Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [130]
Héllenos d’ egénonto philoptolemou basilēos | D&$oTbar;rós te Xo$uTthós te kai Aíolos hippiokhármēs
And of war-loving king Hellēn were born | Dōrus and Xuthus and Aeolus the chariot-fighter.
Xuthus then had two sons of his own, Ion and Achaeus. This neatly accounted for the origin of the four major dialect groups recognised in antiquity, namely Aeolic, Doric, Ionic and Achaean. These major groupings were felt to define the highest level of kinship among the Greeks as a whole, and they have something in common with the dialect relationships recognised when Greek inscriptions began to be studied objectively in modern times: at least Ionic, Aeolic and Doric are major groups. The main supplement needed is to recognise an Arcado-Cyprian group, since the dialects of Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and Cyprus are almost identical, and very different from the neighbouring Dorian dialects in Sparta and Crete. Theories about how the different groups came to occupy their various parts of Greece remain purely speculative.
One of the important features of Greek culture was a tendency to formalise its linguistic productions, thereby creating styles and genres in which writers could go on to compose consciously. So heroic lays were pulled together and integrated, producing the epic style consummated by Homer. Travellers’ tales were organised and then presented as the first works of geography and history. Choral songs sung for inspiration at public gatherings, such as athletic games, were preserved as lyric poetry. Religious liturgy, which had been performed regularly to expound and enact the myths of particular gods, was transformed into drama; the celebrants would now be seen as actors, their words not rituals but examinations of the situations set up in the ancient stories. This gave rise to the first tragedy. Above all, the public discussions of city policy, and examinations of those suspected of crimes, became regularised into the practice of public speaking: training was given by those who were particularly interested in it, and the field of rhetoric was born, probably the most influential intellectual discipline in ancient Western history. Other conversations, on more general themes, when written up became the foundation of philosophy.*
A striking characteristic of most of these early products of Greek literature (all well established by the end of the fourth century BC) is their ‘public’ character: they arise from language used in a public context, and they are largely about matters of public concern.* This is of a piece with the political context of early Greek history: although the constitutions of the different poleis were very varied, and very few were egalitarian democracies, a common property of the societies was openness. Open assemblies were frequent, and the expectation was that all citizens (excluding women, children, slaves and foreigners) would take an active part—if only as a member of a mob—in the political life of the community. Greek, therefore, began its spread as a language for the public-spirited. And in much the same way as one sees in the political media in modern democracies, the pursuit of public affairs becomes the stuff of mass entertainment: on one famous occasion, an orator in the Athenian assembly accused his public of being theataì mèn t&$oTbar;n lógōn, akroataì dè t&$oTbar;n érg&$oTbar;n, ‘spectators of speeches, listeners to events’, i.e. paying more attention to what they were told, and how it was said, than to their own common sense.11
The outward-looking nature of the Greek-speeking community is worth contrasting with that of another prestige language, which was spreading at much the same time—Sanskrit. Both languages developed significant theories of language use. But Sanskrit’s theory, as we have seen, was aimed at preservation of the details of religious texts; as such, it was focused on the minutiae of the language’s grammar and pronunciation, with little to offer