Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [146]
Western Europe likes to think itself an indirect heir of the Greeks; but the countless modern accounts of what the Greeks were like never ask, much less answer, this question. Rather, they simply trace the processes by which the Greeks produced so many pioneering contributions to Western civilisation, in mythology, politics, literature, the arts, architecture, philosophy and science. Part of the answer is thus given implicitly: for none of their contemporaries has laid by as vast a record of their cultural product as the Greeks—unless one counts the Romans, who chose to build on the Greek work, rather than replace it. Literacy could be seen as the Greeks’ secret weapon.
But this can’t be the whole answer. After all, literacy was a gift to them from the Phoenicians, who themselves were just the lately travelling sales representatives of a vast Middle Eastern range of literate societies, from Egypt at one end to Babylon and Elam at the other. But unlike the Phoenicians, the Greeks had chosen to use their literacy to record their culture: the ability to read Greek brought a vast range of original works in its wake. The result was that the Greeks had access to ‘the arts of civilisation’ in a way that could only impress others when they came into contact with them. Civilisation, after all, when combined with such delights as olive oil and wine, is apt to be attractive.
The question can be thrown one stage farther back: why was it that the Greeks, living on the lands that adjoined the Aegean Sea at the end of the Mediterranean, were able to develop and propagate arts of civilisation in this way? Any answer to this one becomes extremely speculative: but it is notable that the Greeks were the only language community around the Mediterranean where the groupings were large enough to form cities, but which, though literate, had no tendency to be agglomerated into larger states, and hence ultimately to be united into an empire. This may have been a result of the mountainous and island-studded environment in which they lived, making small communities easier to feed and defend than large ones: but it did mean that Greece became a vast competitive playground for cultural developments—developments that could spread to other Greeks if successful or attractive (as, for example, was Attic literature), but which would not tend to crowd each other out. In this sense, the early history of Greece can be seen as comparable to that of Europe after the Renaissance—a fertile marriage of competitive independence and good communications.
It is often, somewhat romantically, claimed that Greece’s greatest contribution to subsequent civilisation was the invention of democracy, the highest mechanism invented to realise eleuthería, ‘freedom’, always a virtue that the Greeks claimed to care for. This is certainly false: false as a theory of what appealed in Greek to outsiders confronted by it, and false as an account of what made Greek capable of spreading so far to the east and west of its homeland. It has already been pointed out that most Greek city-states were never democratic; and the larger states with Greek as their official language, established all over Egypt and much of Asia after conquests by Alexander, were without exception monarchies. They were bureaucratic states, where civic control by concerned citizens was not possible, nor even an ideal. They were also much bigger than any city-states had ever been. When the Greek language spread, it did not carry with it the properties that had possibly been crucial in the original creation of its attendant culture.
Indeed, a major property of Greek culture, throughout its long continuous history since