Empires Of The Word Part 14

* The three fabled libraries of Nalanda, Ratnodadhi ('sea of jewels'), Ratnasagara ('ocean of jewels') and Ratnarajaka ('jewel-adorned'), were all to be burnt down. Perhaps it is significant that, according to Tibetan Buddhist accounts of their end, the fires resulted from spells cast by visitors affronted by the rudeness they received from the scholars of Nalanda.

* The name Urdu is short for zaban eurdu e mualla, Persian for 'language of the camp exalted', where the first and last words are originally Arabic, the middle one Turkic, and the linking e's pure Persian. Hindi is a shortening of Hindui or Hindvi, the word for 'Indian talk' originally used by Muslims, since the word Hind itself is a Persian version of the name of the Sindhu river, known to the Greeks (and Europeans) as the Indus.

* For the view from the English side, see Chapter 12, 'Changing perspective-English in India', p. 501.

6.

Three Thousand Years of Solipsism: The Adventures of Greek.

Spartans to Athenians (urging an alliance to resist the Persians, 480 BC): Barbarians have nothing trustworthy or true.

Athenians to Spartans (in reply): There is nowhere so much gold or a country so outstanding in beauty and merit that we should be willing to take it as a reward for going over to the Medes and so enslaving Greece. In fact there are many important things stopping us from doing that even if we wanted to...and then again there is Greekness, being of the same blood and language, and having shared shrines and rituals of the G.o.ds, and similar customs, which it would not be right for the Athenians to betray.

Herodotus* viii. 142-4 ke tora ti tha yenume xoris varvarus? i anthropi afti isan my a kapya lisis.

And now what will become of us without barbarians? These people were some sort of a solution.

Constantine Kavafis, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1949,111.35-6 After the stately self-possession of Chinese and Egyptian, the sensuous prolixity of Sanskrit, and the innovative absolutisms of the Near Eastern languages, Greek makes a much more familiar, not to say modern, impression. This is the language of the people who brought wine, olive oil and literacy to the Mediterranean world, who invented logic, tragic drama and elective government, famed as much for compet.i.tive games as for figurative arts of striking realism. All of Europe became directly or indirectly their students. The dictionaries of European languages are all full of words borrowed from Greek to express Greek concepts and artefacts, and their grammars too, when they came to be written down, were organised on Greek principles.

Yet the history of the Greek language itself is far more complex and beguiling than its net influence would suggest. It was played out as much in the Near East as in the Mediterranean, in areas that are today all but purged of any trace of Greek. Like English, it was spread through a variety of means-speculative commerce, naked imperialism, cultural allure; and the means were very different in the long-term durability of what they achieved.

Above all, Greek stands as an example of a cla.s.sical language that ran its course, fostered with a self-regarding arrogance that for over a thousand years its neighbours were happy to endorse, giving it their military support as they accepted the benefits of its more advanced culture and technology. These powerful, but impressed, neighbours included the Roman empire and the Christian Church. Greek's influence was eclipsed only when it ran out of new alliances, and was forced to face alone an unsympathetic enemy which drew its cultural support elsewhere. It is an instructive example of what can happen to a prestige language when its community ceases to innovate, and the rest of the world catches up.

Greek at its acme.

The high point of Greek expansion came for a century or so approaching the close of the first millennium BC. Then the language could be heard on the lips of merchants, diplomats and soldiers from Emporiai (modern Ampurias), a trading post in the north-east corner of modern Spain, to Palibothras (Pataliputra, modern Patna) in India, a distance of 40,000 stadia, or 8,000 kilometres, approaching a quarter of the circ.u.mference of the globe. Within this range, and over 80 per cent of its extent, there was a continuous band of lands under Greek-speaking administration, all to the east of the Greek homeland in the south Balkans, and extending as far as what is now Pakistan. This total expanse of Greater Greece, the h.e.l.lenised world, had been built up over about seven hundred years, without the benefit of any technology but the s.h.i.+p, the shoe, the wheel, the road, the horse, and writing.

