Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [126]
Herodotus* viii. 142-4
ke tóra ti tha yénume xorís varvárus? i ánthropi aftí ísan my a kápya lísis.
And now what will become of us without barbarians? These people were some sort of a solution.
Constantine Kavafis, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1949,111.35-6
After the stately self-possession of Chinese and Egyptian, the sensuous prolixity of Sanskrit, and the innovative absolutisms of the Near Eastern languages, Greek makes a much more familiar, not to say modern, impression. This is the language of the people who brought wine, olive oil and literacy to the Mediterranean world, who invented logic, tragic drama and elective government, famed as much for competitive games as for figurative arts of striking realism. All of Europe became directly or indirectly their students. The dictionaries of European languages are all full of words borrowed from Greek to express Greek concepts and artefacts, and their grammars too, when they came to be written down, were organised on Greek principles.
Yet the history of the Greek language itself is far more complex and beguiling than its net influence would suggest. It was played out as much in the Near East as in the Mediterranean, in areas that are today all but purged of any trace of Greek. Like English, it was spread through a variety of means—speculative commerce, naked imperialism, cultural allure; and the means were very different in the long-term durability of what they achieved.
Above all, Greek stands as an example of a classical language that ran its course, fostered with a self-regarding arrogance that for over a thousand years its neighbours were happy to endorse, giving it their military support as they accepted the benefits of its more advanced culture and technology. These powerful, but impressed, neighbours included the Roman empire and the Christian Church. Greek’s influence was eclipsed only when it ran out of new alliances, and was forced to face alone an unsympathetic enemy which drew its cultural support elsewhere. It is an instructive example of what can happen to a prestige language when its community ceases to innovate, and the rest of the world catches up.
Greek at its acme
The high point of Greek expansion came for a century or so approaching the close of the first millennium BC. Then the language could be heard on the lips of merchants, diplomats and soldiers from Emporiai (modern Ampurias), a trading post in the north-east corner of modern Spain, to Palibothras (Pātaliputra, modern Patna) in India, a distance of 40,000 stadia, or 8,000 kilometres, approaching a quarter of the circumference of the globe. Within this range, and over 80 per cent of its extent, there was a continuous band of lands under Greek-speaking administration, all to the east of the Greek homeland in the south Balkans, and extending as far as what is now Pakistan. This total expanse of Greater Greece, the Hellenised world, had been built up over about seven hundred years, without the benefit of any technology but the ship, the shoe, the wheel, the road, the horse, and writing.
This de facto world language had a currency that ranged over half a dozen distinct empires and kingdoms of the time. Known as he koiné diálektos—’the common talk’—or simply the koinē, Attic Greek, the particular dialect of the city of Athens, had become current all over the eastern Mediterranean. In Greece too it was gradually replacing all the twenty dialects that had flourished up until the fourth century BC. Probably this levelling began through the commercial prestige of Athens itself, with Piraeus, its port, giving an Attic linguistic tinge to the hub of intra-Greek trade. Pericles, who had presided over Athens’ glory days in the mid-fifth century BC, had already boasted to his fellow-Athenians of a prosperity that allowed them to benefit from the produce of the whole earth.