Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [139]
Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning
eukharisteĩn oudeĩs t$oTbar;n dokím$oTn eĩpen, allà khárin eidénai.
None of the classics said ’eukharisteĩn’ (meaning ‘thank’) but ’khárin eidénai’.
Phrynichus Arabius, v.6 (second century AD)
eukharist$oTbar; t$oTbar;i thé$oTbar;i pántote perì hum$oTbar;n, epì tŋbar;i kháriti to$uT theo$uT dot-heísēi humĩn en Khrist$oTbar;i Iēso$uT.
I thank (eukharist$oTbar;) God always for you, for the grace of God given to you in Jesus Christ.
St Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians, i.4 (first century AD)
Greek speakers have always held particularly strongly to their literary heritage, and this is one reason why their language has remained unitary over so many centuries, despite once being so widely spread around the world. But they have always interpreted it extremely narrowly, not so much as a living tradition, but as an unchanging (and unattainable) canon of classic authors, the main Athenian (’Attic’) writers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC*
This provided a clear basis for education, and a model for writing and formal speech. But it meant that really good style was unattainable (and increasingly unintelligible) once the language had begun to change, as of course it immediately did. So, from the third century BC, correct diction was never distinguishable from archaising pedantry. To some extent, this can be seen as a meritocratic policy in a language that was being used all round the Mediterranean and Near East: native speakers and second-language learners were more on a par when nobody was a natural speaker of the best Greek. But more importantly, it implied that nobody without an extensive literary background would ever be accepted as cultured. Greek has always fostered a disputatious culture, and the cult of ‘Atticism’ has been queried, criticised, parodied and reviled throughout the last 2500 years—but all to no avail.
As we have seen, it was not as if there was no other standard, of a more de facto, indeed demotic, nature: Attic Greek had almost immediately given rise to the more accessible koinébar;, close to Attic in its forms, defined in usage, and intelligible wherever Greek was spoken. But for all its utility, it had no class. And in the pre-modern world where status was bound up with literacy—and without mass education literacy would always be for the few—this mattered.
Occasionally, though, a kind of inverted snobbery prevailed. The Greek language had spread round the Roman empire to others than the educated elite. The Jewish community in Rome spoke Greek until the fourth century AD.26 In the early centuries of the first millennium AD, a number of mystery religions were spreading from the eastern provinces, Egypt, Syria and Asia, most famously the cults of Isis, Mithras and Jesus Christ. All adopted Greek as their ritual language.27 They were attracting converts first among the poor and downtrodden of the empire. And for all of them, the authority of the Greek classics, whose gods, if any, were the imagined residents of Mount Olympus, was no authority at all.
Yet, for Christianity at least, this did not mean that they rejected the authority of written literature. With its origins in the Jewish tradition, the Christian faith soon began writing and recognising its own scriptures, primarily in Greek, although later there were vernacular texts written in Aramaic in Syria, Coptic in Egypt and Ge’ez in Ethiopia—and of course Latin. Language for the early Christians seems universally to have been chosen to maximise access, without thought for the privileged status of any particular code. But this meant that there was the beginning of a new canon for Greek literature, and one based—for the first time in four centuries—on popular usage.*
We have already remarked on the ‘Shield of Faith’ phenomenon, the way in which religions, particularly those of west Asian origin, have contributed to the survival of the languages