Palmer L.R. The Greek Language

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Aegean Octopus Style, which originated in Crete. Cretan influence has also been argued for the Argive Style of

much the same date. During the second half of the twelfth century there are signs of a further accession of

Mycenaean elements, while at the end of that century some Cretans appear to have migrated to Cyprus.

All this is consistent with the view that Crete remained in close contact with the Mainland palaces until their

destruction (see above on the inscribed stirrup-jars) and remained a centre of Mycenaean influence during the

twelfth century.

For the eleventh century the available material is' exceedingly meagre' and, in particular, west Crete is 'completely

blank'. However, Desborough writes of 'a clear continuity with what went before and what came after'. Still more

striking is his general conclusion. 'At the middle of the eleventh century we can identify with certainty only two

regions that were comparatively stable and undisturbed, the one being Crete...'. Until this time, it would seem, there

is no evidence for the arrival of the Dorians. What of the tenth century? In the more purely Dorian west the

material 'is confined to a single cemetery of uncertain date'. Throughout central Crete, on the other hand, we find a

clear influence of the Late Geometric Style of Athens (which was never occupied by the Dorians!) with actual

imports of such vases. As for the general picture of Cretan relations during this century' probably the most

significant feature of Crete... is precisely the links with the east Mediterranean'. In fact there was probably

continuous contact with Cyprus at least from c. 1100 B.C. On the other hand the only evidence adduced for contact

between Crete and the regions to the north is of dress pins and fibulae (safety-pins) and it is concluded 'neither area

had any effect on the other'.

In his general summing-up Desborough concludes with a series of questions 'with fact heavily outweighed by

hypothesis'. Who evicted the Mycenaean refugees who fled from the mainland overseas? Were they aggressors

from north-west Greece? Did they spread into the Peloponnese during the late eleventh and some of the tenth

century 'constituting a somewhat isolated and backward block of population?'

Henri van Effenterre1 is more forthright. The dialect distri-

1La seconde fin du monde, 180 if. (1975).

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bution is basic and essential, but it is supported by certain sociological institutions and practices, among which we

may mention certain details of the calendar. Why, then, he asks, is there no such widespread scepticism about the

importance of the Dorian invasion? It is because the Dorians have been a serious disappointment to the

archaeologists. Effenterre agrees with the historian Moses Finley that there is no archaeological feature which

enables us to identify the Dorians. In the face of such archaeological agnosticism it will be well to recall the

indubitable Dorian character of Iron Age Crete and the 'Achaean' substratum elements in the dialect (to say nothing

of the preservation of tribal designations) that argue a symbiosis of the two Greek population elements. That the

material studied by archaeologists gives no hint of this drastic reshaping of the political and linguistic map of the

Mycenaean world is a lesson to be remembered when dealing with the remoter events that brought the Proto-

Greeks into Greece.

According to a theory which was launched by Paul Kretschmer and remained canonical for a long time, the Greek

invasion comprised three waves stretching over the greater part of the second millennium: 1, Ionians, 2, Aeolians

and 3, 'Dorians' (West Greeks). The distinction of 1 and 2 was due to the belief that there had been an Ionian

occupation of certain parts of the Peloponnese, which was later overlaid by Aeolians. The evidence for the

widespread belief in a 'Middle Helladic' invasion has been considered above. Now with the acknowledged

archaeological silence about the coming of the Dorians, the keystone in this construction ('no archaeological break

no invasion') will be regarded with increased scepticism. If we keep to the linguistic evidence, two facts must be

stressed: 1, Linear B, our first evidence for 'Greekness', is exclusively an LH/LM III B phenomenon; 2, the

differences between the four Bronze Age dialect groups are slight. The second point affects our estimate of the

time required for such differentiation. Modern dialectological studies have shown that major developments which

lead even to mutual unintelligibility may take place within a comparatively short time. For instance, Ernst Risch

has pointed out that in the Middle Ages there was no Schweizerdeutsch really distinct from Swabian or Alsatian.

