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

As for the Germans, the Greeks tended to confuse them with the Celts: after all, they all lived somewhere to the north-west, and no one had yet thought to look for significant differences among such impenetrably barbarous tongues. [833]For the ancients, clear distinguishing features could only be cultural; linguistically, the best that could be done was to note that one tribe had difficulty understanding another.

Even writing in the first century AD, after Caesar had subdued Gaul up to the Rhine, the Greek Strabo could not give much of a description of the Germans. [451]Living to the east of the Rhine, they were wilder, bigger and fairer than the Celts, but otherwise very similar. In fact, so quintessentially similar did they appear to Strabo that he etymologised their name Germani , as the Latin for ‘out and out [Celts]’. Caesar seems to have been responsible for setting the Rhine as a divider, but there is precious little evidence, archaeological or inscriptional, to back up his distinction, and he probably took the river as a convenient natural boundary to his conquests. Nevertheless, this did soon become the permanent boundary of the Roman empire, which meant that henceforth Gauls and Germans would be politically, if not ethnically, divided along this line.

Caesar’s view was that German society was simpler than that of the Gauls, without agriculture but more polarised around military prowess, and less capable of forming large-scale communities. In this he may have uncovered the secret of the Germans’ long-term success in fending off Roman conquest.

A century and a half later, the basic separation between Gaul and German at the Rhine was reiterated by Tacitus in his treatise Germania , although he noted that there were a few German tribes who had crossed over. He also provided the classic treatment of the character of German society, as Posidonius and Caesar had done for Gaul. He saw them as a society of small isolated families, feeling crowded if they could see their neighbours’ chimney smoke even in the distance, and coming together only for the ennobling purpose of glory in war. He rather admired their egalitarian upbringing, physical fitness in harsh conditions, and simple morality.

We now know, on the basis of contemporary Gaulish inscriptions, and the subsequent development of the languages into the distinct families of Celtic and Germanic, that there were substantive linguistic divisions between Celt and German. There are monumental inscriptions in discernibly Celtic languages (in Iberian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman scripts) from the first centuries BC and AD from all over northern Iberia, Gaul, northern Italy and even (though only of Celtic names) in southern Germany, at Manching on the Danube. Likewise, discernibly Germanic inscriptions (written in the runic alphabet) have been found on small portable items such as weapons and safety pins ( fibulae ), from Slovenia in the first century BC to Denmark two hundred years later. From the extremely sketchy evidence we have, it seems that Caesar’s Gallic/Germanic distinction was real, but that there was a major overlap of the languages’ spheres in the area that today comprises western Germany and Austria.

More interesting than the Greeks’ failure to distinguish the essence of the Gaul and the German was their evolving attitude to the Romans, the third contender for linguistic spread over western Europe.

There is nothing to pre-figure the destiny of Rome in classical Greek literature. The first surviving mention of the city is from the fourth century BC, in a fragment of Aristotle. [451]He also mentions their neighbours the Oscans ( ’Opikoí , also called Aúsones’ ) in a global discussion of the origins of communal dining, quoting chroniclers of the Greek colonists. But he does not mention the radically new constitution that the Romans had adopted in the past century, abolishing kings and instituting a republic under the balanced equality of two elected consuls.

Evidently, the first Greeks to encounter Latin speakers would have been colonists: they probably saw them as a bit of local colour among the Etruscans who controlled the landward side of the Greek settlements at Pithecusae (Ischia) and Kyme (Cumae). It would have been Greek colonists then who, over five hundred years, witnessed the gradual emergence of Rome, chief city of the region of Latium, from domination by Etruscans to independence and then commanding influence among the indigenous nations of Italy. There is a story [451]that in 323 BC the Romans sent one of the many deputations that went to Babylon to congratulate Alexander, the new master of the Persian empire. If true, it probably shows that they had heard rumours that he next planned to turn his conquering attentions to the west. This was 150 years before the Romans had any serious interests in the eastern Mediterranean.

Greeks were fascinated by Rome’s winning ways in global politics, and characteristically began to theorise some sort of explanation. Polybius had made the best of his deportation from Greece to Italy in 167 BC (his father had been a prominent Achaean politician) by getting to know the Roman elite: he then devoted much of his life to writing an account of ‘how and by what kind of government almost the whole inhabited world was brought under Roman rule …’ [451]In the event, although he knew many of the Roman protagonists or their children and grandchildren, and reconstructed a meticulous narrative of events and motives since 220 BC, he offers no simple answer to his question. But he does stress the moral impression made by the Romans: ‘Italians in general have a natural advantage over Phoenicians and Africans both in physical strength and personal courage, but at the same time their institutions contribute very powerfully towards fostering a spirit of bravery in their young men.’ [451]He also cites the Roman fear of divine retribution after death, superstition though it may be, as fostering honesty: ‘At any rate, the result is that among the Greeks, apart from anything else, men who hold public office cannot be trusted with the safekeeping of so much as a single talent, even if they have ten accountants and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, whereas among the Romans their magistrates handle large sums of money and scrupulously perform their duty because they have given their word on oath.’ [451]Less cultivated the Romans might be; but there was something about them that impressed the Greeks.

Two hundred years later, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor and Gaul had been added to Roman domains, and Roman dominance must have come to seem a fact of nature. Nevertheless, even then Greeks did not think of the Romans as quite on a par with themselves. Strabo, in the midst of a review of the geography of the whole world, still sees southern Italy outside the remaining Greek enclaves of Tarentum, Naples and Rhegium as barbarian territory, explicitly because it has been taken over by Romans. [451]

Ironically, this southern region was the area of Italy that had retained its own language until the first century BC, a language known as Oscan to the Romans, Opic to the Greeks. This language, related to Latin but as different from it as German is from English, had once been spoken far more widely than Latin; it had been the language, for example, of the Romans’ early rivals, the Sabines (whose women the Romans had famously stolen) and the Samnites.

In fact, when they wanted to put them down, the Greeks liked to refer to their Roman masters as Opikoí. ‘They keep calling us barbarians and insult us more foully than others with the name of opics,’ the proverbially stiff Marcus Cato complained. [451]The point of this slur seems to have been lack of education, since the word was being borrowed back into Latin as a byword for illiteracy. Juvenal talks about a pedantic lady telling off her ‘opic’ girlfriend for using the wrong word.’ [465]‘Opic’ was malapropic. This was another cruel irony. Had they forgotten that the first poet to adapt Greek metrics for use in Roman poetry had himself been an Oscan speaker, Quintus Ennius? Ennius had liked to boast that his three languages gave him three hearts. [451]His mother tongue had been Oscan, as he grew up in Calabria, in the heel of Italy; he knew Greek, because his local big city was Tarentum; and he had learnt Latin serving in the Roman army in the war against Hannibal. Two hundred and fifty years later, the last faint echoes of Oscan could still be heard, in the annual mime shows at Rome. [451]