So Latin spread pretty well across Europe, being the basis of almost every language there, but how come it didn’t take as strong a hold in the Middle East? It’s not as if the Romans were never there, and they lingered there far longer than they did in Europe. Was it just a matter of a stronger preexisting culture, or did the Arabs have something to do with it? What happened here?
Even in the Western half of the empire a lot of the elites spoke Greek. For example: while he would definitely have been capable of speaking Latin, Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations in Greek.