Thus, purely linguistic considerations would not require us to put the

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beginning of "Linear B Greek' further back than the beginning of LH III B, when the Last Palace at Pylos was

constructed, and it is quite possible that the change from

to occurred towards the end of this period. As for the

changes that led to the dialect break-up of 'Proto-Greek' (on this concept see above), they could easily have been

accomplished wholly within the LH III period.1 Any earlier date for Proto-Greek is a departure from the minimum

hypothesis. Consequently the onus is on those who speculate about 'Middle Helladic' (or even 'Early Helladic III')

Greek. These are constructions that rest on archaeological silence. It is curious that such silence should on the one

hand justify a hypothetical Proto-Greek people virtually a millennium before our earliest records and on the other

prompt a denial of the reality of an event virtually within the historical period and vouched for by language,

institutions and folk-memory. If the drastic transformation of the Greek world by the West Greek invasions could

take place without archaeological reflections, it is difficult to accept the validity of the principle that archaeological

continuity implies ethnic continuity (see above pp. 23f.).

4. the Second Colonial Period

A. Meillet has observed that to write the history of the Greek dialects is to write the history of Greek colonization.

Above, the colonial movements of the sub-Mycenaean and the Dark Ages have been largely deduced from the

dialect map. A second colonial period began in the eighth century B.C as a consequence of which Greek dialects

and Hellenic culture were spread to the Black Sea, the Libyan coast of Africa and the countries and islands lying to

the west of Greece by the implantation of colonies. The effective agents were the now-flourishing Greek city

states. The colonists took with them not merely the dialect of the mother city but its institutions, cults, calendar and

alphabet.

1 It is pertinent to recall the dictum of Antoine Meillet (Aperçu d'une histoire de la langue grecque, p. 17)

on the date of Proto-Greek: '... the differences [between the Greek dialects] concern only details that

developed at a recent date, a short time before the historical period; all known Greek dialects go back to

one and the same common language'. In the light of the new evidence we can rephrase this conclusion 'a

short time before the end of LH III B'.

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The colonists in due course developed their own dialectal idiosyncrasies, but these fall outside the framework of

the broad sketch attempted in this chapter. The present section is concerned simply with the spread of Greek in the

Mediterranean as a consequence of this second wave of colonial expansion. The lead was taken by Miletus to

exploit the resources of the Black Sea areas. It founded colonies on the south shore in the first half of the eighth

century and on the other shores during the seventh century. These colonies, together with their secondary

foundations, came to number close on a hundred. Other colonies in the same area were founded by other Ionian

states, while Dorian Megara also took a hand, notably with Chalcedon and Byzantium, both in the first half of the

seventh century. In Italy the earliest colony was established by the Euboean cities Chalcis and Eretria (together

with some from Asiatic Cyme), first on the island of Pithecusae (Ischia) and subsequently at Cyme (Cumae) on the

opposite coast. The Chalcidians also founded Rhegium at the toe of Italy. The Achaeans were active with Sybaris,

Croton, Metapontium, and Caulonia (but these were later Doricized), while the Spartans founded Taras (Tarentum).

The Chalcidians were again the first in Sicily with Naxus (with a contingent from the island of Naxos), Leontini

and Catana. Zancle, too, was colonized jointly by Chalcis and Cumae on the Sicilian side of the passage opposite

Rhegium.

South-east Sicily was secured by the Dorians. Syracuse, founded by Chalcis, was taken by Corinthians, who also

dislodged the Eretrians from Corcyra and founded colonies controlling the entry to the Gulf of Corinth, followed

by others at Leucas and Ambracia. A force of Dorians from Megara, who had assisted the Corinthians at Syracuse,

later founded a colony at Selinus close to the Phoenician settlements in the south-west of the island. Between this

and Syracuse, Gela was founded by Cretans and Rhodians early in the seventh century and over a hundred years

later Gela planted a daughter colony at Acragas (Agrigentum).

In the west the Phocaeans founded Massilia (Marseilles) at the end of the seventh century, with later offshoots

along the coasts of France and Spain.

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The Dorians of Thera first settled on the island of Platea and later founded Cyrene (c. 630 B.C.) on the coast of

Libya.

In conclusion one should stress what one might call the sovereignty of the Greek local dialects in the pre-

Hellenistic age. They were not subject to the relentless pressure of an ever-present standard language like the

dialects of modern Europe in centralized states. This development had to await the extinction of Greek political

freedom and the institution of a central power under the Macedonians (see Chapter VI). What is peculiar to Greek

is the emergence of standard literary languages which found acceptance outside the dialect area in which they

originated. Here the motive force was cultural prestige. Their development is the subject of the next chapter.

