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

The Greek language was spread from its historic home, the southern Balkan peninsula and Aegean islands, through two processes, one piecemeal, long lasting and diffuse in its direction, the other organised, sudden and breathtakingly coherent. One is usually known as the Greek colonisation movement; the other is Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire.

The first process, the colonisation of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts by Greek cities, lasted from the middle of the eighth to the early fifth century BC. The question why, of all the inhabitants of these shores, only the Greeks and the Phoenicians set up independent centres in this way has never been answered. The foundations clearly served a variety of purposes, as political safety valves, as trading posts for raw materials, and as opportunities to apply Greek agriculture to more abundant and less heavily populated soil, but it is noteworthy that they are exclusively coastal, never moving inland except on the island of Sicily. The Greek expansion came after the period of Phoenician settlements (eleventh to eighth centuries), so it may be that the most important factor was who had effective control of the sea. Although by the end of the period almost all available Mediterranean coasts had been populated, it was the western end which loomed largest in the Greek conception of what had been achieved: southern Italy and Sicily, par excellence, made up Megálē Héllas , ‘Great Greece’, usually named in Latin Magna Graecia.

Different cities tended to specialise in different strips of coastline. Among the Ionians, Chalcis and Eretria went for south-western Italy and northeastern Sicily; Phocaea (itself a city on the edge of Lydia) took the coasts of modern Spain, Corsica and France, including Massalia (now Marseilles). [795]The south Aegean city of Miletus covered the whole perimeter of the Black Sea, with nineteen colonies.

Achaeans largely took over the south-eastern coast of Italy. This country is popularly supposed to have been given its name by the Greeks: Italia would be the land of (w)italoí , ‘yearling cattle’, a dialectal variant of etaloí , later borrowed in fact into Latin as vituli , and still with us in the word veal.

Among the Dorians, Corinth, Megara and Rhodes all targeted Sicily again, but this time the south-east and south. Sparta placed one colony only, on the instep of Italy ( Táras , the modern Taranto). [796]Besides its role in Sicily, Megara also specialised in the south-east of the Black Sea, including the most fateful foundation of all, Búzas , a thousand years later chosen as a new capital for the Roman empire, Byzantium [797]or Constantinople. Uniquely, Thera headed south to found a colony on the African coast at Cyrene. [798]

Although colonies ( apoikíai —literally ‘homes-from-home’) were generally led by a ‘home-builder’, oikistébar;s , from the ‘mother city’ or mētrópolis— with whom there would be a historic and emotional, though not political or military, bond—their founding populations might be recruited from a number of cities, so the new foundations could be quite mixed in population, although less so in dialect. The inscriptions suggest that the language spoken was almost always close to that of the metropolis. [414]One could compare the continued dominance of English in North America, even though English colonists were outnumbered by speakers of other languages in the nineteenth century (see p. 492).

The immediate effects of this movement were arguably more cultural than linguistic. The areas were not uninhabited before the newcomers arrived, and the local populations (among them Gauls, Etruscans, Romans, Scyths and Armenians) did not fade away over time. [802]Although the Greeks dominated their coastal regions, and many colonies put out offshoots to create new colonies in the same region, they never became the focus for states on a larger scale. (Contrast this with the powerful self-aggrandisement, over this period and later, of Carthage, once a Phoenician colony.) The colonies, especially in Sicily and southern Italy, were famed for their wealth, and their scientific culture: Parmenides, Zeno, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and Archimedes were all Greeks of the west. Political innovation was not a particular forte. [803]

The colonies in fact became bridgeheads for Greek culture into the western Mediterranean and Black Sea; and this separate scattered Greek presence continued for close on a thousand years. Strabo, at the end of the first century BC, wrote: ‘But now except for Taras and Rhegion and Neapolis [Taranto, Reggio and Naples], all [of Magna Graecia] has been “barbarised out”, [804]and some parts are taken by Lucanians and Bruttians, and others by Campanians. But that is just in name; in fact by Romans—for that is what they have become.’ [414]The three cities mentioned are supposed to have retained their Greekness for another couple of centuries. And Greek is spoken to this day in the extreme toe and heel of Italy in two tiny enclaves: Bovesia in Calabria (south-east of Reggio), and the villages Calimera and Martano south of Lecce in Puglia.

The colonies played a cardinal role in introducing neighbouring peoples of Gaul and Italy to writing: from Massalia on the French Riviera, Gauls learnt to write their own language in Greek characters; Pithecusae (Ischia) and Cumae on the south-western coast taught the Etruscans first of Campania, and hence of the whole centre and north of Italy; a little farther south, Paestum (Poseidonia) could pass literacy on to the Oscans in Lucania, and over in the heel, Taras to the Messapians in Calabria. Most significant of all was one indirect path of such education: as well as many others in north Italy (for example, the Insubrian Gauls in the foothills of the Alps), the Etruscans went on to teach their great adversaries the Romans to read and write. Through an elaborate cascade of successful conquests and commercial infiltrations over the next twenty-seven centuries, the Roman alphabet has become the most widely used in the world at large.

The alphabets that were passed on in this way were not today’s Greek alphabet, which was to be effectively standardised in Athens in 403-402 BC, [807]and then adopted throughout Greece in the next generation. [808]At this earlier time in Greek history (from the eighth century BC), there were still competing variants favoured by different dialects, and most of the cities with colonies in Italy favoured the so-called Western alphabet, in which H was used to represent the aspirate consonant ‘aitch’, X not $XI was used to represent [ks], the letters θ $XI Φ PΩ were dropped, but F and Q were retained. [809]This was the alphabet taken up by the Italians, though, as usual in an age before mass-produced writing, in various local versions. (Lepontic, Etruscan, Os-can, Umbrian, Faliscan and Messapian all had alphabets distinct from Latin’s.)

Another cultural, and economic, boon of the Greek expansion was wine, now passed on to a very welcoming western Mediterranean—probably along with another luxury liquid, olive oil. Justin (43.4) represents the Phocaeans who founded Massalia as teaching the surrounding Gauls not just civic and urban life, but also how to tend vines. [810]Here again, it may be that indirect influence was more powerful than direct, for it is known that the Romans, who had learnt of the vine from the Greeks, were extremely active in promoting it when they moved into Gaul, superseding the Greeks by taking it far beyond the Mediterranean coast.

At the other end of the then Greek world, the colonies round the Black Sea appear to have played a more integrated role in mainland Greek life, since they came to supply it both with wheat (grown on the vast fields of Scythia/Ukraine) and the all-consuming opsa , relishes made of dried fish, the most sought-after spices for the Hellenes.