Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [127]
And despite the different means of achieving its spread, it was already eliciting some of the same attitudes that English evokes today. A political pamphlet of the fifth century had claimed that while Greeks in general used each their own dialect, Athenians spoke a mixture of all of them, and all barbarian languages too.1 In a comedy of the second century, written by the Macedonian Posidippus, a Thessalian (from the north of Greece) reproaches the Athenians for seeing all Greek as Attic. Athenians had some of the same problems in taking the rest of Greece seriously that Greeks in general had with the rest of the world. If they failed to speak proper Greek, they were, after all, no better than barbarians.*
Who is a Greek?
Tí dè tis? Tí d’ ou tis? Skiás ónar ánthrōpos.
What is someone? What is no one? A shadow’s dream is man.
Pindar, Pythian Odes, viii.95—6
Until their independence in AD 1821, the Greeks had only ever been united politically in the aftermath of joint conquest by some outsider. This happened for the first time in the fourth century BC, when the outsider was Philip, the king of Macedon on their northern border. Nevertheless, over the previous thousand years other civilisations encountering the Greeks appear always to have seen them as members of a single ethnic group.
In a way, this was strange, since outsiders always knew them simply by the tribal name of the group they happened to encounter. The Greeks’ shared name for themselves, Héllēnes, never caught on outside Greece.* The Persians knew them as Yauna, for their encounter was with the Ionian Greeks, who are called láwones in Homer, the earliest Greek in the tradition. † At the opposite end of the Greek world, the Romans got to know the Greeks as Graii. They were meeting Greek colonists from Euboea and Boeotia, who were setting up a new city of Cyme in Italy (later known by the Romans as Cumae). In fact, Graii seems to memorialise a small town in southern Boeotia called Graia. § The word Greek comes through the Latin Graecus, a straightforward adjective formed from this name (from Grai-icus), and came to take over from the original Graii.
What, then, was a Greek, by any of these appellations? Although the main criterion was language, there was a general feeling that Greeks had much more in common than that. In a famous passage of Herodotus, the Athenians are made to explain why they will never betray Greece.2 They advert to to Hellēnikón, ‘Greekness’, which is defined as having the same blood and the same language, common shrines of deities, common rituals and similar customs. Common blood, of course, was not something that could be proved or ascertained objectively, though there would have been a feeling for facial features and no doubt skin colour. Common language was evident through mutual intelligibility of all the Greek dialects. As for common service to common gods, the Olympian pantheon was validated in the narrative of the Homeric epics and other hymns, even if the actual practice of cults in different places could be quite unique. Respect for common oracles where prophetic insight could be sought, the most notable being Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, and attendance at the quadrennial Olympic games (whose records of victors extend back to 776 BC) were two other major institutions that bound the Greeks together.*
In fact, the Greeks always felt that there was a rational basis that set them apart from the bárbaroi, the rest of humanity, whose varying speech could just be thought of as an elaboration of ‘bar-bar’, hardly worth distinguishing from the noises made by animals, † Anything foreign was felt somehow to be ridiculous.
So the historian Herodotus describes the language of the Ethiopian Trogodytes (sic) as sounding like screeching bats,3 and in the midst of a serious tragedy4 Queen Clytaemnestra—admittedly a picture of condescending arrogance—conjectures that Cassandra, the Trojan princess,