The Roman conquest of the Greek world could have been accompanied by the Latinization of the Greek provinces, but the Romans had the pragmatic intelligence not to impose Latin, which nonetheless found its way in through institutions, the army and trade. Latin thus acquired a status of its own for the Greeks, helping to lift it out of the muddle of barbarian languages. This led to the development of a body of thought attempting to justify, on an intellectual level, Latin's new and advantageous position due to Roman political hegemony, best represented by Denys of Halicarnassus (circa 60 BC - after 8 AD).
As for other languages, the Empire, already confronted with those spoken in its own provinces, created new conditions that facilitated tourism, intensified trade and reinforced ethnic mixing through recruitment and military assignments. This form of globalization led, if not to tolerance, at least to greater awareness and de facto acceptance of linguistic diversity. At the same time as the Empire was opening up to other languages, it had to control this openness and, if necessary, correct or modulate it, torn as it was between pragmatic acceptance of local diversities and the need to maintain its unity, which also and above all depended on language.
The other factor that contributed to raising awareness of multilingualism was Christianity. Multilingualism occupies an important place in Christian thought, and has given rise to theoretical reflection based on two key passages of Scripture: the episode of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), which founded the idea that multilingualism is a kind of original sin resulting from human pride and precipitating mankind into the chaos of diversity and the discord of incomprehension; and the episode of glossolalia (Acts of the Apostles 2, 6), the positive counterpart, which substitutes the charisma of universal communication for the confusion of incommunicability.
