Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [140]
These extensions in fact tended to undo the change to Greek linguistic sense that was at first brought about by the new informal literature. Here Christianity was a victim of its own success. In the time of its growth, the struggle to maintain the empire’s vast edifice of a single administration for western Europe and the whole Mediterranean was becoming harder and harder. Rulers looked for a new means of securing loyalty over the vast domains. The major insight of the emperor Constantine was that this could be found in Christianity. In 330 he reorganised an increasingly regionalised empire around a new capital at Byzantium, henceforth Constantinople (Kōnstantinoúpolis), and he made it a Christian foundation.
This set the crown on the social advancement of Christianity. For over a century it had begun to attract converts of a new kind. Clement of Alexandria (born in AD 150), for example, had used his extensive classical education to write a Protreptikós, or ‘Encourager’, attempting to argue Greeks out of paganism and into Christianity, and then went on to build a logical system on top of the Christian lógos. Origen (185-255) had been a textual critic of the Bible, and Eusebius (260-339) the first historian of the Church. Such characteristically Greek academics had been well able to write in the classical style. But now the Church would also attract the general ranks of those seeking preferment in the temporal world, or indeed simply seeking to assert their due as members of distinguished families. The result was a full-blooded return to the old Atticising tendency. Ecclesiastical Greek was firmly reinstated in the classical tradition, and was never again tempted to deviate from it. The empire’s increasing tendency to proscribe paganism, defined to include all pre-Christian philosophy, culminated in Justinian’s closure of the School of Athens in 529. But the survival of Attic style was never in doubt.
This conviction of Greeks that, in writing, the very old ways were the best ways turned out to be as deeply rooted as the empire itself. People were still attempting to write in some tolerable version of classical Attic when in 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, over a thousand years later.
Intimations of decline
The story of Greek for the next thousand years is one of infrequent, but sudden and massive, retrenchments, as the vast extent built up in the late first millennium BC was pushed back at the edges. In the western Mediterranean, where Greek’s empire had never been a temporal one, this loss of parts of the Greek language community came about simply because the focus of culture shifted: an education in Greek ceased to be part of western European education, and contacts with the east became much rarer. But elsewhere these withdrawals were caused quite directly by military defeats.
In the West Roman Empire, where Latin was dominant, the military defeats that diminished and soon extinguished the empire politically were to have only very limited effects on language. (See Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 304.) But in the east, the effect of the defeats was much simpler. Hostile forces took charge, and after a decent interval—often of many generations—Greek was no longer to be heard or seen.
Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia
The first area to go was over to the far east: Iran and Afghanistan, down to the Indus valley. Seleucid control here was not long secure, but for the first century after the death of Alexander (323 BC) the competition came mainly from other Macedonian and Greek kings, who would not dispute the spread of Greek. By 260 BC the Indo-Greeks in Bactria, first led by Diodotus, had declared themselves