Julius and Cleopatra

A lot of people know that, as Julius Caesar was being stabbed to death, he turned to his friend Brutus, who was one of the assassins, and said Et tu, Brute?, the Latin for ‘And you, Brutus?’, or ‘What, you too?’

A lot of people know this, because those were the words put into Caesar's mouth by William Shakespeare. But it is probably wrong. We do not know if Caesar said anything at all: we do not have any eye-witness reports. But we do know that if he did say something, he probably did not say it in Latin.

It is much more likely that his dying words were uttered in Ancient Greek. The Roman historian Suetonius – not an eye-witness either, as he was writing about the event over a century after it happened – claimed that what Caesar said was Και συ τέκνον? (Kai su, teknon?), the Greek for ‘You too, my son?’

But surely the language of Ancient Rome was Latin? (It was.) So why on earth would Romans be speaking Greek? Well, most of them didn't: they spoke Latin. But the patricians – the toffs like Caesar – were bilingual in Latin and Greek, and they tended to speak Greek to each other.

When Caesar died in 44 BC, Alexander of Macedon had been dead for nearly 300 years; but it was Alexander the Great whose conquests had taken the Greek language across the Middle East and Iran into the places which are now Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, northwestern India, and parts of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Greek became vitally important as the lingua franca – the language of wider communication – in a very large area of the eastern Mediterranean.