Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (57 page)

The Greek language was spread from its historic home, the southern Balkan peninsula and Aegean islands, through two processes, one piecemeal, long lasting and diffuse in its direction, the other organised, sudden and breathtakingly coherent. One is usually known as the Greek colonisation movement; the other is Alexander’s conquest of the Persian empire.

The first process, the colonisation of the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts by Greek cities, lasted from the middle of the eighth to the early fifth century BC. The question why, of all the inhabitants of these shores, only the Greeks and the Phoenicians set up independent centres in this way has never been answered. The foundations clearly served a variety of purposes, as political safety valves, as trading posts for raw materials, and as opportunities to apply Greek agriculture to more abundant and less heavily populated soil, but it is noteworthy that they are exclusively coastal, never moving inland except on the island of Sicily. The Greek expansion came after the period of Phoenician settlements (eleventh to eighth centuries), so it may be that the most important factor was who had effective control of the sea. Although by the end of the period almost all available Mediterranean coasts had been populated, it was the western end which loomed largest in the Greek conception of what had been achieved: southern Italy and Sicily, par excellence, made up
Megálē Héllas
, ‘Great Greece’, usually named in Latin
Magna Graecia.

Different cities tended to specialise in different strips of coastline. Among the Ionians, Chalcis and Eretria went for south-western Italy and northeastern Sicily; Phocaea (itself a city on the edge of Lydia) took the coasts of modern Spain, Corsica and France, including
Massalia
(now Marseilles).
^*
The south Aegean city of Miletus covered the whole perimeter of the Black Sea, with nineteen colonies.

Achaeans largely took over the south-eastern coast of Italy. This country is popularly supposed to have been given its name by the Greeks:
Italia
would be the land of
(w)italoí
, ‘yearling cattle’, a dialectal variant of
etaloí
, later borrowed in fact into Latin as
vituli
, and still with us in the word
veal.

Among the Dorians, Corinth, Megara and Rhodes all targeted Sicily again, but this time the south-east and south. Sparta placed one colony only, on the instep of Italy (
Táras
, the modern Taranto).† Besides its role in Sicily, Megara also specialised in the south-east of the Black Sea, including the most fateful foundation of all,
Búzas
, a thousand years later chosen as a new capital for the Roman empire, Byzantium§ or Constantinople. Uniquely, Thera headed south to found a colony on the African coast at Cyrene.¶

Although colonies (
apoikíai
—literally ‘homes-from-home’) were generally led by a ‘home-builder’,
oikistébar;s
, from the ‘mother city’ or
mētrópolis—
with whom there would be a historic and emotional, though not political or military, bond—their founding populations might be recruited from a number of cities, so the new foundations could be quite mixed in population, although less so in dialect. The inscriptions suggest that the language spoken was almost always close to that of the metropolis.
¹²
One could compare the continued dominance of English in North America, even though English colonists were outnumbered by speakers of other languages in the nineteenth century (see p. 492).

The immediate effects of this movement were arguably more cultural than linguistic. The areas were not uninhabited before the newcomers arrived, and the local populations (among them Gauls, Etruscans, Romans, Scyths and Armenians) did not fade away over time.
^*
Although the Greeks dominated their coastal regions, and many colonies put out offshoots to create new colonies in the same region, they never became the focus for states on a larger scale. (Contrast this with the powerful self-aggrandisement, over this period and later, of Carthage, once a Phoenician colony.) The colonies, especially in Sicily and southern Italy, were famed for their wealth, and their scientific culture: Parmenides, Zeno, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Empedocles and Archimedes were all Greeks of the west. Political innovation was not a particular forte.†

The colonies in fact became bridgeheads for Greek culture into the western Mediterranean and Black Sea; and this separate scattered Greek presence continued for close on a thousand years. Strabo, at the end of the first century BC, wrote: ‘But now except for Taras and Rhegion and Neapolis [Taranto, Reggio and Naples], all [of Magna Graecia] has been “barbarised out”,§ and some parts are taken by Lucanians and Bruttians, and others by Campanians. But that is just in name; in fact by Romans—for that is what they have become.’
¹³
The three cities mentioned are supposed to have retained their Greekness for another couple of centuries. And Greek is spoken to this day in the extreme toe and heel of Italy in two tiny enclaves: Bovesia in Calabria (south-east of Reggio), and the villages Calimera and Martano south of Lecce in Puglia.

