the third and second centuries BC, hosted numerous intersections for the convergence of resources – people, objects, ideas and stories – recounted in multiple languages and mediums. Propelled by technology, trade, warfare and alliances, as well as love, curiosity and brigandage, the ensuing connectivities stimulated the emergence of new sociocultural trends and communities. Both material and literary endeavours attest to the dynamism of multiple movements within and through Italy in this period (Isayev 2017). Yet, tracking migrants who were part of these human flows, in terms of numbers, origins, destinations and the drivers of their mobility, proves difficult apart from a few exceptional episodes.

The Mamertini are unusual in the ancient world, if not unique, as a group of mercenaries for whom we have both a record in ancient authors of their movements and behaviour (to some extent, and with some variation between authors), and a small number of inscriptions which can be attributed to them partly on linguistic grounds (being written in Oscan in an otherwise Greek-speaking milieu) and partly because some of them explicitly state that they have been erected on behalf of the τωϝτο μαμερτινο ‘the Mamertine people’.

Artisans and craftsmen in Southern Italy participated in complex networks of interactions which are not yet fully understood. Although we know the broad outlines of the kind of mobility driven by trade, the movements of individual artists or artefacts are much harder to track and, unlike the careers of elite men or soldiers, craftsmen’s lives are rarely memorialised in literature or outlined on gravestones. Instead, their work provides our main insight into how artisans lived, worked and travelled. The style, function and decoration of paintings, ceramics and other products provides some clues, but text is also used for decorative and practical purposes on a wide range of different objects. Many of these inscriptions show the writer’s familiarity with multiple languages, alphabets or dialects and, in some cases, may show evidence for movement across language or dialect boundaries.

As has often been remarked, Oscan inscriptions originate from a large area – Campania, Samnium, Lucania, Bruttium and Sicily – but despite this are remarkably similar in terms of language and spelling, with very little regional variation (see e.g. Rix 1996). Likewise, the Oscan alphabet was created in a context of multiple languages and scripts, the result of a long period of successive migrations to the southern half of the Apennine peninsula; the Etruscans, from Etruria; Greek settlers, from different Greek city-states; and later on the Samnites, from the heights of the Apennine mountain range.

Some accidents of preservation, reuse, discovery, and publication are fascinating. It so happens that the earliest Latin inscription known from Egypt claims, it seems, that, on 26 August 116, one Acutius was the first (Italian or writer of Latin) to reach the sanctuary of Isis on the island of Philae in Upper Egypt and to leave a legible mark in Latin (I.Syène 321). For him to be able to make such an absolute claim, we must assume that no Latin was visible amid the many Greek inscriptions then at Philae and that there were no indications of Italians in those Greek inscriptions. If others had preceded him without leaving written evidence, they were as invisible to Acutius as they are to us. Or, Acutius may have made a relative claim: to be the first, in some respect, in relation to those who accompanied him that day and also incised their names. We can only speculate about just how competitive Acutius was in relation to his companions.