This de facto world language had a currency that ranged over half a dozen distinct empires and kingdoms of the time. Known as he koine dialektos-'the common talk'-or simply the koine, Attic Greek, the particular dialect of the city of Athens, had become current all over the eastern Mediterranean. In Greece too it was gradually replacing all the twenty dialects that had flourished up until the fourth century BC. Probably this levelling began through the commercial prestige of Athens itself, with Piraeus, its port, giving an Attic linguistic tinge to the hub of intra-Greek trade. Pericles, who had presided over Athens' glory days in the mid-fifth century BC, had already boasted to his fellow-Athenians of a prosperity that allowed them to benefit from the produce of the whole earth. As more outsiders felt the need to learn Greek, and Greeks themselves began to have an outlook wider than their own city, Attic Greek spread.

And despite the different means of achieving its spread, it was already eliciting some of the same att.i.tudes that English evokes today. A political pamphlet of the fifth century had claimed that while Greeks in general used each their own dialect, Athenians spoke a mixture of all of them, and all barbarian languages too.1 In a comedy of the second century, written by the Macedonian Posidippus, a Thessalian (from the north of Greece) reproaches the Athenians for seeing all Greek as Attic. Athenians had some of the same problems in taking the rest of Greece seriously that Greeks in general had with the rest of the world. If they failed to speak proper Greek, they were, after all, no better than barbarians.*

Who is a Greek?

Ti de tis? Ti d' ou tis? Skias onar anthropos.

What is someone? What is no one? A shadow's dream is man.

Pindar, Pythian Odes, viii.95-6 Until their independence in AD 1821, the Greeks had only ever been united politically in the aftermath of joint conquest by some outsider. This happened for the first time in the fourth century BC, when the outsider was Philip, the king of Macedon on their northern border. Nevertheless, over the previous thousand years other civilisations encountering the Greeks appear always to have seen them as members of a single ethnic group.

In a way, this was strange, since outsiders always knew them simply by the tribal name of the group they happened to encounter. The Greeks' shared name for themselves, h.e.l.lenes, never caught on outside Greece.* The Persians knew them as Yauna, for their encounter was with the Ionian Greeks, who are called lawones in Homer, the earliest Greek in the tradition. At the opposite end of the Greek world, the Romans got to know the Greeks as Graii. They were meeting Greek colonists from Euboea and Boeotia, who were setting up a new city of Cyme in Italy (later known by the Romans as c.u.mae). In fact, Graii seems to memorialise a small town in southern Boeotia called Graia. The word Greek comes through the Latin Graecus, a straightforward adjective formed from this name (from Grai-icus), and came to take over from the original Graii.

What, then, was a Greek, by any of these appellations? Although the main criterion was language, there was a general feeling that Greeks had much more in common than that. In a famous pa.s.sage of Herodotus, the Athenians are made to explain why they will never betray Greece.2 They advert to to h.e.l.lenikon, 'Greekness', which is defined as having the same blood and the same language, common shrines of deities, common rituals and similar customs. Common blood, of course, was not something that could be proved or ascertained objectively, though there would have been a feeling for facial features and no doubt skin colour. Common language was evident through mutual intelligibility of all the Greek dialects. As for common service to common G.o.ds, the Olympian pantheon was validated in the narrative of the Homeric epics and other hymns, even if the actual practice of cults in different places could be quite unique. Respect for common oracles where prophetic insight could be sought, the most notable being Apollo's oracle at Delphi, and attendance at the quadrennial Olympic games (whose records of victors extend back to 776 BC) were two other major inst.i.tutions that bound the Greeks together.*

In fact, the Greeks always felt that there was a rational basis that set them apart from the barbaroi, the rest of humanity, whose varying speech could just be thought of as an elaboration of 'bar-bar', hardly worth distinguis.h.i.+ng from the noises made by animals, Anything foreign was felt somehow to be ridiculous.

So the historian Herodotus describes the language of the Ethiopian TroG.o.dytes (sic) as sounding like screeching bats,3 and in the midst of a serious tragedy4 Queen Clytaemnestra-admittedly a picture of condescending arrogance-conjectures that Ca.s.sandra, the Trojan princess, may speak an unknown language like that of swallows. Even Strabo himself, cosmopolitan geographer of the Mediterranean world in the time of Julius Caesar, writes in the midst of his gazetteer of the peoples of Spain (3.3.7): 'I am loath to go on about the names, conscious of the unpleasantness of them written down, unless someone could actually enjoy hearing of the Pleutauroi, the Bardyetai or the Allotriges, or other names even fouler and more meaningless.'

