Empires Of The Word Part 15

Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes Induit agresti Latio...

Greece, once captured, captured its wild conqueror, and instilled arts into boorish Rome...

Horace, Letters, ii. 1.156 In these two major spreads of Greek by migration and infiltration, the colonisation of Mediterranean coasts, and the results of Alexander's lightning conquest of the east, the prestige of the language and its culture played little, if any, role. Greeks had explored and settled; Greeks had conquered and settled. But the new populations who first heard Greek in consequence had little choice in the matter. A vast expansion of the world where Greek was spoken had come about in this way; but outside Anatolia, Syria and Egypt there is little evidence for its everyday use having spread much beyond the community of Greek emigres.

Greek was poised, however, for a major surge of spread by diffusion. All round the Mediterranean, above all among the elite of the rising power of Rome, Greek culture was about to become the centre of the educational curriculum.

Inevitably, the Greeks began with a cultural advantage on Mediterranean coasts, having brought the alphabet, and some display of what a literate society was like, Greek-style, with formal education and a curriculum based on a corpus of poetical cla.s.sics (notably Homer) and active training in skills of public speaking. Then, in the third century BC, a number of political events brought the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean into active contact with the west. In 280 BC Pyrrhus (coming from Epirus, in western Greece) had tried to invade Italy and Sicily: his initial victories were proverbially pyrrhic, and within five years he was effectively seen off by dogged Roman resistance, but Roman garrisons were then placed in all the Greek cities of southern Italy. In 273 BC King Ptolemy II of Egypt entered into a treaty with Rome, sealing their new status as a coming power in the Mediterranean.

Bilingual authors began building a bridge between Greek and Roman literature. Greek plays were performed (in Latin translation) at Rome from 240 BC. Others, such as Livius Andronicus, tried adapting Greek master works such as the Odyssey for Roman audiences, but using traditional Roman language and patterns of verse. Late in the century came the tense days of the war with Hannibal: victory was followed by a vogue for Greek culture. (The victorious general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, was a notorious enthusiast for things Greek.) A leading figure was the poet Ennius, who had grown up speaking Greek in southern Italy, but learnt Latin during his army service: he brought Greek works and literary values into the heart of Latin education, beginning the refas.h.i.+oning of Latin literature on completely Greek lines.

Foreign policy reinforced the cultural interest, since Rome intervened decisively in Greece in the next century, famously taking advantage of one of the pan-h.e.l.lenic athletic meetings. In 196 BC the Roman general Flamininus announced to an incredulous crowd gathered for the Isthmian Games at Corinth that all the Greek cities were henceforth free, courtesy of the Roman Senate and people. There followed a complicated series of wars in which Rome was involved ever more deeply in Greek affairs, and which led to the downfall of the successors of Alexander in both Greece and Asia. By the end of the century, the whole of Greece and the west of Anatolia were under direct Roman rule.

The outcome was a total penetration of Greek into Roman culture, so that for the next five hundred years, essentially until the Greek east was split off from the Roman west of the empire, well-educated Romans could be counted on to be bilingual in Greek. Romans came to be educated basically on a Greek pattern, but with a strong emphasis on poetry and the practice of public speaking: the musical and gymnastic sides were rather neglected. The tutors and schoolmasters were typically bilinguals of Greek extraction; and one effect was a permanent demand for personable educated Greeks, who could find employment as educators all over the Mediterranean. Overall, the situation was comparable to the prospects for graduates from English-speaking countries in rich non-English speaking countries today. Educated Greeks often found that their language was their fortune.

As one example, in the first century BC Gaulish notables were sending their children to be educated in Greek in Ma.s.salia (Ma.r.s.eilles). Strabo says that 'sophists were employed, both privately and at the city's expense, just like medical doctors'.21 Meanwhile it became usual for elite Romans of rich families to send their young people to Athens or Rhodes to finish their education. But this does not mean that knowledge of Greek was found only among the upper cla.s.ses. Plautus, writing comedies in the early second century BC, puts most of his Greek loan words and slang into the mouths of slaves and low types: graphicus servus-the picture-perfect slave.22 Polybius, writing a generation later, could remark, perhaps making the best of things: 'our men of action in Greece have been released from the pressures of political or military ambition, and so have plenty of opportunities to pursue inquiries or research'.23 A century later, the implicit compact was stated more explicitly, from the Roman point of view, by Vergil:24 others will hammer out more finely bronze that breathes

(I do not doubt), will draw from marble faces live,

will plead court cases better, and use rod to measure out

the wanderings of the sky and constellations' rise;

you, Roman, mind to rule peoples at your command

(these arts will be yours), to impose the way of peace,

to spare the conquered, and to battle down the proud.

