OSCANS, or Opicans, was the name given both by Greeks and Romans to one of the ancient nations of central Italy. There can be no doubt that the original form of the name was Opscus, which, as we learn from Festus, was still used by Ennius. This the Greeks softened into Opicus, while the Latin writers always used Oscus as a national appellation, though they occasionally employ the term “opicus” in the sense of barbarous or ignorant. It is singular that, though there can be no doubt the name was a national one, it is not found in history as the name of any particular nation. No mention occurs of the Oscans among the populations of Italy that were successively reduced by the Roman arms; but we learn incidentally from a passage in Livy (x. 20) that the language of the Samnites and Campanians was Oscan; and it is certain that this continued to be the vernacular tongue of the people of Italy until long after the Roman conquest. Of the ethnical affinities or origin of the Oscans we know nothing, except what may be gathered philologically from the remains of their language; and their relations with the Samnites and other Sabellian tribes, whom we find during the historical period settled in this part of Italy, are extremely obscure. Perhaps the most plausible theory is that they were in very early times the inhabitants of the regions subsequently occupied by a race of invaders from the north, who were known as Sabines, Samnites, and Sabellians, but who, being comparatively few in numbers, and in an inferior stage of civilization, gradually adopted the language of the conquered race (see Italy, vol. xiii. p. 445)....
It is certain that the Oscan language continued in common use as a vernacular dialect till the close of the Roman republic. Ennius boasted that he was possessed of three tongues because he could speak Latin, Greek, and Oscan (Gell, xvii. 17); and at the time of the Social War (88 b.c. ) the allies made an attempt to introduce it as the official language, and struck coins with Oscan inscriptions bearing the names of Viteliu (for Italia), Safinim, &c. After the failure of that movement there can be no doubt that the language was never again employed for official purposes, though it would linger long in use among the rustic populations of the mountains. Nor was it altogether without a literature, for the FabulaeAtellanae, a kind of rude farces popular among the Romans, not only derived their names and origin from the Oscan district of Campania, but were undoubtedly in the first instance composed and recited in the Oscan dialect. The monuments of the language which have been preserved to us by inscriptions are much more numerous than those of any other ancient Italian dialect. The principal of them are enumerated in the article above referred to, and they are all collected and examined in detail by Professor Mommsen in his Unter - Italischen Dialekte (Leipsic, 1850). The general result is that the Oscan language must have resembled the Latin much more closely than any other of the Italian dialects, but wanted almost entirely the Greek or Pelasgic element which is found so distinctly in the more cultivated language, and which formed the basis of the Messapian and other dialects of the southern part of the Italian peninsula.
See Huschke, Die Oskischen und Sdbellischen Denkmäler, Elberfeld, 1856.
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