Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [128]
There are many classic texts where Greeks have set out their ideals. Outstanding among them is Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ Speech for the War Dead made in 431 BC.5 Pericles was the leader of Athens who built the Parthenon and led the city into its great war against Sparta. This speech is an attempt to summarise Athens’ contribution to civilisation, not claiming that the city was like others, but rather setting them an example (parádeigma). He talks of a free approach to politics which is open to all, however poor, of tolerance in private life, of the enjoyment of public entertainments. He glories in the city’s military accomplishments, but no less in the fact that they do not (unlike their main enemy, Sparta) make a fetish of military preparedness. All lies in striking the right balance; in a very Greek phrase, he says:
philokalo$uTmen met’ euteleías kaì philosopho$uTmen áneu malakías
we are beauty-lovers with a sense of economy, and wisdom-lovers without softness.
Overall, he said, the whole city of Athens was an education to Greece.6 Art, value for money, wisdom and physical prowess: that is what Athens liked to think it stood for. (And as for love of wisdom, Greek does not easily distinguish between philosophy and appreciation of cleverness.)
Evidently, these reflected an optimistic statement of Athenian ideals. Beautiful and wise deeds were not conspicuous in the conduct of the war that followed, and which indeed Athens went on to lose. Nevertheless, Pericles had been right to see Athens as an education to Greece: although it gradually lost political importance in the century that followed his speech, it never lost its status as the focus of Greek culture. It remained a city where serious students would come to study for the next thousand years, always in Greek, even though they might come from anywhere in the Roman empire, or beyond.
In fact Athens’ intellectual leadership lasted until Christianity came to resent its continuing self-confidence and fidelity to its pre-Christian open-mindedness. The Roman emperor Justinian closed the school at Athens in AD 529. But the pre-eminence of its language remained, throughout the eastern Mediterranean, for another thousand years.
What kind of a language?
Andròs kharaktēGr ek lógou gnōrízetai
A man’s type is recognised from his words.
Menander7
$ēTthos anthr$ōApōi daímōn
Character for man is fate.
Heraclitus8
The language that so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries was a complex organism that made few concessions, if any, to foreign learners. Its words were polysyllabic, with complex clusters of consonants (phthárthai, ‘to be destroyed’, tlēmonéstatos, ‘most wretched’, stlengís, ‘scraper’ (used with oil at bath-time), sphrāgídion, ‘signet ring’, gliskhrós, ‘sticky’).
Speakers needed to tell long vowels from short, plain consonants from breathy ones, and be able to manage elaborate systems of prefixes and suffixes, where an ordinary noun would have nine different forms, and an adjective nineteen, and a verb well over two hundred. There were, of course, regularities in the system, but they fought a losing battle: there were ten major patterns for nouns, ten more for adjectives, and besides ten different patterns for verbs, there were well over 350 individual verbs that were irregular somewhere. These complex inflexions, taken together with the tendency to compound terms (as seen in Pericles’ remarks quoted), meant that words could become very long, a characteristic that sometimes amused the Greeks themselves: the longest on record, a term for