The world of the arts and sciences was the Greek province, par excellence. But the world of power and order belonged to Rome. The civilisation of the Mediterranean world became a stable Graeco-Roman mix.*

It is worth spending a moment to consider what was the real attraction of Greek, and its a.s.sociated culture, its character or ethos (both Greek words). The Romans certainly did not believe that they had much to learn about traditional virtues, as shown in war, law and politics, from these voluble and innovative foreigners. Greek art, which had become familiar through the army's campaigns in southern Italy and Greece, was attractive in itself; but the Greeks also seemed to have an advantage in the pursuit of pleasure more generally: haute cuisine, wine, music, frolics with either s.e.x. The Greeks were the masters of luxury, and it took little higher discernment to want more of this. The Latin word pergraecari, 'to Greek off', meant devotion not to high thinking but to high living, feasting and drinking.25 At the same time, the sheer knowledge possessed by the Greeks impressed the Romans: Greeks knew their own history, as well as that of their neighbours, they could theorise on any topic, and provide quotations from poetry centuries old. Above all, they were fluent and convincing speakers: they had been trained in how to hold an audience, and get people to do what they wanted. This explicit skill in rhetoric was highly in demand in the civic society that the Romans had created, where people were constantly running for office at every level from village council to the republic itself, and measures were presented orally for approval by a.s.semblies.

Above all, we can see the Romans (and hence the whole Mediterranean world) attracted by the sheer sense of savoir-faire generated by a large-scale and highly elaborated culture, self-confident to the point of solipsism. Much the same thing was to happen when Sanskrit and the wonders of cla.s.sical India washed up on the sh.o.r.es of South-East Asia (see Chapter 5, 'The spread of Sanskrit', p. 201); or when French became the language of refinement throughout Europe, and especially in Russia, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries (see Chapter 11, 'La francophonie', p. 410). Something of the same charm of brash, large-scale self-confidence can be seen today powering the worldwide taste for Americana, and with it the English language. And as these examples show, the prestige behind it is something other than a.s.sociation with a successful army, or a successful economy.

Mid-life crisis: Attempt at a new beginning.

eukharisten oudes t$oTbar;n dokim$oTn epen, alla kharin eidenai.

None of the cla.s.sics said 'eukharisten' (meaning 'thank') but 'kharin eidenai'.

Phrynichus Arabius, v.6 (second century AD) eukharist$oTbar; t$oTbar;i the$oTbar;i pantote peri hum$oTbar;n, epi tbar;i khariti to$uT theo$uT dot-heisei humn en Khrist$oTbar;i Ieso$uT.

I thank (eukharist$oTbar;) G.o.d always for you, for the grace of G.o.d given to you in Jesus Christ.

St Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians, i.4 (first century AD) Greek speakers have always held particularly strongly to their literary heritage, and this is one reason why their language has remained unitary over so many centuries, despite once being so widely spread around the world. But they have always interpreted it extremely narrowly, not so much as a living tradition, but as an unchanging (and unattainable) canon of cla.s.sic authors, the main Athenian ('Attic') writers of the fifth and fourth centuries BC*

This provided a clear basis for education, and a model for writing and formal speech. But it meant that really good style was unattainable (and increasingly unintelligible) once the language had begun to change, as of course it immediately did. So, from the third century BC, correct diction was never distinguishable from archaising pedantry. To some extent, this can be seen as a meritocratic policy in a language that was being used all round the Mediterranean and Near East: native speakers and second-language learners were more on a par when n.o.body was a natural speaker of the best Greek. But more importantly, it implied that n.o.body without an extensive literary background would ever be accepted as cultured. Greek has always fostered a disputatious culture, and the cult of 'Atticism' has been queried, criticised, parodied and reviled throughout the last 2500 years-but all to no avail.

As we have seen, it was not as if there was no other standard, of a more de facto, indeed demotic, nature: Attic Greek had almost immediately given rise to the more accessible koinebar;, close to Attic in its forms, defined in usage, and intelligible wherever Greek was spoken. But for all its utility, it had no cla.s.s. And in the pre-modern world where status was bound up with literacy-and without ma.s.s education literacy would always be for the few-this mattered.

