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By Root 486 0

Xerxes had tried and failed to end the independence of the Greek city-states across the Aegean (although they had quite easily tamed the Greek cities that bordered Anatolia), another power succeeded where Persia failed. Philip of Macedon reduced all of European Greece, claiming all the while to be a Greek himself. This claim, made on grounds of language and culture, is surprisingly difficult to substantiate, since hardly a word of the Macedonian language has survived.56 But his son Alexander, perhaps with an aggression that stemmed from insecurity,† decided to demonstrate his belonging by undertaking to avenge the affront that the Greeks had suffered when the Persians tried to invade. (Not that this prevented him, after the reigning king of Persia had been assassinated by his own people, from claiming to the Persians that he was the rightful successor.)

Within the ten years 333-323 BC he had succeeded totally. Although he had not campaigned in every province, the vast Persian empire, including its extremities in Egypt and Afghanistan, was now a possession of the royal house of Macedon. Macedonians stayed in control of the Persian and Mesopotamian part for almost two hundred years, yielding to Arsaces, first of the Parthians, only in 140 BC.

It is likely that in this ‘Hellenistic’ period the Middle East was in fact governed in a mixture of languages, the new masters’ Greek competing with the old masters’ Aramaic. (See Chapter 6, ‘Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war’, p. 243.) Aramaic clearly held its ground far better in Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, where it had at least five hundred more years of background than in Anatolia and Iran, where it had only been established as a language of government by the King of Kings’ fiat, a bare two hundred years before. In addition, after Alexander’s conquest, Greek settlement would have been much heavier in Anatolia, already surrounded as it was by Greek colonies on its coasts, than in Iran, far beyond the Taurus and Zagros mountains, even if Persia’s Royal Road from Sardis in Lydia to Persepolis meant that the area already enjoyed better communications than anywhere else in the known world.

This led to rather different subsequent careers for Greek in these different parts of Alexander’s empire. Greek remained as no more than a lingua franca in the centre and east. The Greek administration here was ended by the rise of the Parthians (from eastern Iran, and speaking a language close to Persian) in the second century BC, and this put an end to official status for Greek. It seems that there may have been a return to a language situation rather like the early years of the Persian empire, with Aramaic continuing for all practical purposes in Mesopotamia, but a form of Persian now in use farther east.

In the west, by contrast, Greek had fully replaced the previous languages (notably Lydian, Lycian and Aramaic). When the Romans took it over in the first century BC they kept Greek on as the de facto language of administration, insisting on Latin only in the courts and the army. (Educated Romans all knew Greek anyway.) This meant that Anatolia became almost monolingual in Greek, while in Syria and Palestine Greek was used to govern a public that still predominantly spoke Aramaic. In Egypt, the situation was complicated by the survival of the Egyptian language, as well as the extremely cosmopolitan society encouraged by the Ptolemies around their capital, Alexandria, where, for example, the Jewish community was largely Greek-speaking.

The advent of the single language Greek across the Persian empire, a domain supposedly already unified under Aramaic, thus had a remarkable effect in bringing the linguistic differences to the surface.

SECOND INTERLUDE: THE SHIELD OF FAITH

Jesus of Nazareth spoke Aramaic, though not of the best, by the standards of his own people. His native Galilee was generally reckoned to speak a substandard variety, a ‘North Country’ accent to the ears of the educated of Jerusalem and Judaea; famously, his disciple Peter’s accent gave him away at a crucial