There are many cla.s.sic texts where Greeks have set out their ideals. Outstanding among them is Thucydides' account of Pericles' Speech for the War Dead made in 431 BC.5 Pericles was the leader of Athens who built the Parthenon and led the city into its great war against Sparta. This speech is an attempt to summarise Athens' contribution to civilisation, not claiming that the city was like others, but rather setting them an example (paradeigma). He talks of a free approach to politics which is open to all, however poor, of tolerance in private life, of the enjoyment of public entertainments. He glories in the city's military accomplishments, but no less in the fact that they do not (unlike their main enemy, Sparta) make a fetish of military preparedness. All lies in striking the right balance; in a very Greek phrase, he says: philokalo$uTmen met' euteleias kai philosopho$uTmen aneu malakias we are beauty-lovers with a sense of economy, and wisdom-lovers without softness.

Overall, he said, the whole city of Athens was an education to Greece.6 Art, value for money, wisdom and physical prowess: that is what Athens liked to think it stood for. (And as for love of wisdom, Greek does not easily distinguish between philosophy and appreciation of cleverness.) Evidently, these reflected an optimistic statement of Athenian ideals. Beautiful and wise deeds were not conspicuous in the conduct of the war that followed, and which indeed Athens went on to lose. Nevertheless, Pericles had been right to see Athens as an education to Greece: although it gradually lost political importance in the century that followed his speech, it never lost its status as the focus of Greek culture. It remained a city where serious students would come to study for the next thousand years, always in Greek, even though they might come from anywhere in the Roman empire, or beyond.

In fact Athens' intellectual leaders.h.i.+p lasted until Christianity came to resent its continuing self-confidence and fidelity to its pre-Christian open-mindedness. The Roman emperor Justinian closed the school at Athens in AD 529. But the pre-eminence of its language remained, throughout the eastern Mediterranean, for another thousand years.

What kind of a language?

Andrs kharakteGr ek logou gnorizetai A man's type is recognised from his words.

Menander7 $eTthos anthr$oApoi daimon Character for man is fate.

Herac.l.i.tus8 The language that so united the known (Western) world, especially its educated members, over all those centuries was a complex organism that made few concessions, if any, to foreign learners. Its words were polysyllabic, with complex cl.u.s.ters of consonants (phtharthai, 'to be destroyed', tlemonestatos, 'most wretched', stlengis, 'sc.r.a.per' (used with oil at bath-time), sphragidion, 'signet ring', gliskhros, 'sticky').

Speakers needed to tell long vowels from short, plain consonants from breathy ones, and be able to manage elaborate systems of prefixes and suffixes, where an ordinary noun would have nine different forms, and an adjective nineteen, and a verb well over two hundred. There were, of course, regularities in the system, but they fought a losing battle: there were ten major patterns for nouns, ten more for adjectives, and besides ten different patterns for verbs, there were well over 350 individual verbs that were irregular somewhere. These complex inflexions, taken together with the tendency to compound terms (as seen in Pericles' remarks quoted), meant that words could become very long, a characteristic that sometimes amused the Greeks themselves: the longest on record, a term for a gastronomical masterpiece, comes in a fifth-century BC comedy:9 lopadotemakhoselakhogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphiok.

arabomelitokatakekhumenokikhlepikossuphophattoperisteralektruono.

ptokephalliokinklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterugon.

But words ten letters long and more occur in almost every sentence of every text. And proper names, which are themselves very often clearly a.n.a.lysable as compound nouns, are particularly heavyweight.

Together with complexity of individual words went the flexibility of Greek style: within a clause, word order was almost totally free, and so it was largely the endings of the nouns, adjectives and verbs, marking gender, case, number and person, which made clear the relations.h.i.+ps between the meanings of words: who did what to whom, what in effect was being said. Here art began to take over from nature: the elaboration of Greek prose style by the sophistai ('wise-guys', as professional pundits were known) meant that sentences, especially in fine speaking, tended to become ever longer and more ramified, with artfully balanced clauses, in the so-called lexis katestrammene, 'constrained style', so widely admired by Greek audiences.