Occasionally, though, a kind of inverted sn.o.bbery prevailed. The Greek language had spread round the Roman empire to others than the educated elite. The Jewish community in Rome spoke Greek until the fourth century AD.26 In the early centuries of the first millennium AD, a number of mystery religions were spreading from the eastern provinces, Egypt, Syria and Asia, most famously the cults of Isis, Mithras and Jesus Christ. All adopted Greek as their ritual language.27 They were attracting converts first among the poor and downtrodden of the empire. And for all of them, the authority of the Greek cla.s.sics, whose G.o.ds, if any, were the imagined residents of Mount Olympus, was no authority at all.

Yet, for Christianity at least, this did not mean that they rejected the authority of written literature. With its origins in the Jewish tradition, the Christian faith soon began writing and recognising its own scriptures, primarily in Greek, although later there were vernacular texts written in Aramaic in Syria, Coptic in Egypt and Ge'ez in Ethiopia-and of course Latin. Language for the early Christians seems universally to have been chosen to maximise access, without thought for the privileged status of any particular code. But this meant that there was the beginning of a new canon for Greek literature, and one based-for the first time in four centuries-on popular usage.*

We have already remarked on the 's.h.i.+eld of Faith' phenomenon, the way in which religions, particularly those of west Asian origin, have contributed to the survival of the languages that were their vehicles. Greek hardly needed any help from Christianity in these early years, but many must have taken up Greek as a second language in order to get better access to its literature. And Christianity did effect some extensions to the range of Greek literature, transforming rhetoric into the art of the homily or sermon, and philosophy into theology.

These extensions in fact tended to undo the change to Greek linguistic sense that was at first brought about by the new informal literature. Here Christianity was a victim of its own success. In the time of its growth, the struggle to maintain the empire's vast edifice of a single administration for western Europe and the whole Mediterranean was becoming harder and harder. Rulers looked for a new means of securing loyalty over the vast domains. The major insight of the emperor Constantine was that this could be found in Christianity. In 330 he reorganised an increasingly regionalised empire around a new capital at Byzantium, henceforth Constantinople (Konstantinoupolis), and he made it a Christian foundation.

This set the crown on the social advancement of Christianity. For over a century it had begun to attract converts of a new kind. Clement of Alexandria (born in AD 150), for example, had used his extensive cla.s.sical education to write a Protreptikos, or 'Encourager', attempting to argue Greeks out of paganism and into Christianity, and then went on to build a logical system on top of the Christian logos. Origen (185-255) had been a textual critic of the Bible, and Eusebius (260-339) the first historian of the Church. Such characteristically Greek academics had been well able to write in the cla.s.sical style. But now the Church would also attract the general ranks of those seeking preferment in the temporal world, or indeed simply seeking to a.s.sert their due as members of distinguished families. The result was a full-blooded return to the old Atticising tendency. Ecclesiastical Greek was firmly reinstated in the cla.s.sical tradition, and was never again tempted to deviate from it. The empire's increasing tendency to proscribe paganism, defined to include all pre-Christian philosophy, culminated in Justinian's closure of the School of Athens in 529. But the survival of Attic style was never in doubt.

This conviction of Greeks that, in writing, the very old ways were the best ways turned out to be as deeply rooted as the empire itself. People were still attempting to write in some tolerable version of cla.s.sical Attic when in 1453 the city of Constantinople fell to the Turks, over a thousand years later.

Intimations of decline.

The story of Greek for the next thousand years is one of infrequent, but sudden and ma.s.sive, retrenchments, as the vast extent built up in the late first millennium BC was pushed back at the edges. In the western Mediterranean, where Greek's empire had never been a temporal one, this loss of parts of the Greek language community came about simply because the focus of culture s.h.i.+fted: an education in Greek ceased to be part of western European education, and contacts with the east became much rarer. But elsewhere these withdrawals were caused quite directly by military defeats.

In the West Roman Empire, where Latin was dominant, the military defeats that diminished and soon extinguished the empire politically were to have only very limited effects on language. (See Chapter 7, 'Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances', p. 304.) But in the east, the effect of the defeats was much simpler. Hostile forces took charge, and after a decent interval-often of many generations-Greek was no longer to be heard or seen.

Bactria, Persia, Mesopotamia.

