With good reason, Late Antiquity is commonly regarded as a period characterized by profound political and sociocultural shifts, due among other things to the rise of Christianity across the Mediterranean. This gradual but quite radical process arguably gave rise to a diversification of the cultural outlook in general and, more specifically, of the linguistic horizon that came with it. For centuries, Greeks and Romans had been happy to limit themselves to their own language—or to their own language and Greek in the case of the Romans—dismissing other languages as “barbaric” or quite simply ignoring them. The geographical and linguistic originating context of Christian faith, as well as the fact that it had been passed on in Hebrew and Aramaic before Greek came in the picture, compelled early Christians of Greek and Latin language to at the very least acknowledge the existence of “foreign” languages. In many cases, this new reality...

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