The colonies played a cardinal role in introducing neighbouring peoples of Gaul and Italy to writing: from Massalia on the French Riviera, Gauls learnt to write their own language in Greek characters; Pithecusae (Ischia) and Cumae on the south-western coast taught the Etruscans first of Campania, and hence of the whole centre and north of Italy; a little farther south, Paestum (Poseidonia) could pass literacy on to the Oscans in Lucania, and over in the heel, Taras to the Messapians in Calabria. Most significant of all was one indirect path of such education: as well as many others in north Italy (for example, the Insubrian Gauls in the foothills of the Alps), the Etruscans went on to teach their great adversaries the Romans to read and write. Through an elaborate cascade of successful conquests and commercial infiltrations over the next twenty-seven centuries, the Roman alphabet has become the most widely used in the world at large.

The alphabets that were passed on in this way were not today’s Greek alphabet, which was to be effectively standardised in Athens in 403-402 BC,
^*
and then adopted throughout Greece in the next generation.† At this earlier time in Greek history (from the eighth century BC), there were still competing variants favoured by different dialects, and most of the cities with colonies in Italy favoured the so-called Western alphabet, in which H was used to represent the aspirate consonant ‘aitch’, X not $XI was used to represent [ks], the letters θ $XI Φ PΩ were dropped, but F and Q were retained.§ This was the alphabet taken up by the Italians, though, as usual in an age before mass-produced writing, in various local versions. (Lepontic, Etruscan, Os-can, Umbrian, Faliscan and Messapian all had alphabets distinct from Latin’s.)

Another cultural, and economic, boon of the Greek expansion was wine, now passed on to a very welcoming western Mediterranean—probably along with another luxury liquid, olive oil. Justin (43.4) represents the Phocaeans who founded Massalia as teaching the surrounding Gauls not just civic and urban life, but also how to tend vines.¶ Here again, it may be that indirect influence was more powerful than direct, for it is known that the Romans, who had learnt of the vine from the Greeks, were extremely active in promoting it when they moved into Gaul, superseding the Greeks by taking it far beyond the Mediterranean coast.

At the other end of the then Greek world, the colonies round the Black Sea appear to have played a more integrated role in mainland Greek life, since they came to supply it both with wheat (grown on the vast fields of Scythia/Ukraine) and the all-consuming
opsa
, relishes made of dried fish, the most sought-after spices for the Hellenes.

The Greeks came to have a sneaking respect for the nomadic Scythians: like them they would see off an attempted Persian invasion. In general, they were quite impervious to Greek ways: but Herodotus recalls two who had a taste for things Greek, Anacharsis (who became a legendary sage) and Scyles. In both cases, ultimately it was the forbidden charms of Greek religious ceremonies to which they yielded: the Greeks were not then seen in their modern light, as the arch-rationalists of the ancient world.

Hoi huméteroi prógonoi elthóntes eis Makedonían kaì eis tèbaren állbaren Helláda kak$oTbar;s epoíēsan hēmás oudèn proēdikēménoi; egòbar;o dè tòbar;n Hellébar;nōn hēgemòbar;n katastatheìs kaì timōrébar;sasthai boulómenos Pérsas diébēn es tèbar;n Asían, huparksántōn hum$oTbar;n…Kaì to$uT loipo$uT hótan pémpēis par’ éme, hōs pròs basiléa tŋbar;s Asías pémpe, mēdè ex ísou epístelle, all’ h$oTbar;s kuríōi ónti pántōn t$oTbar;n s$oTbar;n phráze eí tou déēi…

Your ancestors entering Macedonia and the rest of Greece wronged us without previous grievance; but I, constituted as leader of the Greeks and wishing to take vengeance on the Persians, have crossed into Asia, something that you people started… And in future when you send to me, send to me as King of Asia, and do not correspond on equal terms, but as to the lord of all that is yours, tell me if you need anything…

Alexander to Darius, king of Persia, 332 BC: Arrian, ii.14

About a quarter of the way through the three thousand years of Greek’s recorded history came the single decade that changed everything.