The first area to go was over to the far east: Iran and Afghanistan, down to the Indus valley. Seleucid control here was not long secure, but for the first century after the death of Alexander (323 BC) the compet.i.tion came mainly from other Macedonian and Greek kings, who would not dispute the spread of Greek. By 260 BC the Indo-Greeks in Bactria, first led by Diodotus, had declared themselves independent. At just about the same time (and possibly caused by this rebellion) the Iranian-speaking Parthians thrust south from the eastern sh.o.r.es of the Caspian into the plateau of Iran. A century later, in 146 BC, Mithradata I of Parthia completed the job, and drove the Seleucids out of the rest of Iran, taking Mesopotamia for good measure. Ten years later, as it happened, the Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were overwhelmed by a Scythian (Saka) invasion from the north, shortly followed by the Kushana (also known as Tocharians or Yuezhi) from the north-east.

Extinction of Greek over this vast area was not immediate. In the east, there is the fact that Bactrian, the official language of the Kushana empire, which lasted from the middle of the first to the end of the second century AD, came to be written in Greek script. This is unique among Iranian languages, and it shows that the Kushana had a longish period of cultural interaction with the Greeks. In AD 44, 190 years after the fall of the Indo-Greek kings, the sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have had no difficulty communicating in Greek on a tour that took him all the way across the Hindu Kush to Taxila, where he was entertained (in Greek) by a Parthian king, who expatiated on his own Greek-style education.28 We know from official inscriptions that in the western regions Greek-speaking communities continued for several generations within the Parthian empire. There are Greek inscriptions at Susa, which had been the Greek capital as 'Seleuceia on the Eulaeus', one of them from AD 21; and farther west in Mesopotamia, in Seleuceia on the Tigris, there is a bilingual inscription in Greek and Parthian explicitly dated as late as AD 151, recording a Parthian victory over a (presumably) Greek-speaking Mesene, on the Persian Gulf, near modern Basra. (It is tellingly inscribed on the loins of a statue of Hercules, one language on each thigh.29) Mesene was also home to Isidorus of Charax, a Greek who around the time of Christ wrote a book, The Parthian Stations, describing the route across Parthia from south-west to north-east.

The Parthians' own language policy was to reverse history. They reinstated Aramaic as the lingua franca of their empire, leaving numerous inscriptions in it, and also using its writing system for their own (Iranian) language. The fact that this was possible shows that Greek had never fully replaced it during the two centuries of Seleucid rule.

But the Parthians were not anxious to efface the heritage of Greek rule in Iran. Their coins all bear a legend in Greek: BASILEOS BASILEON ARSAKOU EUERGETOU DIKAIOU EPIPHANOUS PHILELLENOS.

Of the King of Kings, Arsaces, Beneficent, Just, Outstanding, Greek-loving.

And Plutarch recounts the story that when in 53 BC the Parthian king Orodes received the gruesome evidence of the Roman general Cra.s.sus's defeat, his severed head, he was actually attending a performance of Euripides' Bacchae.*

Perhaps because Greek remained the language of the neighbouring superpower, the Roman empire, its prestige lasted in Parthia long after its use must have actually died out. The Parthian kingdom in Iran lasted for five centuries. In AD 224 the last Parthian yielded to Ardas.h.i.+r, the first king of the next dynasty, the Sa.s.sanids, who spoke Persian. And yet when his son Shapur came to have his own achievements inscribed on rock at Naqsh-i Rustam, facing the tombs of the Persian kings at Persepolis, he wrote them up in three languages: Persian, Parthian and Greek.30

Syria, Palestine, Egypt.

Iran was never part of the Roman empire, and Mesopotamia only in very small part. So they never acquired the sense of permanent Greek possessions that came to characterise Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They had been incorporated into the empire of Alexander, hence 'h.e.l.lenised', in 332 BC; in 64 BC the Roman general Pompey had incorporated Syria and Palestine as a directly governed province of the empire; and in 30 BC Augustus had added Egypt, deposing Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies. These Roman conquests, as we have seen, had no linguistic effect, except to introduce some use of Latin in the army and the courts. But they did serve to underline the sense that this part of the world, the far south-east of the Mediterranean, was to be permanently, and as far as possible stably, under western control. Greek remained widely spoken there by foreign elites, and in some special cities such as Palmyra, Gaza and Alexandria by many more.

