Empires Of The Word Part 16

ronos tinas pote $rTcross;en din mareni,

yat' amarandos ine i sofia.'

I awake and see at once above me.

The same Athena is waiting candidly, And with these words from on high she talks to me: 'The renown of Greece of old No time will ever efface: For wisdom is imperishable.'

Andreas Myiares (c.1708).

Greek had been undone: it was no more the language of a community with universal aspirations. When the Renaissance took hold in western Europe, it did enjoy a resuscitation as a source of scholarly wisdom. Ability to read the language, and a familiarity with its cla.s.sics (focused on the fifth and fourth centuries BC, as ever-though with more attention now to Aristotle), became a useful touchstone of authenticity for scholars, but it never rose to the level of a lingua franca among them: that position was held by its old colleague, Latin.

But Greek itself, as a living language, was now the property of a number of small communities, with no right or power actively to influence others. And their sense of unity one with another was diminished by the breakdown of any link with traditional Greek literary education, a development that had begun in the thirteenth century, a century and a half before the Turkish triumph, when the Latin powers had first taken control of so many of the empire's old domains.

In these home communities, it did not die out. Its transmission was s.h.i.+elded 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 const.i.tuent 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 cla.s.sical hang-ups. There was a new sense of Greek, based on the spirit of the kleftis, 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 cla.s.sical education, during the Tourkokratia. A popular-in Greek, 'Demotic'-style of written language had established itself, and its role could now be a.s.serted. 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.

Retrospect: The life cycle of a cla.s.sic.

Aien aristeuein kai hupeirokhon emmenai allon mede genos pateron aiskhunemen, hoi meg' aristoi...

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 philh.e.l.lenes, 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 compet.i.tive 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 compet.i.tive 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 eleutheria, '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 cla.s.sics, 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 cla.s.sics 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 diminis.h.i.+ng Greek influence nevertheless took as much as they could from it: the Kushana 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 oikoumene, 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 princ.i.p.al 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, senatus, Augustus, imperator, are in fact usually translated: hupatos (literally 'topmost'), gerousia ('gathering of old men'), Sebastos ('reverend'), autokrator ('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 amebar;n and hosanna.

Things changed after the Greeks were disempowered by the Fourth Crusade. Latin elements came into the language and stuck: banio, 'bath', bastar$rTcross;o, 'b.a.s.t.a.r.d', bira, 'beer'. After this, within a Turkish-run world, Greek did behave more like a colonised language, and absorbed a whole host of Turkish words, not just for new concepts such as tzami, 'mosque', atzis, 'Mecca pilgrim', o$rTcross;aliski, 'concubine' (from Turkish oda-lik, 'roomer', combined with a Greek diminutive), but for such mundane and apparently gratuitous things as boyatzis, 'painter', tembelis, 'lazy', yakas, 'collar', bolikos, 'abundant' and sokaki, '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 G.o.ds and a general sense of kins.h.i.+p, 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.sics, 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 sh.o.r.es 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.

* 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 a.s.sociation.

w, written as f in some Greek alphabets, dropped out of p.r.o.nunciation (and hence spelling) in most dialects. Hence the w in this Homeric word is, strictly speaking, conjectural, loTnes is the same word, with a common contraction of a+o into o. 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 a.s.sociations 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, Achivi, 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 doc.u.ments, namely the royal correspondence (in cuneiform on baked clay tablets) of the Hitt.i.tes 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 Herodotos, Akhaios 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 kh ph th in fact as in English 'Can Pete take it?' Except in diphthongs, au, eu, the Greek u was p.r.o.nounced in Attic much as it is today in French, phonetically [y]; ou was a long u, 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 a.s.sociated with a particular dialect, typically that of its first pract.i.tioners, 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sociation.

* It also had one colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Amisus, 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 Epid.a.m.nos, later Dyrrhachium (now Durrazze 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 (Buzantion) is just the diminutive of Buzas, as if Hongkers had become the official name of Hong Kong.

Cyrene, founded c.630, specialised in the growth and export of silphion, a medicinal plant. But Greek was also to be heard farther east on the African sh.o.r.e, where a rather different kind of enterprise was established. Naucratis, 'Sea-Queen', was a pan-h.e.l.lenic 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 G.o.ds, with an emphasis on recounting their myths.