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IV the Literary Languages: Poetry

1. Homer

It was argued above that the language of the Linear B tablets was a widespread administrative koine which, though

once based on a living dialect, conceals from us the everyday speech current in the various regions of the

Mycenaean world; this implies that it may well have been archaic at the time of the destruction of the palaces.

Nothing could be more flat, terse and bald than these earliest specimens of Greek prose; functionally determined as

they are, being the concise, severely practical memoranda of the palace scribes, they may conceal not only the local

dialects, but a highly developed and sophisticated Mycenaean poetical language. The evidence for this is indirect:

the possibility emerges from the analysis of our earliest specimen of Greek poetrythe Homeric Epics.

At first glance the Epic language betrays not only its artificial and conventional character but also that it is the

product of a long and complex history. The conclusions which emerge from the analysis may be stated at once:

while the language of 'Homer' is basically Ionic, it has incorporated elements of widely different date and dialect

origin reaching back into the Mycenaean age. There is a reasonable measure of agreement among scholars that the

long process of linguistic and poetical evolution reached its culmination in the work of the 'monumental poet(s)',1

datable to the latter half of the eighth century for the Iliad and the early part of the seventh century for the Odyssey.

They lived and worked in the Ionian 'New World' in Asia Minor, the settlement of which began c. 1050 B.C.

The predominantly East Ionian character of the epic dialect is immediately obvious from the treatment of

( > h

even after r 1 and e), and this first impression is supported by the presence

1 The author shares the view that the Odyssey is later than the Iliad and of different authorship.

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of all the other major features; quantitative metathesis (

, etc.), ( ), athematic infinitives in ,

third singular for , third plural in , the pronouns and , and the potential particle . The

distinction from Attic is marked not only by the consistent change of > h, but also by the contracted form =

Attic , by the absence of contraction in , by the treatment of digamma in the clusters (

, see p. 62), and by the genitive singular for Attic in masculine a-stems.

This overall picture is distorted, however, by the presence of certain unmistakably Aeolic features. First, there are

words with the typically Aeolian change *qw * > p before front vowels: , etc. More

important are the morphological features, notably the dative plurals

and the infinitives in , the

former appearing also in thematic verbs (p. 61). There is only one example of an Aeolic perfect participle in

, but there are also certain artificial forms which are suspected of concealing earlier . We

also find third plural endings like

for and the athematic conjugation of contracted verbs (

The complex dialect problems which the epic language presents may be illustrated by the Homeric forms of the

preposition 'towards', and which have figured largely in arguments about the chronology and

dialect distribution of the change

> (see above). In view of the importance attached to the pre-Dorian

elements in Crete and the fact that they are concentrated in central Crete, a fact of Cretan dialect geography may be

relevant to this problem. It is in central Crete (Gortyna, Knossos, Vaxos, etc.) that we find

as against in

the east and west (

before dentals in Kydonia). C. D. Buck presents the overall dialect picture thus: [Central]

Cretan

>, Attic-Ionic, Lesbian in the West Greek dialects (except [Central] Crete), as well as in

Thessalian and Boeotian; A-C

. He comments '...the relation of to can hardly be the same

in origin as that of

to .1 E. Schwyzer, for his part, regards the forms as 'archaisms which prove

nothing'. In

1The Greek Dialects, 2nd edn. 100; in the 3rd edition, p. 58, he writes: '... It is a question whether the of

comes from by elision and apocope or is a different ending, original '.

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assessing the bearing of the dialect evidence on the provenance of the different Homeric forms the first point to be

seized on is that

finds the closest analogue in Central Cretan . Arcado-Cypriot does not appear in

Homer. It is unfortunate that Linear B posi is ambiguous, for it may stand for posi or porsi. In either event if, as

appears likely, the Central Cretan form

is an 'Achaean' survival, this would add to the evidence that the

Linear B administrative koine masks the real dialect situation in the Mycenaean Peloponnese. What is essential to

the picture of the Epic language is that Homer presents forms from the two different nuclei

and , the

combinations of which with

and span the whole Greek dialect world (see above). If we exclude any Doric

participation in the formation of the Epic language, the combined evidence of Homer and the inscriptions suggests

that we must attribute to the pre-Dorian, pre-migration Mainland the whole set of forms just discussed. It is

significant that only the exclusively A-C form

is excluded from Homer.