A sense of the language situation in a centre of international pilgrimage in the region is given by Egeria, who visited Jerusalem around AD 400: Seeing that in that country part of the people know both Greek and Syriac, another part only Greek and yet another part only Syriac, given also that the bishop, although he knows Syriac, always speaks in Greek and never in Syriac, there is always by his side a priest who, while the bishop is speaking in Greek, translates his comments into Syriac so that everyone may understand them. Similarly for the lessons that are read in church: since these must be read in Greek, there is always somebody there to translate them into Syriac for the benefit of the people, that they may receive instruction. As for the Latins who are there, i.e. those who know neither Syriac nor Greek, to them also is an interpretation given lest they be displeased; for there are some brethren and sisters, proficient in both Greek and Latin, who give explanations in Latin.31 We have already considered (see Chapter 3, 'Arabic - eloquence and equality: The triumph of 'submission", p. 93) the series of lightning campaigns by the newly declared Muslims which reversed this state of affairs, and so created the linguistic situation that has lasted to the present day. A single decade from the death of Muhammad in 632 sufficed to draw a thin, but indelible, line under 950 years of Greek control and Greek language, and to turn the page, opening what is so far 1300 years of Arabic sway in these same lands. A shock for all concerned, but particularly so since it came a couple of years after the emperor Heraclius had rea.s.serted the imperial defences, and in four years of campaigning rolled back a Sa.s.sanid invasion of these same territories which had denied them to the Greeks since the beginning of the century.

This was a devastating blow to the empire politically and economically: the losses included Egypt, still after 650 years the major supplier of grain to the empire's capital. And the best estimates* suggest that the Arab conquests deprived the empire of over half its population. But it could have been worse. The Arabs failed in repeated attempts to take Constantinople itself, and also failed to detach Anatolia, despite raiding it virtually every year for the next two centuries.32 The region had been reorganised by Heraclius, effectively combining civil and military administration, and imposing martial law. The clear perception that the enemy was at the gate imposed this new discipline, and kept the empire effectively mobilised for defence.

There is an interesting pattern to the Byzantine losses in the mid-seventh century. The places that held firm were precisely those where Greek was the majority language, spoken by the people at large and not just elites. This had an effect on the linguistic self-image of the Roman empire (for they still considered themselves Roman). Latin had been dropping out of use for some time, losing even its last redoubt in the law: since the time of Justinian, a century before, most legislation had been drafted in Greek; and the emperor's second-in-command, the praetorian prefect, was now often a man who knew no Latin. The empire still held much of southern Italy, and would hang on to parts of it for another four hundred years, until the middle of the eleventh century. But now for the first time Greek, not Latin, was seen as the unifying language of the whole community. Confusingly for moderns, they called Greek romaiika, 'Romanish', contrasting it with latinika. But looking back from the mid-tenth century, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus remarked that it had been in the time of Heraclius that the Romans 'had been h.e.l.lenized and discarded the language of their fathers, the Roman tongue'.33

Greece.

Although the unsettling bellows motion of the imperial frontiers did not stop, the attrition of Greek-language areas effectively now did, for the next four hundred years. This would not have been clear at the time, for while the southeastern lands of the Levant were being lost, the north too was in turmoil.

It was touch and go whether Greek would survive in its own heartland. After invasions from Germanic-speaking Goths in 378, Turkic-speaking Huns in 441-7, Germanic Ostrogoths in 479-82, and Turkic-speaking Bulgars in 493, the mayhem continued in the sixth century. Fifty years after the crisis, the Byzantine historian Procopius recounted: Illyric.u.m and all of Thrace, i.e. the whole country from the Ionian Gulf [the Adriatic] to the outskirts of Byzantium, including Greece and the Chersonese, was overrun almost every year by Huns, Slavs and Antae, from the time when Justinian became Roman emperor, and they wrought untold damage among the inhabitants of those parts. For I believe that in each invasion more than two hundred thousand Romans were killed or captured...34 Then, in 581, as John of Ephesus records: 'an accursed people, called Slavonians, overran the whole of Greece, and the country of the Thessalonians, and all Thrace, and captured the cities, and took numerous forts, and devastated and burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of the whole country, and settled in it by main force, and dwelt in it as though it had been their own'.35 This was not a temporary phenomenon, and it led to large-scale emigration by Greeks. According to the Chronicle of Monemvasia, by the year 587/8 scarcely any part of Greece was immune to the Slavic scourge, this time from the Avars (another Turkic group): 'Only the eastern part of the Peloponnese, from Corinth to Cape Maleas, was untouched by the Slavonians because of the rough and inaccessible nature of the country.'

