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

eukharisteĩn oudeĩs t$oTbar;n dokím$oTn eĩpen, allà khárin eidénai.

None of the classics said ’eukharisteĩn’ (meaning ‘thank’) but ’khárin eidénai’.

Phrynichus Arabius, v.6 (second century AD)

eukharist$oTbar; t$oTbar;i thé$oTbar;i pántote perì hum$oTbar;n, epì tŋbar;i kháriti to$uT theo$uT dot-heísēi humĩn en Khrist$oTbar;i Iēso$uT.

I thank ( eukharist$oTbar; ) God always for you, for the grace of God given to you in Jesus Christ.

St Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians, i.4 (first century AD)

Greek speakers have always held particularly strongly to their literary heritage, and this is one reason why their language has remained unitary over so many centuries, despite once being so widely spread around the world. But they have always interpreted it extremely narrowly, not so much as a living tradition, but as an unchanging (and unattainable) canon of classic authors, the main Athenian (’Attic’) writers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC [856]

This provided a clear basis for education, and a model for writing and formal speech. But it meant that really good style was unattainable (and increasingly unintelligible) once the language had begun to change, as of course it immediately did. So, from the third century BC, correct diction was never distinguishable from archaising pedantry. To some extent, this can be seen as a meritocratic policy in a language that was being used all round the Mediterranean and Near East: native speakers and second-language learners were more on a par when nobody was a natural speaker of the best Greek. But more importantly, it implied that nobody without an extensive literary background would ever be accepted as cultured. Greek has always fostered a disputatious culture, and the cult of ‘Atticism’ has been queried, criticised, parodied and reviled throughout the last 2500 years—but all to no avail.

As we have seen, it was not as if there was no other standard, of a more de facto, indeed demotic, nature: Attic Greek had almost immediately given rise to the more accessible koinébar; , close to Attic in its forms, defined in usage, and intelligible wherever Greek was spoken. But for all its utility, it had no class. And in the pre-modern world where status was bound up with literacy—and without mass education literacy would always be for the few—this mattered.

Occasionally, though, a kind of inverted snobbery prevailed. The Greek language had spread round the Roman empire to others than the educated elite. The Jewish community in Rome spoke Greek until the fourth century AD. [414]In the early centuries of the first millennium AD, a number of mystery religions were spreading from the eastern provinces, Egypt, Syria and Asia, most famously the cults of Isis, Mithras and Jesus Christ. All adopted Greek as their ritual language. [414]They were attracting converts first among the poor and downtrodden of the empire. And for all of them, the authority of the Greek classics, whose gods, if any, were the imagined residents of Mount Olympus, was no authority at all.

Yet, for Christianity at least, this did not mean that they rejected the authority of written literature. With its origins in the Jewish tradition, the Christian faith soon began writing and recognising its own scriptures, primarily in Greek, although later there were vernacular texts written in Aramaic in Syria, Coptic in Egypt and Ge’ez in Ethiopia—and of course Latin. Language for the early Christians seems universally to have been chosen to maximise access, without thought for the privileged status of any particular code. But this meant that there was the beginning of a new canon for Greek literature, and one based—for the first time in four centuries—on popular usage. [822]

We have already remarked on the ‘Shield of Faith’ phenomenon, the way in which religions, particularly those of west Asian origin, have contributed to the survival of the languages that were their vehicles. Greek hardly needed any help from Christianity in these early years, but many must have taken up Greek as a second language in order to get better access to its literature. And Christianity did effect some extensions to the range of Greek literature, transforming rhetoric into the art of the homily or sermon, [823]and philosophy into theology.

These extensions in fact tended to undo the change to Greek linguistic sense that was at first brought about by the new informal literature. Here Christianity was a victim of its own success. In the time of its growth, the struggle to maintain the empire’s vast edifice of a single administration for western Europe and the whole Mediterranean was becoming harder and harder. Rulers looked for a new means of securing loyalty over the vast domains. The major insight of the emperor Constantine was that this could be found in Christianity. In 330 he reorganised an increasingly regionalised empire around a new capital at Byzantium, henceforth Constantinople ( Kōnstantinoúpolis ), and he made it a Christian foundation.

This set the crown on the social advancement of Christianity. For over a century it had begun to attract converts of a new kind. Clement of Alexandria (born in AD 150), for example, had used his extensive classical education to write a Protreptikós , or ‘Encourager’, attempting to argue Greeks out of paganism and into Christianity, and then went on to build a logical system on top of the Christian lógos. Origen (185-255) had been a textual critic of the Bible, and Eusebius (260-339) the first historian of the Church. Such characteristically Greek academics had been well able to write in the classical style. But now the Church would also attract the general ranks of those seeking preferment in the temporal world, or indeed simply seeking to assert their due as members of distinguished families. The result was a full-blooded return to the old Atticising tendency. Ecclesiastical Greek was firmly reinstated in the classical tradition, and was never again tempted to deviate from it. The empire’s increasing tendency to proscribe paganism, defined to include all pre-Christian philosophy, culminated in Justinian’s closure of the School of Athens in 529. But the survival of Attic style was never in doubt.

This conviction of Greeks that, in writing, the very old ways were the best ways turned out to be as deeply rooted as the empire itself. People were still attempting to write in some tolerable version of classical Attic when in 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, over a thousand years later.

The story of Greek for the next thousand years is one of infrequent, but sudden and massive, retrenchments, as the vast extent built up in the late first millennium BC was pushed back at the edges. In the western Mediterranean, where Greek’s empire had never been a temporal one, this loss of parts of the Greek language community came about simply because the focus of culture shifted: an education in Greek ceased to be part of western European education, and contacts with the east became much rarer. But elsewhere these withdrawals were caused quite directly by military defeats.

In the West Roman Empire, where Latin was dominant, the military defeats that diminished and soon extinguished the empire politically were to have only very limited effects on language. (See Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304.) But in the east, the effect of the defeats was much simpler. Hostile forces took charge, and after a decent interval—often of many generations—Greek was no longer to be heard or seen.

The first area to go was over to the far east: Iran and Afghanistan, down to the Indus valley. Seleucid control here was not long secure, but for the first century after the death of Alexander (323 BC) the competition came mainly from other Macedonian and Greek kings, who would not dispute the spread of Greek. By 260 BC the Indo-Greeks in Bactria, first led by Diodotus, had declared themselves independent. At just about the same time (and possibly caused by this rebellion) the Iranian-speaking Parthians thrust south from the eastern shores of the Caspian into the plateau of Iran. A century later, in 146 BC, Mithradata I of Parthia completed the job, and drove the Seleucids out of the rest of Iran, taking Mesopotamia for good measure. Ten years later, as it happened, the Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were overwhelmed by a Scythian (Saka) invasion from the north, shortly followed by the Kushāna (also known as Tocharians or Yuezhi) from the north-east.