Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [132]
The colonies in fact became bridgeheads for Greek culture into the western Mediterranean and Black Sea; and this separate scattered Greek presence continued for close on a thousand years. Strabo, at the end of the first century BC, wrote: ‘But now except for Taras and Rhegion and Neapolis [Taranto, Reggio and Naples], all [of Magna Graecia] has been “barbarised out”,§ and some parts are taken by Lucanians and Bruttians, and others by Campanians. But that is just in name; in fact by Romans—for that is what they have become.’13 The three cities mentioned are supposed to have retained their Greekness for another couple of centuries. And Greek is spoken to this day in the extreme toe and heel of Italy in two tiny enclaves: Bovesia in Calabria (south-east of Reggio), and the villages Calimera and Martano south of Lecce in Puglia.
The colonies played a cardinal role in introducing neighbouring peoples of Gaul and Italy to writing: from Massalia on the French Riviera, Gauls learnt to write their own language in Greek characters; Pithecusae (Ischia) and Cumae on the south-western coast taught the Etruscans first of Campania, and hence of the whole centre and north of Italy; a little farther south, Paestum (Poseidonia) could pass literacy on to the Oscans in Lucania, and over in the heel, Taras to the Messapians in Calabria. Most significant of all was one indirect path of such education: as well as many others in north Italy (for example, the Insubrian Gauls in the foothills of the Alps), the Etruscans went on to teach their great adversaries the Romans to read and write. Through an elaborate cascade of successful conquests and commercial infiltrations over the next twenty-seven centuries, the Roman alphabet has become the most widely used in the world at large.
The alphabets that were passed on in this way were not today’s Greek alphabet, which was to be effectively standardised in Athens in 403-402 BC,* and then adopted throughout Greece in the next generation.† At this earlier time in Greek history (from the eighth century BC), there were still competing variants favoured by different dialects, and most of the cities with colonies in Italy favoured the so-called Western alphabet, in which H was used to represent the aspirate consonant ‘aitch’, X not $XI was used to represent [ks], the letters θ $XI Φ PΩ were dropped, but F and Q were retained.§ This was the alphabet taken up by the Italians, though, as usual in an age before mass-produced writing, in various local versions. (Lepontic, Etruscan, Os-can, Umbrian, Faliscan and Messapian all had alphabets distinct from Latin’s.)
Another cultural, and economic, boon of the Greek expansion was wine, now passed on to a very welcoming western Mediterranean—probably along with another luxury liquid, olive oil. Justin (43.4) represents the Phocaeans who founded Massalia as teaching the surrounding Gauls not just civic and urban life, but also how to tend vines.¶ Here again, it may be that indirect influence was more powerful than direct, for it is known that the Romans, who had learnt of the vine from the Greeks, were extremely active in promoting it when they moved into Gaul, superseding the Greeks by taking it far beyond the Mediterranean coast.
At the other end of the then Greek world,