This might have been expected to lead to a permanent spread of Slavic languages, as indeed it did in Serbia and Bulgaria farther north (see Chapter 7, 'Slavonic dawn in the Balkans', p. 309). But somehow the preponderance of Greek over Slavic speakers was restored in the south. In the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries the empire organised a series of resettlement programmes and missionary campaigns, moving Slavs into northern Anatolia, and bringing others into southern Greece. We hear that in 805 Nicephorus I 'built de novo the town of Lacedaemon and settled in it a mixed population, namely Kafirs, Thracesians, Armenians and others, gathered from different places and towns, and made it into a bishopric'.36 Likewise, in the 860s, Basil I was hard at work to convert the Serbs in the north: 'having greeked them [graik$oTbar;sas], he subjected them to governors according to Roman custom, honoured them with baptism, and delivered them from the oppression of their own rulers'.37 The details are impossible to clarify, if the aim is to explain why some communities became Greek-speaking, as well as Christian; certainly the religious liturgies they learnt would have been in Greek. Later, service in the army would also have served to bring many Slavs into the Greek-speaking world. But the net effect is clear. Greek remained, or was re-established as, the dominant language of its traditional homeland.

Anatolia.

Greek dominance in Anatolia lasted until 1071: in that year the empire lost the battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt, north of Lake Van) to a new power dominating the Muslim world, the sultanate of the Seljuk Turks.* Even so, it could still have avoided the loss of its whole heartland that resulted: the Seljuk sultan, Alp Arslan, with other wars to fight, had attempted to reinstate the defeated emperor, Roma.n.u.s Diogenes, on terms that would have established an alliance between the two powers, and given the Turks access to the Mediterranean through Edessa, Hierapolis and Antioch in northern Syria. But Roma.n.u.s, and the proffered terms, were rejected: the consequence was the Seljuks' swift advance through most of Anatolia, a territory that was thenceforth to be dominated by speakers of Turkish, and known-in curious reminiscence of the old empire's origins in Italy-as the Sultanate of Rum.

This spread of Turkish hordes, who rapidly converted into Turkish settlers, within a hundred years had deprived the Greek language community of the heart of its major territory. The population of Greek speakers worldwide was therefore set to fall rapidly, whether by emigration, or simple loss of later generations of learners. Some whole communities of Greek speakers would depart en ma.s.se; many individuals would leave their homes to find better opportunities elsewhere; and the children of some Greek families, a.s.similating to the new environment, would grow up speaking Turkish.

This was a direct blow to the survival of Greek as a major language. Five generations later, it suffered a political blow that shattered its remaining prestige. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, made up of knights from western Europe, turned aside from its appointed mission of attacking the Muslim powers that held Palestine, and captured Constantinople, as well as parts of Greece and the coast of Anatolia. It then proceeded to hold its gains as a 'Latin Empire', masterminded by the Venetians, which lingered on pointlessly for a couple of centuries before being absorbed by the Turks. The Fourth Crusade had reduced the East Roman Empire to a set of five separate statelets: although one of these did manage to retake Constantinople in 1261, and reconst.i.tute itself as a rump of empire, no Greek state was ever again more than a minor constraint on the growing power of the Turks. The empire was finally extinguished by the Turks in 1453, and the last Greek statelet, Trebizond, in 1471. It had taken the Turks just over 380 years to advance from Manzikert to Constantinople-the same interval of time that Greece was subsequently to spend under Tourkokratia, as they called the domination of the Turks.

From being the language of a universal empire, so catholic in its aspirations that it scarcely noticed whether its language was h.e.l.lenic or Roman, Greek had now become the tongue of a conquered people, the Orthodox Christians, just one of the milletler ('nations'-really, religious groupings) that had a place in the cosmopolitan empire of the Ottoman Turks. Humbled at last, the Greeks now did notice what language they were speaking: it was inseparable from their Orthodox faith, and became an important token of their ident.i.ty for the long centuries in which they lacked their freedom.

Given that Anatolia had been, in the late first millennium BC, no less Greek-speaking than the Balkan peninsula that culminates in the Peloponnese, the place that we now think of as the farthest natural extent of Greece, it is almost an accident that the Greek-speaking community ended up concentrated in the same place from which it spread two and a half thousand years before. Looking back, we can see that this only reflects the fact that the Muslim powers that threatened from the east, the Arabs and above all the Turks, were better organised, and more coherent in the long term, than the threats that came from the north, the Goths, Avars and Slavs. Slavs could be a.s.similated; Turks could not.

Consolations in age.

ksipno ke vlepo efis ano na meni

i i$rTcross;ia Aina me parrisian

ky etsi apo psila mu sindieni:

'Tis Ela$rTcross;s tin brin din ev$rTcross;ksian