Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

Tí dè tis? Tí d’ ou tis? Skiás ónar ánthrōpos.

What is someone? What is no one? A shadow’s dream is man.

Pindar, Pythian Odes, viii.95—6

Until their independence in AD 1821, the Greeks had only ever been united politically in the aftermath of joint conquest by some outsider. This happened for the first time in the fourth century BC, when the outsider was Philip, the king of Macedon on their northern border. Nevertheless, over the previous thousand years other civilisations encountering the Greeks appear always to have seen them as members of a single ethnic group.

In a way, this was strange, since outsiders always knew them simply by the tribal name of the group they happened to encounter. The Greeks’ shared name for themselves, Héllēnes , never caught on outside Greece. [791]The Persians knew them as Yauna , for their encounter was with the Ionian Greeks, who are called láwones in Homer, the earliest Greek in the tradition. [792]At the opposite end of the Greek world, the Romans got to know the Greeks as Graii. They were meeting Greek colonists from Euboea and Boeotia, who were setting up a new city of Cyme in Italy (later known by the Romans as Cumae). In fact, Graii seems to memorialise a small town in southern Boeotia called Graia. [793]The word Greek comes through the Latin Graecus , a straightforward adjective formed from this name (from Grai-icus ), and came to take over from the original Graii . [794]

What, then, was a Greek, by any of these appellations? Although the main criterion was language, there was a general feeling that Greeks had much more in common than that. In a famous passage of Herodotus, the Athenians are made to explain why they will never betray Greece. [414]They advert to to Hellēnikón , ‘Greekness’, which is defined as having the same blood and the same language, common shrines of deities, common rituals and similar customs. Common blood, of course, was not something that could be proved or ascertained objectively, though there would have been a feeling for facial features and no doubt skin colour. Common language was evident through mutual intelligibility of all the Greek dialects. As for common service to common gods, the Olympian pantheon was validated in the narrative of the Homeric epics and other hymns, even if the actual practice of cults in different places could be quite unique. Respect for common oracles where prophetic insight could be sought, the most notable being Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, and attendance at the quadrennial Olympic games (whose records of victors extend back to 776 BC) were two other major institutions that bound the Greeks together. [819]

In fact, the Greeks always felt that there was a rational basis that set them apart from the bárbaroi , the rest of humanity, whose varying speech could just be thought of as an elaboration of ‘bar-bar’, hardly worth distinguishing from the noises made by animals, [820]Anything foreign was felt somehow to be ridiculous.

So the historian Herodotus describes the language of the Ethiopian Trogodytes ( sic ) as sounding like screeching bats, [414]and in the midst of a serious tragedy [414]Queen Clytaemnestra—admittedly a picture of condescending arrogance—conjectures that Cassandra, the Trojan princess, may speak an unknown language like that of swallows. Even Strabo himself, cosmopolitan geographer of the Mediterranean world in the time of Julius Caesar, writes in the midst of his gazetteer of the peoples of Spain (3.3.7): ‘I am loath to go on about the names, conscious of the unpleasantness of them written down, unless someone could actually enjoy hearing of the Pleutauroi, the Bardyetai or the Allotriges, or other names even fouler and more meaningless.’

There are many classic texts where Greeks have set out their ideals. Outstanding among them is Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Speech for the War Dead made in 431 BC. [414]Pericles was the leader of Athens who built the Parthenon and led the city into its great war against Sparta. This speech is an attempt to summarise Athens’ contribution to civilisation, not claiming that the city was like others, but rather setting them an example ( parádeigma ). He talks of a free approach to politics which is open to all, however poor, of tolerance in private life, of the enjoyment of public entertainments. He glories in the city’s military accomplishments, but no less in the fact that they do not (unlike their main enemy, Sparta) make a fetish of military preparedness. All lies in striking the right balance; in a very Greek phrase, he says:

philokalo$uTmen met’ euteleías kaì philosopho$uTmen áneu malakías

we are beauty-lovers with a sense of economy, and wisdom-lovers without softness.

Overall, he said, the whole city of Athens was an education to Greece. [414]Art, value for money, wisdom and physical prowess: that is what Athens liked to think it stood for. (And as for love of wisdom, Greek does not easily distinguish between philosophy and appreciation of cleverness.)

Evidently, these reflected an optimistic statement of Athenian ideals. Beautiful and wise deeds were not conspicuous in the conduct of the war that followed, and which indeed Athens went on to lose. Nevertheless, Pericles had been right to see Athens as an education to Greece: although it gradually lost political importance in the century that followed his speech, it never lost its status as the focus of Greek culture. It remained a city where serious students would come to study for the next thousand years, always in Greek, even though they might come from anywhere in the Roman empire, or beyond.

In fact Athens’ intellectual leadership lasted until Christianity came to resent its continuing self-confidence and fidelity to its pre-Christian open-mindedness. The Roman emperor Justinian closed the school at Athens in AD 529. But the pre-eminence of its language remained, throughout the eastern Mediterranean, for another thousand years.

Andròs kharaktēGr ek lógou gnōrízetai

A man’s type is recognised from his words.

Menander [414]

$ēTthos anthr$ōApōi daímōn

Character for man is fate.

Heraclitus [414]

The language that so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries was a complex organism that made few concessions, if any, to foreign learners. Its words were polysyllabic, with complex clusters of consonants ( p ht hárthai , ‘to be destroyed’, tlēmonéstatos , ‘most wretched’, stlengís , ‘scraper’ (used with oil at bath-time), sp hrāgídion , ‘signet ring’, glisk hrós , ‘sticky’).

Speakers needed to tell long vowels from short, plain consonants from breathy ones, and be able to manage elaborate systems of prefixes and suffixes, where an ordinary noun would have nine different forms, and an adjective nineteen, and a verb well over two hundred. There were, of course, regularities in the system, but they fought a losing battle: there were ten major patterns for nouns, ten more for adjectives, and besides ten different patterns for verbs, there were well over 350 individual verbs that were irregular somewhere. These complex inflexions, taken together with the tendency to compound terms (as seen in Pericles’ remarks quoted), meant that words could become very long, a characteristic that sometimes amused the Greeks themselves: the longest on record, a term for a gastronomical masterpiece, comes in a fifth-century BC comedy: [414]

lopadotemakhoselakhogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiok