Auctores, ‘scuole’, multilinguismo: forme della circolazione e delle pratiche del latino nell’Egitto predioclezianeo

In such a multilingual and multicultural environment as Egypt, Latin language and literature are known to have circulated between I BC and VII AD. Different aims shaped the circulation of the language, as Latin moved from being the language of the army to that of law: Diocletian’s reforms gave new inputs towards an intensification of teaching and learning Latin, causing a restyling of already attested practices and the same themes (and auctores) known in Egypt since the I BC kept circulating in new forms. Vergil is an example: as far as we know, Vergil’s hexameters were one of the mainly favorite subject of the exercitationes scribendi till the III AD (e.g.: P.Tebt. II 686) and no Vergilian bilingual Latin-Greek glossaries are known before the IV AD. Through an analysis of Latin literary texts on papyrus (I BC-III AD) and focussing on learning Latin as second-language (L2), this paper aims to highlight the knowledge we have of the forms of circulation and practices of Latin in Egypt.