The language in those centuries BC would have sounded very different from Greek as spoken today. The main reason for this was the fact that it was tonal, each word given a distinctive melody of high and low tones, in a way that is most closely paralleled today by accent in j.a.panese. The system gradually broke down in the first few centuries AD, but was trans.m.u.ted rather than disappeared: nowadays Greeks stress the same syllable that used to have high tone.

Overall, it seems to have been the complexities in sound structure, rather than grammar, which pressed hardest on language-learners. Most of the mistakes we find in correspondence from around the turn of the millennium (usually on sheets of papyrus preserved in Egypt) concern spelling: above all, they were already finding it difficult to keep many of the various high vowels and diphthongs apart (i, ei, e, oi, u). Sure enough, all these distinct sounds have merged as i in the modern language. The noun and verb systems held up remarkably well: they have been simplified to an extent, but to this day the typical Greek noun still has five or six forms, and the verb twenty.*

One feature of the language community up until the second century BC was its disunity. In the second and early first millennia BC, Greek had developed in small communities all over the south of the Balkans and the Aegean islands and coastline; many of these communities were isolated by sea and mountain, and until they began to develop specialised economies, their size must have remained small. The result was a tendency for individual dialects to develop and go off in their own directions, a pattern that was further complicated when a large-scale migration brought the Doric Greeks out of the north and into the centre of the Peloponnese. Greeks remained able to intercommunicate throughout, but until the events of the fifth century BC, individual communities, poleis, as they were called, remained independent; local pride flowered, and with it a self-conscious use of local dialects. Before there was a common external threat, or any power with a military superiority sufficient to submerge their independence, ties among Greeks remained on the level of a sense of shared ancestry and religion. Shared festivals, and a shared literature, reminded them of a common heritage: but the initiative remained with the individual cities, each with their own hinterland of farms, pastures and fisheries.

Typically, when the Greeks of the ancient world looked for knowledge about their own history, they turned to poetry, and particularly to Homer, whose Iliad and Odyssey, together with a host of hymns addressed to particular G.o.ds, largely defined their conception of the past. More such literature is attributed to Hesiod, who is a less shadowy figure from around 700 BC; but there was great dispute in the ancient world about which was the earlier. h.e.l.len, the eponymous forefather of the Greeks, was said to have had three sons, Aeolus, Xuthus and Dorus. Hesiod wrote:10 h.e.l.lenos d' egenonto philoptolemou basileos D&$oTbar;ros te Xo$uTthos te kai Aiolos hippiokharmes And of war-loving king h.e.l.len were born Dorus and Xuthus and Aeolus the chariot-fighter.

Xuthus then had two sons of his own, Ion and Achaeus. This neatly accounted for the origin of the four major dialect groups recognised in antiquity, namely Aeolic, Doric, Ionic and Achaean. These major groupings were felt to define the highest level of kins.h.i.+p among the Greeks as a whole, and they have something in common with the dialect relations.h.i.+ps recognised when Greek inscriptions began to be studied objectively in modern times: at least Ionic, Aeolic and Doric are major groups. The main supplement needed is to recognise an Arcado-Cyprian group, since the dialects of Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and Cyprus are almost identical, and very different from the neighbouring Dorian dialects in Sparta and Crete. Theories about how the different groups came to occupy their various parts of Greece remain purely speculative.

One of the important features of Greek culture was a tendency to formalise its linguistic productions, thereby creating styles and genres in which writers could go on to compose consciously. So heroic lays were pulled together and integrated, producing the epic style consummated by Homer. Travellers' tales were organised and then presented as the first works of geography and history. Choral songs sung for inspiration at public gatherings, such as athletic games, were preserved as lyric poetry. Religious liturgy, which had been performed regularly to expound and enact the myths of particular G.o.ds, was transformed into drama; the celebrants would now be seen as actors, their words not rituals but examinations of the situations set up in the ancient stories. This gave rise to the first tragedy. Above all, the public discussions of city policy, and examinations of those suspected of crimes, became regularised into the practice of public speaking: training was given by those who were particularly interested in it, and the field of rhetoric was born, probably the most influential intellectual discipline in ancient Western history. Other conversations, on more general themes, when written up became the foundation of philosophy.*

