Breaching the Convention of Shared Language in Greek and Latin Narrative

It is a convention to be observed across ancient narrative that people belonging to different cultures simply speak the same language, which is the language of the author and his readers. The rationale behind this convention of shared language as I have dubbed it is easily understandable and foremost practical: readers should be able to understand what is said by foreign characters too. However, occasionally ancient narrative authors do flag language differences, e.g. in the speech introduction or through references to interpreters. Examples have been collected by historians and socio-linguists, but in my paper I will approach the phenomenon from a literary point of view. My working hypothesis is that references to language differences, exactly because they are so rare, are not random. They are contextually relevant and may have various narrative effects.

Prof. I.J.F. (Irene) de Jong is a professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam. She is a leading scholar in classical narratology, known for her influential work on Homer and Greek prose fiction. Applying concepts from narratology to ancient texts, notably Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, and Euripides, she has opened new areas of research, refined interpretations, and modernized age-old philological tools such as commentaries and literary histories.