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 Nicaea 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 they actually appeared.  That unifying influence was the Latin used by the officials sent out from Rome, which all classes eagerly strove to imitate.  Naturally the language of the provinces did not conform in all respects to the Roman standard.  Apuleius, for instance, is aware of the fact that his African style and diction are likely to offend his Roman readers, and in the introduction to his Metamorphoses he begs for their indulgence.  The elder Seneca in his Controversiae remarks of a Spanish fellow-countryman “that he could never unlearn that well-known style which is brusque and rustic and characteristic of Spain,” and Spartianus in his Life of Hadrian tells us that when Hadrian addressed the senate on a certain occasion, his rustic pronunciation excited the laughter of the senators.  But the peculiarities in the diction of Apuleius and Hadrian seem to have been those which only a cultivated man of the world would notice.  They do not appear to have been fundamental.  In a similar way the careful studies which have been made of the thousands of inscriptions found in the West[7], dedicatory inscriptions, guild records, and epitaphs show us that the language of the common people in the provinces did not differ materially from that spoken in Italy.  It was the language of the Roman soldier, colonist, and trader, with common characteristics in the way of diction, form, phraseology, and syntax, dropping into some slight local peculiarities, but kept essentially a unit by the desire which each community felt to imitate its officials and its upper classes.