A striking characteristic of most of these early products of Greek literature (all well established by the end of the fourth century BC) is their 'public' character: they arise from language used in a public context, and they are largely about matters of public concern.* This is of a piece with the political context of early Greek history: although the const.i.tutions of the different poleis were very varied, and very few were egalitarian democracies, a common property of the societies was openness. Open a.s.semblies were frequent, and the expectation was that all citizens (excluding women, children, slaves and foreigners) would take an active part-if only as a member of a mob-in the political life of the community. Greek, therefore, began its spread as a language for the public-spirited. And in much the same way as one sees in the political media in modern democracies, the pursuit of public affairs becomes the stuff of ma.s.s entertainment: on one famous occasion, an orator in the Athenian a.s.sembly accused his public of being theatai men t&$oTbar;n logon, akroatai de t&$oTbar;n erg&$oTbar;n, 'spectators of speeches, listeners to events', i.e. paying more attention to what they were told, and how it was said, than to their own common sense.11 The outward-looking nature of the Greek-speeking community is worth contrasting with that of another prestige language, which was spreading at much the same time-Sanskrit. Both languages developed significant theories of language use. But Sanskrit's theory, as we have seen, was aimed at preservation of the details of religious texts; as such, it was focused on the minutiae of the language's grammar and p.r.o.nunciation, with little to offer to improve communication with other people. Greek linguistic theory (until the school requirements of the Roman empire take over) is focused above all on the effective use of language to persuade others: native command of the grammatical details tends to be a.s.sumed (despite their complexity), and the theorists talk rather about the construction of a case at law, or (if philosophically inclined) about the form of a valid argument. One could say that whereas Indian linguistic theory is an exercise in disinterested a.n.a.lysis, the Greek theories are always close to practical application.

Homes from home: Greek spread through settlement.

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 sh.o.r.es, 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 Megale h.e.l.las, '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 Ma.s.salia (now Ma.r.s.eilles).* 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)italoi, 'yearling cattle', a dialectal variant of etaloi, 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 (Taras, 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, Buzas, 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 (apoikiai-literally 'homes-from-home') were generally led by a 'home-builder', oikistebar;s, from the 'mother city' or metropolis-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-aggrandis.e.m.e.nt, 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 Ma.s.salia on the French Riviera, Gauls learnt to write their own language in Greek characters; Pithecusae (Ischia) and c.u.mae 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 $XI P were dropped, but F and Q were retained. This was the alphabet taken up by the Italians, though, as usual in an age before ma.s.s-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 pa.s.sed on to a very welcoming western Mediterranean-probably along with another luxury liquid, olive oil. Justin (43.4) represents the Phocaeans who founded Ma.s.salia 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 h.e.l.lenes.

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.

Kings of Asia: Greek spread through war.

Hoi humeteroi progonoi elthontes eis Makedonian kai eis tebaren allbaren h.e.l.lada kak$oTbar;s epoiesan hemas ouden proedikemenoi; egbar;o de tbar;n h.e.l.lebar;non hegembar;n katastatheis kai timorebar;sasthai boulomenos Persas dieben es tebar;n Asian, huparksanton hum$oTbar;n...Kai to$uT loipo$uT hotan pempeis par' eme, hos prs basilea tbar;s Asias pempe, mede ex isou epistelle, all' h$oTbar;s kurioi onti panton t$oTbar;n s...o...b..r;n phraze ei tou deei...

Your ancestors entering Macedonia and the rest of Greece wronged us without previous grievance; but I, const.i.tuted as leader of the Greeks and wis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sumed 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 overlords.h.i.+p 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, rea.s.serted 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 h.e.l.lenisation 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 trans.m.u.ted gradually into a consciously Greek empire: appropriately, the word it used to describe itself, romaos, '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 Asoka 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 Asoka'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 Kharohi 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 pa.s.s, and died about 30 BC. Since the government was by then in the hands of aka/Scythians, Pallava/Parthians and Kushana, whose own (Iranian) languages stemmed from north of the Hindu Kush, this might argue for a persisting public of Greek speakers; but the Kharohi 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.

