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

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes | Induit agresti Latio…

Greece, once captured, captured its wild conqueror, and instilled arts into boorish Rome…

Horace, Letters, ii. 1.156

In these two major spreads of Greek by migration and infiltration, the colonisation of Mediterranean coasts, and the results of Alexander’s lightning conquest of the east, the prestige of the language and its culture played little, if any, role. Greeks had explored and settled; Greeks had conquered and settled. But the new populations who first heard Greek in consequence had little choice in the matter. A vast expansion of the world where Greek was spoken had come about in this way; but outside Anatolia, Syria and Egypt there is little evidence for its everyday use having spread much beyond the community of Greek émigrés.

Greek was poised, however, for a major surge of spread by diffusion. All round the Mediterranean, above all among the elite of the rising power of Rome, Greek culture was about to become the centre of the educational curriculum.

Inevitably, the Greeks began with a cultural advantage on Mediterranean coasts, having brought the alphabet, and some display of what a literate society was like, Greek-style, with formal education and a curriculum based on a corpus of poetical classics (notably Homer) and active training in skills of public speaking. Then, in the third century BC, a number of political events brought the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean into active contact with the west. In 280 BC Pyrrhus (coming from Epirus, in western Greece) had tried to invade Italy and Sicily: his initial victories were proverbially pyrrhic, and within five years he was effectively seen off by dogged Roman resistance, but Roman garrisons were then placed in all the Greek cities of southern Italy. In 273 BC King Ptolemy II of Egypt entered into a treaty with Rome, sealing their new status as a coming power in the Mediterranean.

Bilingual authors began building a bridge between Greek and Roman literature. Greek plays were performed (in Latin translation) at Rome from 240 BC. Others, such as Livius Andronicus, tried adapting Greek master works such as the Odyssey for Roman audiences, but using traditional Roman language and patterns of verse. Late in the century came the tense days of the war with Hannibal: victory was followed by a vogue for Greek culture. (The victorious general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was a notorious enthusiast for things Greek.) A leading figure was the poet Ennius, who had grown up speaking Greek in southern Italy, but learnt Latin during his army service: he brought Greek works and literary values into the heart of Latin education, beginning the refashioning of Latin literature on completely Greek lines.

Foreign policy reinforced the cultural interest, since Rome intervened decisively in Greece in the next century, famously taking advantage of one of the pan-Hellenic athletic meetings. In 196 BC the Roman general Flamininus announced to an incredulous crowd gathered for the Isthmian Games at Corinth that all the Greek cities were henceforth free, courtesy of the Roman Senate and people. There followed a complicated series of wars in which Rome was involved ever more deeply in Greek affairs, and which led to the downfall of the successors of Alexander in both Greece and Asia. By the end of the century, the whole of Greece and the west of Anatolia were under direct Roman rule.

The outcome was a total penetration of Greek into Roman culture, so that for the next five hundred years, essentially until the Greek east was split off from the Roman west of the empire, well-educated Romans could be counted on to be bilingual in Greek. Romans came to be educated basically on a Greek pattern, but with a strong emphasis on poetry and the practice of public speaking: the musical and gymnastic sides were rather neglected. The tutors and schoolmasters were typically bilinguals of Greek extraction; and one effect was a permanent demand for personable educated Greeks, who could find employment as educators all over the Mediterranean. Overall, the situation was comparable to the prospects for graduates from English-speaking countries in rich non-English speaking countries today. Educated Greeks often found that their language was their fortune.

As one example, in the first century BC Gaulish notables were sending their children to be educated in Greek in Massalia (Marseilles). Strabo says that ‘sophists were employed, both privately and at the city’s expense, just like medical doctors’. [414]Meanwhile it became usual for elite Romans of rich families to send their young people to Athens or Rhodes to finish their education. But this does not mean that knowledge of Greek was found only among the upper classes. Plautus, writing comedies in the early second century BC, puts most of his Greek loan words and slang into the mouths of slaves and low types: graphicus servus —the picture-perfect slave. [414]

Polybius, writing a generation later, could remark, perhaps making the best of things: ‘our men of action in Greece have been released from the pressures of political or military ambition, and so have plenty of opportunities to pursue inquiries or research’. [414]

A century later, the implicit compact was stated more explicitly, from the Roman point of view, by Vergil: [414]

The world of the arts and sciences was the Greek province, par excellence. But the world of power and order belonged to Rome. The civilisation of the Mediterranean world became a stable Graeco-Roman mix. [813]

It is worth spending a moment to consider what was the real attraction of Greek, and its associated culture, its character or ethos (both Greek words). The Romans certainly did not believe that they had much to learn about traditional virtues, as shown in war, law and politics, from these voluble and innovative foreigners. [814]Greek art, which had become familiar through the army’s campaigns in southern Italy and Greece, was attractive in itself; but the Greeks also seemed to have an advantage in the pursuit of pleasure more generally: haute cuisine, wine, music, frolics with either sex. The Greeks were the masters of luxury, and it took little higher discernment to want more of this. The Latin word pergraecārī , ‘to Greek off’, meant devotion not to high thinking but to high living, feasting and drinking. [414]

At the same time, the sheer knowledge possessed by the Greeks impressed the Romans: Greeks knew their own history, as well as that of their neighbours, they could theorise on any topic, and provide quotations from poetry centuries old. Above all, they were fluent and convincing speakers: they had been trained in how to hold an audience, and get people to do what they wanted. This explicit skill in rhetoric was highly in demand in the civic society that the Romans had created, where people were constantly running for office at every level from village council to the republic itself, and measures were presented orally for approval by assemblies.

Above all, we can see the Romans (and hence the whole Mediterranean world) attracted by the sheer sense of savoir-faire generated by a large-scale and highly elaborated culture, self-confident to the point of solipsism. Much the same thing was to happen when Sanskrit and the wonders of classical India washed up on the shores of South-East Asia (see Chapter 5, ‘The spread of Sanskrit’, p. 201); or when French became the language of refinement throughout Europe, and especially in Russia, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 11, ‘La francophonie’, p. 410). Something of the same charm of brash, large-scale self-confidence can be seen today powering the worldwide taste for Americana, and with it the English language. And as these examples show, the prestige behind it is something other than association with a successful army, or a successful economy.