bathsheba: I wish I could help more, but what little I know about either My Lai or the Second Indochina War in general is kinda...skewed, based almost entirely on late 1970s and early 1980s US Army postmortems.
Inspired by a recent thread, can anybody tell me exactly how widespread the use of Greek was in the Roman Empire? I know it was used in Southern Gaul, but did it spread further north?
There's basically no evidence for it. Greek was spoken widely in southern Gaul because of the Greek colonies there (same reason it was spoken along the Iberian coastline), and that was mostly during the earlier period of the Empire - there's no evidence for it later. There'd be no point to learning it as a trade language further north because Greeks wouldn't, ah, be trading there. It wasn't necessary to learn it for government or to be part of any sort of elite. So outside of the odd traveler I can't imagine that it was very widespread at all.
Lord Baal said:
Also, why didn't the Romans attempt to enforce Latin? Most other empires in history have required at least the ruling elite to learn their language, but the Romans seemed happy to do business in the local language everywhere they went.
The Roman elite was
defined by its knowledge not only of Latin, but of an archaic "classical" Latin from the first centuries BC and AD. Membership in such an elite was contingent on one's knowledge of the language. Furthermore, Latin was necessary, at least in a rudimentary sense, for service in the army, which considering its size and its recruitment policies must have spread the use of the language extremely far over the imperial centuries.
Insofar as the Romans 'did business' in other languages (basically just Greek), they did so in meaningful but limited contexts - usually meaning just that, business, as in trade. In the East, Emperors coined in Greek (
imperator replaced by
strategos autokrator and the like). This is not particularly unique for its time, though. The rulers of the Iranian states - the Arshakid, and Sasanian Empires, as well as the Baktrian and Indohellenic states - coined in the local language in certain contexts, Greek for the Arshakids and Sasanians and Kharoshthi for the Baktrians and Indo-Greeks. So too did the Yuezhi-Kushans, who employed a sort of semi-Greek on their coins. Vaguely, I might hypothesize that this was because in each case the local group that spoke that language was highly likely to be using such coins. The reason Rome did not coin widely in, say, Brythonic may be because people who spoke that language were unlikely to be trading with currency, uninvolved in such an economy as they were. It's not a very good guess, because it relies pretty heavily on the [Romans, Yuezhi, Parni, etc.] being more aware of the linguistic situation than they are likely to have been and sort of distorts the record of coinage in pre-Roman Western Europe, but it's
a guess, at least.