Greek a.n.a.lysis 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 Tekhne Grammalik$eA 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 a.s.sociated 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.

ekbebarbarosthai: it had been two hundred years since Rome had conquered Greece, and begun its attempt to a.s.similate its culture; yet a Greek-and one educated at Rome at that-still cla.s.sed 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 (-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 c.u.mae, 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 Patanjali (3.2.111): arunad yavanan saketam, 'The Greek has besieged Saketa' (a city close to Faizabad on the Gaghra); arunad yavanan madhyamikam, "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 ill.u.s.trate 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 munic.i.p.al, 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 cla.s.sical Indian one, concerned to distinguish the complementary roles of Brahman/scholar, Kshatriya/warrior-king and Vaisya/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-h.e.l.lenic 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 alloglossous, 'of another language', i.e. than the Egyptians. And Herodotus too uses this term of Greeks in Egypt (2.154). Contrast the more typical att.i.tude 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, yudah maqqaba.

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 Philadelphos, 'Lover of His Sister': indeed he married her, in an amazing Greek adoption of Egyptian pharaonic tradition.

* The authors are in fact extremely few, and are still recognisable as the core of a traditional, cla.s.sical education in western Europe. The dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes; the historian Thucydides; the philosopher Plato; and a handful of orators culminating in Demosthenes, who inveighed against the threat of Philip of Macedon. Greek traditional att.i.tudes dating back to the Roman empire effectively still defined the British school syllabus that I studied in the 1960s.

* Another feature of the writings besides their style was innovative. Christians were important in popularising the new format for books, the 'codex', with separate two-sided pages attached to a spine, as against the traditional scroll. This set the format for at least the next two thousand years. The conjecture is that this made books much easier to access when bookmarking, and quoting, important pa.s.sages (Harris 1989: 296).

Both Greek homilia and Latin sermo originally meant an informal conversation, a chat.

* His host, Artavazdes, the king of Armenia, was also a Greek scholar, apparently, to the extent of having written his own plays in the language (Plutarch, Cra.s.sus, fin.).

Over the three years AD 114-17, the whole area was taken and lost again by the emperor Trajan. But the north-western portion, Osroene, was incorporated for two centuries after a Roman campaign in 164.

* Mango (1980: ch. 1) puts the population of the eastern Mediterranean provinces in the mid-sixth century at 30 million, with 8 million in Egypt, 9 million in Syria-Palestine-Mesopotamia, 10 million in Anatolia and 3-4 million in the Balkans. Note also how Anatolia had twice the population of Greece and the European provinces.

* The writing was on the wall for the Byzantines in that year of 1071: news also arrived that the Normans had taken Bari, ending 535 years of their empire in Italy.

* The Greek Orthodox patriarchate indeed gained from the Turkish conquest, since the Sultan Mehmet rationalised his Orthodox subjects after taking Constantinople, incorporating the Bulgarian and Serbian patriarchates under the authority of Constantinople. Linguistically, of course, they remained separate.

* e.g. zingiberi, 'ginger', sakkharon, 'sugar' (see Chapter 5, "The character of Sanskrit', p. 192).

* Close to the full list seems to be spiti, 'house' (from Latin hospitium, 'inn'), skamnio, 'bench' (scamnum), porta, 'door', kamara, 'room', verga, 'rod', and possibly aspros, 'white' (from Latin asper, 'rough'). Compare the vastly longer list of borrowings by Welsh (which was in close contact with Latin for half the time). (See Chapter 7, 'Consilium: The rationale of Roman imperium', p. 303.) It has been suggested that the favourite choice of the Christian word for 'love', agape, is influenced by Hebrew 'aheb, 'love' (which happens to have much stronger s.e.xual overtones than the Greek), and Greek skebar;ne, 'tent', by Hebrew &scar;eken, 'dwelling' (Moule 1959: 186).

7.

Contesting Europe: Celt, Roman, German and Slav.

[The Gauls are] in their conversation terse and enigmatic, often speaking in allusive riddles.

iodorus Siculus, v.31 Tri huaithaid ata ferr sochaidi: uathad dagbriathar, uathad bo hi feor, uathad carat im chuirm.

