Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [131]
Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement
The Greek language was spread from its historic home, the southern Balkan peninsula and Aegean islands, through two processes, one piecemeal, long lasting and diffuse in its direction, the other organised, sudden and breathtakingly coherent. One is usually known as the Greek colonisation movement; the other is Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire.
The first process, the colonisation of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts by Greek cities, lasted from the middle of the eighth to the early fifth century BC. The question why, of all the inhabitants of these shores, only the Greeks and the Phoenicians set up independent centres in this way has never been answered. The foundations clearly served a variety of purposes, as political safety valves, as trading posts for raw materials, and as opportunities to apply Greek agriculture to more abundant and less heavily populated soil, but it is noteworthy that they are exclusively coastal, never moving inland except on the island of Sicily. The Greek expansion came after the period of Phoenician settlements (eleventh to eighth centuries), so it may be that the most important factor was who had effective control of the sea. Although by the end of the period almost all available Mediterranean coasts had been populated, it was the western end which loomed largest in the Greek conception of what had been achieved: southern Italy and Sicily, par excellence, made up Megálē Héllas, ‘Great Greece’, usually named in Latin Magna Graecia.
Different cities tended to specialise in different strips of coastline. Among the Ionians, Chalcis and Eretria went for south-western Italy and northeastern Sicily; Phocaea (itself a city on the edge of Lydia) took the coasts of modern Spain, Corsica and France, including Massalia (now Marseilles).* The south Aegean city of Miletus covered the whole perimeter of the Black Sea, with nineteen colonies.
Achaeans largely took over the south-eastern coast of Italy. This country is popularly supposed to have been given its name by the Greeks: Italia would be the land of (w)italoí, ‘yearling cattle’, a dialectal variant of etaloí, later borrowed in fact into Latin as vituli, and still with us in the word veal.
Among the Dorians, Corinth, Megara and Rhodes all targeted Sicily again, but this time the south-east and south. Sparta placed one colony only, on the instep of Italy (Táras, the modern Taranto).† Besides its role in Sicily, Megara also specialised in the south-east of the Black Sea, including the most fateful foundation of all, Búzas, a thousand years later chosen as a new capital for the Roman empire, Byzantium§ or Constantinople. Uniquely, Thera headed south to found a colony on the African coast at Cyrene.¶
Although colonies (apoikíai—literally ‘homes-from-home’) were generally led by a ‘home-builder’, oikistébar;s, from the ‘mother city’ or mētrópolis—with whom there would be a historic and emotional, though not political or military, bond—their founding populations might be recruited from a number of cities, so the new foundations could be quite mixed in population, although less so in dialect. The inscriptions suggest that the language spoken was almost always close to that of the metropolis.12 One could compare the continued dominance of English in North America, even though English colonists were outnumbered by speakers of other languages in the nineteenth century (see p. 492).
The immediate effects of