Overall, the general picture is of a Greek-speaking government having relatively little impact on a populace persistently speaking Indian languages. Although both sides were literate, there is no record of bilingual grammars or dictionaries; and no account is given of what language was used when the most famous Greek king, Menander (Milinda to the Indians), engaged the sage Nagasena in a debate about Buddhism, recorded in the Milindapanha. Perhaps Prakrit-speaking Greeks were no great exception by then. Not long afterwards a pillar was erected (at Besnagar in modern Madhya Pradesh) by Heliodorus, an amba.s.sador from King Antialkidas in Taxila. It is all in Prakrit.15 One hundred and fifty years earlier, Megasthenes had served as a Greek amba.s.sador (sent by King Seleucus) at the court of Chandragupta in Patna from 302 BC, and he had been followed by Deimakhos from the next king (Antiochus I), and Dionysius, from the competing Greek domain of Egypt; all had written books about their experiences which became current in Alexandria on the Nile, now the fast-emerging centre of Greek learning.

Back in the kingdom of the Seleucid successors to Alexander (Persia, the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia), there is evidence that Greek became ingrained more widely and deeply than in India, though the picture is not uniform. For instance, although in the eastern area of Iran Greek power yielded within a century (c.230 BC) to the rising Parthians, the new rulers continued to issue their coins in Greek (occasionally too in Aramaic), only going over to Parthian (Pahlavi) legends in the first and second centuries AD, when the remaining Greek legends were becoming increasingly garbled. There are official doc.u.ments written in Greek up until the fourth century.16 But farther south, on the Persian Gulf, the small kingdom of Persis (in existence from 280 BC to AD 224) always issued its coins in Aramaic.

In the Fertile Crescent, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine, the Aramaic-speaking lands at the core of the old a.s.syrian empire, which became the actual centre of gravity of the new Seleucid government, the penetration of Greek was likewise significant, but seems to have led to a situation of more or less stable diglossia, people using different languages in different communities and for different purposes. Babylon, despite its strategic importance to the Seleucids, probably never had more than a small Greek community, and they and their language are unlikely to have flourished after the city was yielded to Parthia in AD 126. Edessa, modern Urfa, which came to be on the border with Parthia, maintained a strong Aramaic (Syriac) literary tradition throughout the Greek and Roman periods.

However, round northern Syria, Seleucus I made a serious attempt at establis.h.i.+ng Greek colonies, which have by and large survived to the present day: Antioch (Antakya), Apamea (Hamah), Seleuceia (Silifke), and Laodiceia (Latakia). Antioch on the Mediterranean coast, which went on to a glorious career as capital of Roman Syria, started with a core of 5300 Athenians and Macedonians transplanted from a nearby Greek colony. Nevertheless, they always had a large Aramaic-speaking, as well as a Jewish, community. Nearby Palmyra seems to owe its Greek speakers (and its name-it was previously Tadmor) to the advent of Roman control (AD 17-19); and there is a famous Greek-Aramaic inscription on tariffs (AD 137) found there, to show that both languages had status. But nine hundred years later, when Greek control was ended by the Arab conquest, it appears that Greek had never spread outside these few cities.17 In Jerusalem, there was major trouble beginning in 168, led by Judas Maccabaeus,* involving resistance to the Seleucid government's perceived measures to h.e.l.lenise the Jews, although unsurprisingly the religious cult rather than the language aspect was to the fore. It led to the setting up of the Hasmonaean kingdom, which ruled Judaea from 142 to 63 BC, minimising Greek influence. Aramaic remained the dominant language in Palestine, with Hebrew restricted to liturgical use, and Greek interestingly a.s.signed a role in the more cosmopolitan aspect of Jewry, and such spin-offs as the Christians. But as Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2, graphically recounts, every language still spoken in the Roman empire could be heard in the streets of Jerusalem at the time of the Pa.s.sover festival.

