Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [147]
We can see that what Greek had to offer was highly attractive in the context of the ancient world. Even those whose careers were dedicated to limiting and diminishing Greek influence nevertheless took as much as they could from it: the Kushāna kings of Afghanistan, who went on using Greek on their coinage after unseating Greek kings; the Parthian and Armenian courtiers entertaining themselves with Greek tragedies, even as their armies were besting the Greeks’ Roman students; the Carthaginian generals who used Greek to communicate with their own forces of mercenaries. The Greeks were undoubtedly the Great Communicators of the Mediterranean world.
But the agents who spread this undoubtedly attractive commodity round the oikouménē, the inhabited world, were seldom actually Greek. The spread of the Greek language is, rather, an object lesson in the effectiveness of hitching a ride. Macedon was beyond the pale of the Greek language community; yet its king planted Greek-speaking colonies all the way to the boundaries of India. Aramaic was the language of Greece’s greatest foe, the Persian empire; yet the two-hundred-year-old use of it as a chancery language across the empire meant that there was a clear model for Greeks to follow in seeding a Greek-based communications network round their newly won domains. Two hundred years later Rome, and with it Latin, was taking the whole Mediterranean rim by storm; yet Greek, the language of colonies in southern Italy, was accepted into a kind of equality with Latin, and went on to become the true cultural milieu of the Roman empire—in the sense that no cultivated inhabitant of the empire could be without it. Two hundred years later still, the new brooms sweeping the empire were mystery religions, especially Christianity; yet although none of them originated in Greece, their language of preference was Greek, and so Greek built an indissoluble link with the greatest movement of the late Roman empire, the Christian Church. By a final stroke of good fortune, this same movement, now specialised as Christian Orthodoxy, turned out to be the key to preserving Greek through four centuries of Turkish domination, after the dissolution of the Roman empire in the east. Greek thus owes its remarkable career to help from its friends, at every crucial turning point of the last 2300 years.
Yet curiously, for all its close relationship with other cultural powers (military, administrative and spiritual), Greek has been highly resistant to influence from others with which it has been in contact. We have already seen that out in the farthest eastern reaches Greek was prepared to take on loan words for interesting new substances from India;* but the influence of its bedfellow language Aramaic was negligible. In the west, its five centuries of cohabitation with Latin as a principal language of the Roman empire led to a crop of borrowings to designate official and military matters, administration and finance (for example, names of months, coins, ranks, military ranks, taxes) but hardly any day-to-day words.* Many words where one might have expected borrowings, such as consul, senātus, Augustus, imperātor, are in fact usually translated: húpatos (literally ‘topmost’), gerousía (’gathering of old men’), Sebastós (’reverend’), autokrátōr (’self-controller’). Likewise, the Christian and other mystery religions’ adoption of Greek left it surprisingly