Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (62 page)

^*
It was the name for some of Achilles’ people in Homer’s
Iliad
(ii.684), and since he was the greatest Greek hero in that greatest of Greek poems, this may have been sufficient to name the whole race by association.

^†
w, written as
f
in some Greek alphabets, dropped out of pronunciation (and hence spelling) in most dialects. Hence the w in this Homeric word is, strictly speaking, conjectural,
lōTnes
is the same word, with a common contraction of a+o into ô. Later the Indians came to call the Greeks
yavana
too—although their first major encounter was with a warlike force led by Macedonians. § Near Oropus, which is on the coast facing Eretria, according to Strabo, ix.2.10. ¶ Two other ethnonyms for
Greek
, seemingly much older, are
Danaoi
and
Akhaioi.
They are the words used by their ethnic poet Homer, writing some time in the early first millennium BC. The name
Danaoi
has associations with the city of Argos, a major city at the time when Homer represents Greece. Danaos is a legendary king of that city.
Akhaioi
, when it is used specifically, refers either to the people of an area in the north of the Peloponnese, with no particular claim to representative status, or to the people of Phthiotis, which is also notable in Homer as another part of the kingdom of Achilles (
Iliad
, ii.684). Its Latin form,
Achîvî
, shows that it originally had a W at the end of the stem (hence really
’Akhaiwoi’
). But in this form, with an inversion of the A and I, as
Ahhiyawa
, it does seem to figure as a term for a major kingdom in other documents, namely the royal correspondence (in cuneiform on baked clay tablets) of the Hittites who dominated Anatolia in the second millennium BC. So it seems that, early on, the Greeks were known abroad by yet another name.

Both these terms may have been used by the Egyptians. There is an inscription
c
. 1370 BC (on a statue base in a funerary temple of Amenophis III) which mentions the TNY along with a variety of other names locatable in Crete. Egyptian hieroglyphics usually omit vowels, and i or y between vowels is often lost in Greek, so this could be an explicit reference to the
Danaioi.
In another inscription
c.
1186 BC, the DNYN are mentioned as one of the Sea-Peoples attacking Egypt. But in an earlier inscription
c
. 1218 BC, the IKWS, which could just possibly be the
Akhaiwoi
or
Ahhiyawa
, are mentioned as allies in the resistance against the Sea-Peoples (Strange 1980; Muhly et al. 1982).

^*
In this chapter, Greek names in the text are given in the conventional Latinised form: hence not
Hēródotos, Akhaiós
but
Herodotus, Achaeus.
In the romanised transcription, h has much the same force as in English, but is often used to aspirate a consonant: kh, ph, th could more accurately have been written k
^h
p
^h
t
^h
in fact as in English ‘Can Pete take it?’ Except in diphthongs,
au, eu
, the Greek
u
was pronounced in Attic much as it is today in French, phonetically [y];
ou
was a long ū, as in English
rune.
The accents in Greek up to the early centuries AD give some image of the pattern of tone, not stress; thereafter they just mark the stressed syllable.

^*
As it happens, this pre-eminence of Attic was the result of cultural and commercial, not military, dominance. Athens, as we have seen, was early a major trading centre. But until the fifth century Greek literature had been the joint product of many different dialects.

^*
Compare the figures for modern spoken English: two forms for most nouns (
word, words
), four for most verbs (
talk, talks, talked, talking
).

^*
The fact that Greek speech was so dialectally riven at the time had an interesting impact on these styles and genres: for the first few centuries after written literature began, each became associated with a particular dialect, typically that of its first practitioners, even though the literature was largely shared. So epic poetry had to be written in Homer’s mixture of Ionic and Aeolic, lyric poetry in Doric, history at first in Ionic, tragedy in Attic. This played some role in perpetuating knowledge of the dialects, even after the increasing unity of the Greek world was pushing them out of actual use in conversation. It is a particularly good example of how so much of a language’s flavour comes purely by association.

^*
It also had one colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Amisūs, modern Samsun.

† Although not prohibited by Carthaginian or Phoenician influence, the Adriatic received rather little attention from Greek colonists, and was not identified with a particular metropolis. However, it was de facto a Dorian area. Three major cities here were Epidamnos, later Dyrrhachium (now Durrazzë in Albania), founded by Corinth and the neighbouring island of Corcyra
c
.625 BC; Atria, in the Po delta, founded in late sixth century BC by Aegina (a Dorian city later cleared and repopulated by Athens); and Ancona, a city of the indigenous Piceni later refounded by Greek refugees from Syracuse in 387 BC. (The promise of the Venetian lagoon was not exploited in antiquity.)

§ 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 too.

¶ In principle, it is possible that this distinctive product of the eastern Mediterranean was brought to the west by the other great colonial civilisation, the Phoenicians, but the countries that became (and have remained to this day) pre-eminent in wine-making happen to be in the Greek sphere of influence, Italy and Gaul/France, rather than North Africa and Spain.

^*
This event is immortalised (along with other evidence, Greek and Indian) in two example sentences of the second-century Sanskrit grammarian Patañjali (3.2.111):
arunad yavanan sāketam
, ‘The Greek has besieged Saketa’ (a city close to Faizabad on the Gaghra);
arunad yavanan mādhyamikam
, “The Greek has besieged Madhyamika’ (a city close to Chittaurgarh, south of the Rajasthan desert). In each case, the sentence needs to be veridical in order to illustrate the point, that this tense (LaN, the imperfect) is used ‘of a recent public occurrence not actually witnessed by the speaker but potentially so’. Since of these two only Saketa is actually on the way to Patna from the Panjab, it appears that the Greeks also campaigned farther south and west, in Rajasthan.

^*
It is also the origin of the romantic boy’s name
Romeo.

^*
Libanius, a Greek resident of Antioch in Syria in the fourth century AD, wrote sixty-four speeches which range over municipal, educational and cultural matters, as well as an autobiography and an encomium of the city. He mentions the existence of Aramaic just once, although it was spoken in the country all around (Mango 1980: ch. 1).

^*
It is interesting from a modern standpoint—and indeed from a classical Indian one, concerned to distinguish the complementary roles of
Brahman
/scholar,
Kshatriya
/warrior-king and
Vaiśya/
trader—that the question of who the leaders in business were never seems to have occurred to the Greeks or Romans. Fortunes were certainly being made, but this was seen as an occasion more for indulgence than glory.

† Two fields where the Romans never used Greek were law and the military. This was true even in Greek’s heartland in the eastern Mediterranean, where Latin otherwise made little headway.

^*
These were not the only pan-Hellenic games: two others were the Pythian games in Delphi, and the Isthmian games, organised by Corinth.

^†
The only known case where early Greeks took a less ethnocentric view of their language was in Egypt: there is a graffito from 591 BC, written by a Greek mercenary on the leg of a statue at Abu Simbel. He refers to the Greeks among his party as
alloglōssous
, ‘of another language’, i.e. than the Egyptians. And Herodotus too uses this term of Greeks in Egypt (2.154). Contrast the more typical attitude of Strabo (vi.1.2), viewing Romans in Italy as still barbarians by contrast with the Greeks there.

^*
He would have hated the irony that he is generally known by this Latinised Greek version of his name. He was Judah the Hammer,
y
ūdāh maqqābā.

† Visitors from Parthia, Media, Elam, Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia Minor, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and Libya around Cyrene, together with Romans, foreign Jews, Cretans and Arabs, are explicitly distinguished (Acts ii.9-10).

§ Known as
Philádelphos
, ‘Lover of His Sister’: indeed he married her, in an amazing Greek adoption of Egyptian pharaonic tradition.