Greek texts of the Hebrew scriptures were in fact commissioned by Ptolemy II, the second in the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt after Alexander's death. (He ruled 308-246 BC) The process by which this was achieved is detailed, with some legendary accretions, in the Alexandrian 'Letter of Aristeas'. Whatever the true details, the Greek Septuagint (named-in Latin-for the seventy-two scholars supposedly summoned from Jerusalem to work on it) became an authoritative text of the Bible, and was widely used by Jews outside Palestine, as well as the later Christian movement. Greek therefore became the vehicle for a major culture outside its own traditions, freed from a.s.sociations with Athenian eleutheria (or by now Macedonian magnificence), and in a sense thereby secularised as a language. On pragmatic grounds, it became able, when in later centuries the need was felt for new Christian scriptures to transmit to the wider world, to a.s.sume equivalent, and then superior, status to Aramaic.

In Egypt as a whole, although the Ptolemies, like all the h.e.l.lenistic Diadochi (diadokhoi-heirs of Alexander), relied on their armies to guarantee their authority, there was a major cultural project started to validate it. A Museum (Mouseon-temple of the Muses) was established as a government-funded research inst.i.tute, and the eternally famous Library, both close to the royal palace in Alexandria, the newly founded capital city. These attracted Greek-speaking scholars from all over the oikoumene, the inhabited world. Coinage was issued in Greek, from a single mint, also at Alexandria. Greek was gradually introduced as a new language of administration, in this country with the longest tradition of central administration in the world.

Greek seems to have remained a language for the ruling elite in Egypt. Although the literature that came out of Alexandria (which is copious) developed new genres for talking in prose and verse about picturesque features of everyday life, the everyday life talked about always seems to be somewhere else, more traditionally Greek, such as in the Aegean islands or perhaps in Syracuse. The last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra, who ruled from 51 to 30 BC, is said to have been the first of them to learn Egyptian.18 So it was still worth learning; the popular language, even after three hundred years of Greek government, was still Egyptian.

Doc.u.mentation of actual ancient correspondence is more copious here than anywhere else in the ancient world, because of the general use of papyrus, and the preservative power of the dry soils away from the Nile valley. These give occasional glimpses of how the use of Greek was perceived from outside the charmed circle of the immigrant h.e.l.lenes. So in the mid-third century BC, a couple of generations after the conquest, a letter to Zenon, the Carian manager of a farm in the Fayum, complains (in Greek) that he is despised because he cannot speak Greek, or literally 'h.e.l.lenise' (h.e.l.lenizein).

In a way, the area least changed immediately by the new dispensation was Anatolia. But its conversion was to be the most long-lasting among Alexander's new provinces. We know from inscriptions and coins that the penetration of Aramaic had been variable here: strongest in Cilicia (the south-eastern region bordering its homeland in Syria), weakest on the southwestern coasts, Lydia and Phrygia, and with some presence in bilingualism with Greek on the Black Sea. (See Chapter 3, 'Aramaic-the desert song: Interlingua of western Asia', p. 78.) The Greeks had been an influential presence on the periphery for at least a thousand years. They were now installed throughout, in what D. Musti calls a 'military monarchy', but allowing 'a privileged relations.h.i.+p for cities (poleis) and a much-trumpeted respect for their freedom and democracy (eleutheria kai demokratia).'19 Although the Greek administration of the Seleucids was not to last more than two hundred years before yielding to the Romans, the language situation was much more consistent. For the next thousand years, Greek spread relentlessly, supplanting the local languages of the south coast and the interior. One example: although we still find inscriptions in Phrygian until the third century AD, local peasants' votive tablets to Zeus (available even to poor people because of the availability of marble offcuts from the quarry at Dokimeion) are from the second century AD all in Greek.20 And there was a hidden symmetry in this sudden spread of Greek into the east, for the Aramaic that remained Greek's princ.i.p.al compet.i.tor throughout the old Persian empire was a close relative of the Phoenician or, in Latin, Punic language, Greek's main compet.i.tor in the colonial world of the Mediterranean's western sh.o.r.es. Indeed, the two Semitic sisters had originated within a hundred miles of each other, their foci at Tyre and Damascus, in the west and centre of northern Syria. It was as if the entire region from Cadiz beyond the Pillars of Heracles to the banks of the Indus was now the field for a simple two-sided compet.i.tion, between the Greek koine and an alliance of Semitic twin sisters.

As one might expect from the self-centred Greeks, they never noticed.*

A Roman welcome: Greek spread through culture.