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

But Greek itself, as a living language, was now the property of a number of small communities, with no right or power actively to influence others. And their sense of unity one with another was diminished by the breakdown of any link with traditional Greek literary education, a development that had begun in the thirteenth century, a century and a half before the Turkish triumph, when the Latin powers had first taken control of so many of the empire’s old domains.

In these home communities, it did not die out. Its transmission was shielded by its role in Orthodox liturgy: but in fact, even as the language of a subject people, it was under no threat. There was no pressure for Christians to convert to Islam. Although the Seljuk advance had favoured the spread of Turkish-speaking settlers across Anatolia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the political advance of the Ottoman Turks, begun in the late thirteenth century, served mainly a military purpose, reorganising resident Turks into devastating campaigners. Although the Ottoman empire then took the Near and Middle East by storm, historically it had no tendency to favour the spread of any language whatever. Rather it seemed totally laid back—indeed, never systematically organised for any purpose beyond military conquest—and allowed ample self-governance to its constituent milletler . [828]

Nevertheless, Greek effectively ceases to be a world language at this point. For all the gratifying interest in its tradition out in the west of Europe, now that it was no longer master in its own house the Greek-speaking community could no longer see itself as the autonomous centre of its own world. The Greeks began to think of themselves as a small people, able to act only through negotiation with others far stronger than them. Their solipsism was at an end. We shall not trace its history further, although there is much to tell. The new centre of gravity in the language community, for the first time a rural one, with no duty to maintain an ancient past or a wider sense of Greek’s place in the world, led to the composition of popular lays and romances, untrammelled by earlier classical hang-ups. There was a new sense of Greek, based on the spirit of the kléftis , the outlaw who accepted no foreign oppression. But when the western powers, in sympathy with the Romantic movement, guaranteed Greece’s liberation from the Ottomans in 1821, there was renewed discussion as to what true standard to set for the Greek language—and once again the Greek elite gave its judgement in favour of a policy of conscious archaism.

Yet now, for the first time in over two thousand years, the policy would not stick. Something had changed, perhaps because of the break in urban dominance, and hence classical education, during the Tourkokratía. A popular—in Greek, ‘Demotic’—style of written language had established itself, and its role could now be asserted. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed further struggles: but since the fall of the colonels’ regime (1967-74) and the Education Act of 1976, there is now acceptance of a new written standard based on something close to ordinary spoken Greek.

Aièn aristeúein kaì hupeírokhon émmenai allōn

mēdè génos patérōn aiskhúnemen, hoì még’ áristoi…

Always to be the best, and to be superior to others,

And not to shame the race of fathers who much the best…

Homer, Iliad , vi.208 (a father’s parting advice to a Homeric hero)

This survey of the expansion and contraction of the Greek language community over three millennia only makes more urgent a fundamental question. What was it about Greek speakers which had commended them over their contemporaries, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Etruscans, Gauls, Carthaginians or whatever? What was it about them that made them think their group, and their way of life, more civilised than all these others, and furthermore by and large persuaded these miscellaneous ‘barbarians’ to take the Greek view of the matter? Most importantly, given the flow of power relations through the ancient world, why did the Romans become philhellenes, rather than admirers of Etruscan, Punic or indeed Egyptian ways?

Western Europe likes to think itself an indirect heir of the Greeks; but the countless modern accounts of what the Greeks were like never ask, much less answer, this question. Rather, they simply trace the processes by which the Greeks produced so many pioneering contributions to Western civilisation, in mythology, politics, literature, the arts, architecture, philosophy and science. Part of the answer is thus given implicitly: for none of their contemporaries has laid by as vast a record of their cultural product as the Greeks—unless one counts the Romans, who chose to build on the Greek work, rather than replace it. Literacy could be seen as the Greeks’ secret weapon.

But this can’t be the whole answer. After all, literacy was a gift to them from the Phoenicians, who themselves were just the lately travelling sales representatives of a vast Middle Eastern range of literate societies, from Egypt at one end to Babylon and Elam at the other. But unlike the Phoenicians, the Greeks had chosen to use their literacy to record their culture: the ability to read Greek brought a vast range of original works in its wake. The result was that the Greeks had access to ‘the arts of civilisation’ in a way that could only impress others when they came into contact with them. Civilisation, after all, when combined with such delights as olive oil and wine, is apt to be attractive.

The question can be thrown one stage farther back: why was it that the Greeks, living on the lands that adjoined the Aegean Sea at the end of the Mediterranean, were able to develop and propagate arts of civilisation in this way? Any answer to this one becomes extremely speculative: but it is notable that the Greeks were the only language community around the Mediterranean where the groupings were large enough to form cities, but which, though literate, had no tendency to be agglomerated into larger states, and hence ultimately to be united into an empire. This may have been a result of the mountainous and island-studded environment in which they lived, making small communities easier to feed and defend than large ones: but it did mean that Greece became a vast competitive playground for cultural developments—developments that could spread to other Greeks if successful or attractive (as, for example, was Attic literature), but which would not tend to crowd each other out. In this sense, the early history of Greece can be seen as comparable to that of Europe after the Renaissance—a fertile marriage of competitive independence and good communications.

It is often, somewhat romantically, claimed that Greece’s greatest contribution to subsequent civilisation was the invention of democracy, the highest mechanism invented to realise eleuthería , ‘freedom’, always a virtue that the Greeks claimed to care for. This is certainly false: false as a theory of what appealed in Greek to outsiders confronted by it, and false as an account of what made Greek capable of spreading so far to the east and west of its homeland. It has already been pointed out that most Greek city-states were never democratic; and the larger states with Greek as their official language, established all over Egypt and much of Asia after conquests by Alexander, were without exception monarchies. They were bureaucratic states, where civic control by concerned citizens was not possible, nor even an ideal. They were also much bigger than any city-states had ever been. When the Greek language spread, it did not carry with it the properties that had possibly been crucial in the original creation of its attendant culture.