ABSTRACT
Latin was originally the language of a small city-state in central Italy. By the middle of the third century BC the Romans controlled the Italian peninsula; two centuries later Spain, Sicily, Greece, Gaul and parts of Asia Minor and North Africa had become Roman provinces, and expansion continued into the second century AD. From the third century the Empire began a gradual decline, until Rome itself was overrun by the Visigoths in AD 410. But the ‘pax romana’ had brought two hundred years of stability and prosperity to the provinces of western Europe, enabling Latin to take root and displace the indigenous languages of much of the region.
