Reading notes.
Utraque lingua eruditi. Une page relative à l’histoire de l’éducation dans l’Afrique romaine, by Tadeusz Kotula in Hommages à Marcel Renard, vol. II, Latomus, Bruxelles, 1969, pp. 386 - 392.

After the fall of Carthage, Hellenistic as well as Roman culture began to spread in Northern Africa not only in port cities populated by Alexandrian, Greek and Italian émigrés but also in minor African cities. King Juba’s court was labeled as Hellene, and many an African home strove to imitate the royal example with chefs d’oeuvre of Greek art. A tendency for Africans to prefer latinitas can be discerned after the assassination of King Ptolemy of Mauretania in 40 C.E. The Romanisation of Africa intensified under the Flavians and reached its apogee, paradoxically, under the philhellene Antonines. That is, in the second century of the Empire, Latin was not a foreign language for North Africans. What about Greek ?

Until the end of Roman rule in Africa, both languages continued to be taught in schools. Greek, however, was turning into a school-book language. A hiatus developed with literary life on one hand, and daily life on the other. The better Hellenists abandoned the smaller towns and flocked to Carthage. To know Greek thus became a mark of distinction ; hence the insistence, for example on the epitaphs of African students who died young, that the student was utraque lingua eruditis.

Scholars in the 19th and early 20th centuries believed that both Latin and Greek were still much in use as late as the middle of the 3rd century. The language of Apuleius of Madauros (in modern Algeria - c. 125 - 170 C.E.) was considered the measure of African education ; provincial Africa was seen through his prose. His briliant cosmopolitan works and his categories of thought were supposed to have been comprehensible to his compatriots. But Apuleius himself scorns the élite of Oea who did not know Greek (Apuleius, Apol. 10,87,98). If the mention utraque lingua eruditis appeared more and more after the Antonines, it more likely reflected the fact that Latin was becoming the everyday tongue, whereas to know Greek was exceptional. The grammarian Nonius Marcellus, born in Thubursica Numidarum at the end of the 3rd century, knew only Latin ; even saint Augustine confessed that his grasp of Greek was poor (Conf. I,14). Surviving inscriptions show that Africans who deamed of a political career strove to be another Cicero (Cicero Thabudeiensis, said C. Julius Silvanus) or a Vergilius Africanus. It appears no one dreamed of becoming another Demosthenes.

While familiarity with Greek and with Hellenistic thought in Roman Africa may have continued to merit admiration and esteem, its practical value seems to have reached nil earlier in African history than was believed previously.