Over the period 334-325 BC a Greek army under Alexander III of Macedon eliminated the Persian empire, over almost the whole area of the modern states of Turkey, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Armenia, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Alexander’s declared motive was to take revenge for Persian aggression in the Persian Wars, still very present in Greek minds, although they had been an experience of their great-great-grandparents, a century and a half before, and Greece at least was now under very different management. On the same timescale Britain should now be preparing for Russia’s serious retaliation for the Crimean War.

The result of this lightning advance, the wholesale takeover by Greek military administrators of a multi-ethnic empire that had existed for over two hundred years, was an instant trebling of the area where the Greek language might be heard, and Greek cultural traditions known and appreciated. Unlike the colonial advance around the Mediterranean and Black Sea, this advance did not hug the coastline, but assumed supreme control over all the major established urban centres. Although the unitary control by a single ruler did not last (Alexander died two years after his momentous campaign, and his empire fell apart into the domains of his different marshals), Greek overlordship did survive. It lasted for a century in central Persia, until another Iranian-speaking power, this time the Parthians from south-east of the Caspian, reasserted control. But it was to be three hundred years before it relaxed its grasp on Egypt, Syria or Babylonia. And although Alexander’s claim on the west bank of the Indus was almost immediately annulled by the advance of the equally magnificent Indian emperor Chandragupta ruling from Patna, Greek kings based in Bactria (Afghanistan) continued an independent dominion for about as long as those in Syria. They moved south into Gandhara (Swat) and the Panjab (in what is now Pakistan); though they lost hold of Bactria itself, for a time they even reached as far to the east as Patna on the Ganges.
^*
In fact, Greek kingdoms lasted longer here than in Greece itself, where Macedonian kings yielded sovereignty to Rome after two centuries in 146 BC.

The process of Hellenisation in the realms conquered by Alexander created the heartland of a vast Greek-speaking community that would dominate the eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years. It had already existed for half this time when it was recognised officially, in AD 286, on the formal division of the Roman empire into east and west. The eastern Roman empire then transmuted gradually into a consciously Greek empire: appropriately, the word it used to describe itself,
rōmaĩos
, ‘Roman’, has become a popular word that now means ‘Greek’.
^*

Although Greeks were, for a long time, politically pre-eminent—never as democrats—all over this vast dominion, the actual spread of their language was probably much more patchy. For two hundred years, Aramaic, originally the lingua franca of Babylon and Canaan, had been the convenient standard for the whole Persian empire. As we have seen, its take-up had not been uniform. But Alexander’s new subjects must have expected a separate, common, language, for imperial administration. Effective conversion from one such language to another, if it happened at all, cannot have been instant.

Reviewing the evidence from east to west, we can begin with Greek spoken in India. In the mid-third century BC, when the emperor Aśoka was setting up edicts urging the importance of
dhamma
, virtue, all over north and central India in the local vernacular, he chose at Kandahar to write the inscription in Aramaic and Greek. Kandahar was better known to Greeks as Alexandria of the Arachosians, founded by Alexander in 329, and Aśoka’s rock edict is not the only Greek inscription to have been found there.
¹⁴
This would have been on, or beyond, the edge of his domain. Coin evidence is copious for the Greek monarchies of India, and this alleges some form of bilingualism, since the coins have Greek on one side, and an Indian Prakrit, written in Kharo⋅⃛hi script (another derivate of Aramaic script), on the other. In fact, Greek legends on coins continued for a century after the death of the last Greek king and queen, Hermaios and Calliope, who had ruled little more than Peshawar and the Khyber pass, and died about 30 BC. Since the government was by then in the hands of Śaka/Scythians, Pallava/Parthians and Kushāna, whose own (Iranian) languages stemmed from north of the Hindu Kush, this might argue for a persisting public of Greek speakers; but the Kharo⋅⃛hi Indian inscriptions on the coins continue too, so it might simply be an attempt to put the weight of tradition and continuity behind the currency, even as the real power moved into the hands of illiterate rulers.