Three scarcities that are better than plenty: a scarcity of fine words, a scarcity of cows in a meadow, a scarcity of friends at beer.

The Triads of Ireland, ed. Kuno Meyer, 93 nor was it fitting for the government of the Romans...given that they were possessed more than anyone by a hatred of the very nature and name of absolute power ('tyranny').

Arrian, Alexander's Campaign, vii.15.6 hoc vero regnum est, et ferri nullo pacto potest.

But this is kings.h.i.+p, and can in no wise be tolerated.

Cicero, Letter to Atticus, ii.12.1 ...et ingrata genti quies et facilius inter ancipitia claresc.u.n.t magnumque comitatum non nisi vi belloque tueare.

Peace is disliked by the [German] nation; they distinguish themselves more easily in a crisis and you will not see them in large numbers except in wartime.

Tacitus, Germania, 14.2 Want her do ar arme wuntane baugs, cheisuhngu gitsn, so imo se der chuning gap, Huneo truhtin: 'dat ih dir it nu bi huldi gibu.' Hadubrant gimahalta Hiltibrandes sunu 'Mit geru seal man geba infshan, ort widar orte.'

He took from his arm twisted tores worked with specie gold, given him by the king, lord of the Huns: 'This I now give you in friends.h.i.+p.' Rejoined Hadubrand, son of Hildebrand: 'With spears are gifts to be taken, point against point.'

Hildebrandslied, 33-8

Reversals of fortune

The history of Europe, over the three thousand years for which we have evidence, is dominated by the changing fortunes of four closely related families of languages: Celtic, Italic, Germanic and Slavonic. In every age, their advances across the continent have been warlike: there is a depressing brutality about the heroics in which they all gloried. But like the languages themselves, the cultures they fostered characterise different peoples, each with rather different values.

This chapter focuses on the crucial part of that history, which witnessed a major s.h.i.+ft in ambient language, all over western Europe, from Celtic to Latin. This linguistic s.h.i.+ft was unambiguously due to military conquest, and the sheer clarity of it lives on to this day in Europe's everyday conception of what changes languages: control, backed by military and economic strength. And yet, as if to provide an object lesson in the inadequacy of that simple view, this conquest was itself overwhelmed. After half a millennium of stability, the military balance was overturned in a wide-ranging military catastrophe from which there was no recovery: indeed, it set the pattern of political and national boundaries that has lasted to the present day. Yet while the linguistic effect of all this in most of the West was nil, in Britain, and in the Balkans, it proved decisive.

Looked at as a whole, the history of these crucial thousand years, approximately from 500 BC to AD 500, has a certain symmetry. It begins and ends with the triumph of mobile military societies organised round kins.h.i.+p relations, the Celts at the outset, the Germans and Slavs at the close. In between, we see the triumph of a civic society, which unified Europe, organised its defences and provided good communications throughout, through well-kept roads and well-patrolled sea routes.

For the first 250 years, Gaulish raiders (backed by the best weapons technology available, in iron) dominate the continent, then settle down. They may have partic.i.p.ated then in large-scale trade up and down the Atlantic coast, which also spread their language. Then, over a period of 250 years, they are gradually but systematically overwhelmed, by a better-organised and strategically self-conscious foe, the Romans. Ironically, it is only when the raiders begin to unify and organise themselves jointly for defence (under Vercingetorix) that they can be undone with finality. Four hundred years of stability ensue, while the Roman empire effectively resists continuing pressure for immigration from Germany. Under greater stress (originating in north and east Asia), the resistance fails, first sporadically, then totally; and the last hundred years are spent watching the effects of allowing new sets of raiders to pa.s.s as they will through the old imperial domains.

All in all, the major changes of language in this period, the spread of Latin across Italy, and into Gaul and Iberia, the spread of English in Britain, and the spread of Slavic in the Balkans, are the best markers of serious cultural change. The cases where serious language change failed to follow on from conquests expose the hollowness of much military glory-the conquests in western Europe by Franks, Vandals and Visigoths, even the conquests in Britain by Romans and Normans.