Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [150]
§ For all its stately sound, this name (Buzántion) is just the diminutive of Búzas, as if Hongkers had become the official name of Hong Kong.
¶ Cyrene, founded c.630, specialised in the growth and export of sílphion, a medicinal plant. But Greek was also to be heard farther east on the African shore, where a rather different kind of enterprise was established. Naucratis, ‘Sea-Queen’, was a pan-Hellenic emporium in the Nile delta, a centre for trade with the Egyptian market, in a trading concession allowed by the pharaoh. The initiative here had come from Ionian Greeks, from Miletus and Samos, conveniently sited just to the north. (See Chapter 4.)
* This early Greek range is very different from the genres of medieval and modern European literature. There is no novel, no essay, no fantasy literature. Neither is there any literature devoted to religious devotion. As it happens, the first three of these were all Greek inventions too, but from a much later period, in the first centuries AD, when Greece was an enforced part of the Roman empire, and there was no serious expectation of a public career or public responsibilities. Affluent individuals were then free to explore more personal concerns, to write romances, and descriptions of personal adventures. Likewise, explorations of individual religious experience were alien to the Greek spirit in these earlier days, although they were later to become central after the spread of Christianity. The religious outpourings of the earlier period take the form of hymns to the Olympian gods, with an emphasis on recounting their myths.
† Greek analysis of grammar was essentially complete when Dionysius the Thracian, working in Alexandria, the intellectual centre of Greece at the time, published his compilation of Stoic and Alexandrian work as Tékhnē Grammalik$ēA at the beginning of the first century BC.
* An exception to this tendency for indigenous populations to survive Greek settlement was Sicily, where the Greek presence must have been particularly dense. They had at least thirteen separate colonies there, and the western end of the island was in the hands of another foreign incomer, Carthage, with three more. Nevertheless, the pre-existing Sicans, Elymians and Sicels had been very much a factor when land was originally sought for the new cities.
† Such political fame as they acquired was associated with experiments in tyrannous megalomania, notably those of Dionysius of Syracuse (430-367 BC) and Agathocles of Acragas (361-284 BC), both of whom organised Greek wars against Carthage with zero net effect.
§ ekbebarbarōsthai: it had been two hundred years since Rome had conquered Greece, and begun its attempt to assimilate its culture; yet a Greek—and one educated at Rome at that—still classed Romans as barbarians.
* This was a significant year for Athens, the first year of restored democracy after its conclusive defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.
† Athens adopted the Ionic alphabet as used in Miletus, in preference to their own ‘Attic’ style, which had not distinguished long E (H—eta) and long O (Ω—omega) from their short versions.
§ Q (qoppa) was originally a back [k] used before back vowels [o] and [u]. Early inscriptions use FH to represent [f], since F was originally a sign for [w] or [v]. Most of the Ionic dialects (including those at Miletus and Athens) had lost this sound, hence its disappearance from the offical Greek alphabet. But there is a bizarre twist here. Chalcis and Eretria, which founded Pithecusae and Cumae, actually spoke Ionic dialects, and so might have been expected to drop F in writing