Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (61 page)

In these home communities, it did not die out. Its transmission was shielded by its role in Orthodox liturgy: but in fact, even as the language of a subject people, it was under no threat. There was no pressure for Christians to convert to Islam. Although the Seljuk advance had favoured the spread of Turkish-speaking settlers across Anatolia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the political advance of the Ottoman Turks, begun in the late thirteenth century, served mainly a military purpose, reorganising resident Turks into devastating campaigners. Although the Ottoman empire then took the Near and Middle East by storm, historically it had no tendency to favour the spread of any language whatever. Rather it seemed totally laid back—indeed, never systematically organised for any purpose beyond military conquest—and allowed ample self-governance to its constituent
milletler.
^*

Nevertheless, Greek effectively ceases to be a world language at this point. For all the gratifying interest in its tradition out in the west of Europe, now that it was no longer master in its own house the Greek-speaking community could no longer see itself as the autonomous centre of its own world. The Greeks began to think of themselves as a small people, able to act only through negotiation with others far stronger than them. Their solipsism was at an end. We shall not trace its history further, although there is much to tell. The new centre of gravity in the language community, for the first time a rural one, with no duty to maintain an ancient past or a wider sense of Greek’s place in the world, led to the composition of popular lays and romances, untrammelled by earlier classical hang-ups. There was a new sense of Greek, based on the spirit of the
kléftis
, the outlaw who accepted no foreign oppression. But when the western powers, in sympathy with the Romantic movement, guaranteed Greece’s liberation from the Ottomans in 1821, there was renewed discussion as to what true standard to set for the Greek language—and once again the Greek elite gave its judgement in favour of a policy of conscious archaism.

Yet now, for the first time in over two thousand years, the policy would not stick. Something had changed, perhaps because of the break in urban dominance, and hence classical education, during the
Tourkokratía.
A popular—in Greek, ‘Demotic’—style of written language had established itself, and its role could now be asserted. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed further struggles: but since the fall of the colonels’ regime (1967-74) and the Education Act of 1976, there is now acceptance of a new written standard based on something close to ordinary spoken Greek.

Aièn aristeúein kaì hupeírokhon émmenai allōn

mēdè génos patérōn aiskhúnemen, hoì még’ áristoi…

Always to be the best, and to be superior to others,

And not to shame the race of fathers who much the best…

Homer,
Iliad
, vi.208 (a father’s parting advice to a Homeric hero)

This survey of the expansion and contraction of the Greek language community over three millennia only makes more urgent a fundamental question. What was it about Greek speakers which had commended them over their contemporaries, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Etruscans, Gauls, Carthaginians or whatever? What was it about them that made them think their group, and their way of life, more civilised than all these others, and furthermore by and large persuaded these miscellaneous ‘barbarians’ to take the Greek view of the matter? Most importantly, given the flow of power relations through the ancient world, why did the Romans become philhellenes, rather than admirers of Etruscan, Punic or indeed Egyptian ways?

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 the third century BC, has been a wish to hark back to the classics, aping their linguistic form as well (as far as possible) as their style and content, but never the excitement of innovation and originality that must have attended their actual writing in the fifth and fourth centuries. Whatever has proved enduring in the Greek language tradition—and leaving aside the question of whether its classics really are the best things ever written—it has far more to do with rigid conservatism than openness to exciting new ideas. If nothing else, the history of the Greek language community shows that conservatism too can be attractive, if something attractive is being conserved.

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 untouched, if one discounts the names of people and places, and interjections such as
amébar;n
and
hōsanná.
†

Things changed after the Greeks were disempowered by the Fourth Crusade. Latin elements came into the language and stuck:
bánio
, ‘bath’,
bastar$rTcross;o
, ‘bastard’,
bíra
, ‘beer’. After this, within a Turkish-run world, Greek did behave more like a colonised language, and absorbed a whole host of Turkish words, not just for new concepts such as
tzamí
, ‘mosque’,
χatzís
, ‘Mecca pilgrim’,
o$rTcross;alíski
, ‘concubine’ (from Turkish
oda-lik
, ‘roomer’, combined with a Greek diminutive), but for such mundane and apparently gratuitous things as
boyatzís
, ‘painter’,
tembélis
, ‘lazy’,
yakás
, ‘collar’,
bólikos
, ‘abundant’ and
sokáki
, ‘street’. A lot of such vocabulary has since dropped out, or been suppressed by language planning policies since independence. But the new tolerance of borrowed words since the collapse of the empire is evidence in itself that we were right to see Greek’s self-image as changing around that time: relieved of responsibilities to keep order in its historic dominions, and indeed to stand as the bulwark of Christian Orthodoxy, the language was no longer maintained in such conscious isolation from its neighbours.

Having developed autonomously as a cultural area, linked primarily by a common language, a common set of gods and a general sense of kinship, Greek effectively had global reach pressed upon it: this was its reward for impressing so mightily the imperial powers of Macedon and Rome. Over the centuries, those powers ebbed away, leaving large-scale political units in their wake, and Greek speakers as the de facto guardians of a political dispensation not of their making. They reacted by holding to the core of their own traditions, which in the last analysis turned out not to be political, or even intellectual, but linguistic. Their distinctive, civic, approach to government fell away when confronted with units larger than city-states; their rationalist, or polytheistic, philosophies yielded to Christianity; but they never lost faith in the rhetoric of Lysias or Demosthenes, the poetry of Aeschylus or Euripides, or the prose of Plato and Xenophon. It was a curious faith, confronted with a multinational, multilinguistic empire. But it served.

Greek’s solipsism in effect came to an end with the downfall of its associated empire. After two millennia of steadfast concentration, it was no longer constrained to preserve its unity by holding the line that the unchanging standard of excellence, linguistic if not spiritual, was the language of one Greek city in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. From our perspective in the twenty-first century, and especially in a language community, such as English, which has cut itself free from adoration of classics, whether in its own language or anyone else’s, it is hard to see real value in this central myth. But the Greek achievement stands as an interesting monument of one way to keep a language tradition, even one of vast extent, self-consciously united. The absence of serious division in the Greek language is quite striking to this day. While Latin is succeeded by a handful of separate national language traditions, all of which have moved on from their common roots in the Latin of Rome in, say, the second century BC, Greek—even as spoken on the Turkish shores of the Black Sea, and in villages in the remote south of Italy—knows what is its common centre. The adulation of Attic did actually work, in the grand programme of making sure that Greek remained the language of a single community.