With this we approach the question of Arcado-Cypriot elements in Homer. They consist in the main of vocabulary

items:

(A-C), (Arc.), (A-C, Myc.), (Arc.), (Arc.), (Arc., Cypr.),

(Arc.), (Cypr.), (Arc. ), (Cypr.), (Arc.), (Arc.), and the particles

and . To these may be added elements culled from the glossographers which also recur in Linear B:

and . The evidence will be discussed below.

We may now turn to the presence of forms of different date (the terms 'early' and 'late' are correlative; they have no

implications of absolute date and certainly do not mean 'genuine' v. 'intrusive'). The treatment of digamma is

illuminating. By way of preliminary it is necessary to distinguish the positional variants, for these disappeared at

widely different times. As was shown above (p. 71), intervocalically the loss of this sound in Attic-Ionic must be

attributed to pre-migration times. On the other hand the divergent treatment of

( / ), ( /

), etc. shows that in these clusters the change was post-migration and later than the completion of the

evolution

> h, the inception of which must also be placed in pre-migration times (see pp. 62 f.). What

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concerns us most is initial digamma. The texts of Homer (see below) lack any indication of this sound, but its

presence in the epic language emerges from metrical considerations. Hiatus of a short final vowel is very rare

before a word beginning with a vowel, whether aspirated or not. But over 2,000 examples have been counted

where this word originally began with F (or *sw-), so that we can remove the hiatus by inserting this sound:

, etc. In other verses an apparently short syllable receives the

required length if the digamma is inserted. Most instructive are examples like

and , where

the anomalous hiatus and apparent lengthening of the short vowels is due to the ww-which developed from

*swekuros and *swos respectively (p. 238). But this treatment is by no means constant for there are numerous

examples of elision and non-lengthening before words that originally began with digamma:

One reflection of the digamma is of interest in that it shows how evidently artificial forms occurring in late

passages may nevertheless go back to ancient formulas. We recall that the adjectival suffix -went- in Linear B is

added directly to the stem-consonant in third declension words (e.g. pedwessa 'footed'). In Homer we have

reflections of

'purple', 'crimson'. Later a thematic vowel was inserted; but then became

unusable in hexameter verse. The relevant passages are: (x 500),

(j 118); (k 133), said of

Nestor, who also appears in 1 ( 116);

'the weals red with blood sprang up' (y 716-17).

While with its false quantity is evidently an artificial form, the connection with 'cloak' and its

verse-final position suggests that it goes back to a genuine ancient formula which still preserved the Mycenaean

. The last example (from the Games) is the only one where the adjective has freed itself from the

formulaic position and connection with and so belongs to a later phase in the evolution of the Epic

language.

1 Another reading is .

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The example quoted above,

, leads to another feature which reveals the presence of earlier and later

elements. This is the contraction of vowels, and we have in

an example which cannot be resolved. This

ending of the genitive singular is the last stage in the Greek development of *-osjo (p. 238): -oio, -oo, -ou. Homer

offers examples of all these forms (on -oo see below); Linear B shows -oio, and this form appears in an

apocopized form in the Thessalian (Pelasgiotis) -oi. In Homer the contracted forms are much in the minority: the

Iliad has only 20 per cent and the Odyssey only 24 per cent of all o-stem genitive singular forms. In general,

contraction of vowels is comparatively rare in Homer if we count only those examples which are metrically

protected. For instance,

'unwilling' appears both as and but the former can everywhere be

resolved. Similarly, only one example of

< resists resolution, while can be scanned as

trisyllabic in all but five instances. Adjectives in

from feminine a-stems are usually uncontracted

, etc.), but there are a few contracted forms: ` S 475, 110 (on for

, see below). The word' to wash' is of interest because in Linear B the verbal stem is lewo- as opposed

to later

. Homer has (also the derived ), and in many instances the reading

can be replaced by . But there are examples where the contracted form must stand:

We now turn to the problem of how such a linguistic amalgam comprising forms of different dialect and date came

about. One suggestion may be ruled out at once: the notion that such a mixed dialect represents the spoken

language of any historical Greek community. It is true that we have testimony for the northward advance of the

Ionians in Asia Minor and their occupation of the originally Aeolic town of Smyrna, while the inscriptions of

Chios present Lesbian features, such as

for . As we have seen, the dialects of Boeotia and

Thessaly present a striking mixture of Aeolic and West Greek elements. But there is no parallel for the type of

mixture observed in the Epic language. It is hard to imagine a living dialect which possessed simultaneously three

different genitive forms, such as

or so many different forms of the

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