Cahiers Glotz, XXVIII, 2017, p. 151-174. Christian Laes* MULTILINGUALISM AND MULTILINGUAL ENCOUNTERS IN AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS 1. Introduction : Le grand oubli d’histoire Non omnia narratu sunt digna, quae per squalidas transiere personas (28, 1, 15). hough he was obviously not writing about socio-cultural history, this quotation from Ammianus Marcellinus is revealing for the way he would assess the impor- tance of the subject of multilingualism. In such an attitude, he is not at all a unique case. hough the Roman Empire with a variety of possibly over forty languages was a multilingual environment par excellence, with encounters between speak- ers of all sorts of languages and dialects being part and parcel of everyday reality, Greek and Latin authors rarely ind the fact worth mentioning. As a consequence of the silence of the sources and the predominance of the classical languages, classi- cists and ancient historians also have not focused too much on the subject, though in the last decades important studies have appeared on interpreters, translation, language encounters, knowledge of languages and thinking about languages in Antiquity. 1 In this paper, I focus on a potentially rich and not yet fully exploited source for the topic. Indeed, the historiographic work by Ammianus Marcellinus brings us to the eastern borders, and to a lesser extent to the western area, in the mili- * I owe many thanks to Mark Golden (University of Winnipeg), who kindly read and improved my English text. English translations from Ammianus Marcellinus are from the Loeb edition by J. C. Rolfe, unless indicated otherwise. 1. Clackson 2015 is an outstanding introduction to language and society in the Greek and Roman worlds, with an authoritative bibliography which guides the readers through all the subjects raised in the irst paragraph of this article. Here, I cite only some most relevant publications for the diferent topics at stake. On interpreters and translators : Rochette 1994 ; Rochette 1996 ; Wiotte Franz 2001 ; McElduf 2013. On polyglots : Laes 2013. On language learning : Dickey 2012-2015 ; Dickey 2016. On bilingualism : Adams 2003. hinking about languages and language diversity : Rochette 1995 ; Gera 2004 ; Van Hal 2009 ; Denecker 2015. On language encounters : Campos Daroca 1992 ; Papaconstantinou 2010 (about the ample documentation from Roman Egypt). Rich edited volumes on the topic of multilingualism : Neumann, Untermann 1992 ; Müller, Sier, Werner 1992 ; Mullen, James 2012. MEP_N°28.indd 151 31/08/18 17:14