Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [136]
Greek seems to have remained a language for the ruling elite in Egypt. Although the literature that came out of Alexandria (which is copious) developed new genres for talking in prose and verse about picturesque features of everyday life, the everyday life talked about always seems to be somewhere else, more traditionally Greek, such as in the Aegean islands or perhaps in Syracuse. The last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, who ruled from 51 to 30 BC, is said to have been the first of them to learn Egyptian.18 So it was still worth learning; the popular language, even after three hundred years of Greek government, was still Egyptian.
Documentation of actual ancient correspondence is more copious here than anywhere else in the ancient world, because of the general use of papyrus, and the preservative power of the dry soils away from the Nile valley. These give occasional glimpses of how the use of Greek was perceived from outside the charmed circle of the immigrant Hellenes. So in the mid-third century BC, a couple of generations after the conquest, a letter to Zenon, the Carian manager of a farm in the Fayŭm, complains (in Greek) that he is despised because he cannot speak Greek, or literally ‘Hellenise’ (hellēnízein).
In a way, the area least changed immediately by the new dispensation was Anatolia. But its conversion was to be the most long-lasting among Alexander’s new provinces. We know from inscriptions and coins that the penetration of Aramaic had been variable here: strongest in Cilicia (the south-eastern region bordering its homeland in Syria), weakest on the southwestern coasts, Lydia and Phrygia, and with some presence in bilingualism with Greek on the Black Sea. (See Chapter 3, ‘Aramaic—the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia’, p. 78.) The Greeks had been an influential presence on the periphery for at least a thousand years. They were now installed throughout, in what D. Musti calls a ‘military monarchy’, but allowing ‘a privileged relationship for cities (póleis) and a much-trumpeted respect for their freedom and democracy (eleuthería kaì dēmokratía).’19
Although the Greek administration of the Seleucids was not to last more than two hundred years before yielding to the Romans, the language situation was much more consistent. For the next thousand years, Greek spread relentlessly, supplanting the local languages of the south coast and the interior. One example: although we still find inscriptions in Phrygian until the third century AD, local peasants’ votive tablets to Zeus (available even to poor people because of the availability of marble offcuts from the quarry at Dokimeion) are from the second century AD all in Greek.20
And there was a hidden symmetry in this sudden spread of Greek into the east, for the Aramaic that remained Greek’s principal competitor throughout the old Persian empire was a close relative of the Phoenician or, in Latin, Punic language, Greek’s main competitor in the colonial world of the Mediterranean’s western shores. Indeed, the two Semitic sisters had originated within a hundred miles of each other, their foci at Tyre and Damascus, in the west and centre of northern Syria. It was as if the entire region from Cadiz beyond the Pillars of Heracles to the banks of the Indus was now the field for a simple two-sided competition, between the Greek koinē and an alliance of Semitic twin sisters.
As one might expect from the self-centred Greeks, they never noticed.*