Palmer L.R. The Greek Language
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Thucydides. Intended as it was for oral exposition, the oratorical period, however long and however complex its
structure might be, had to make it easy for the hearer to grasp the meanings of the cola as they emerged and to
apprehend their relation to the whole and so not only to follow the exposition and the argument but also to
experience the intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction given by such a period. As Aristotle puts it, a period is a
sentence that has a beginning and an end in itself and is of a size which can be taken in at a glance (
).
Such a sentence is pleasant and easy to grasp (
). The style of Thucydides does not conform to this
prescription. In the first place the historian packs too much meaning into his cola for ready apprehension by the
hearer. Further obscurity results from his constant search for variation in the contrasting members of his antithetic
expressions, which results in structural tangles that can be unravelled only by a reader.
There remains a further feature of artistic prose which, we recall, was also initiated by Thrasymachus. This was the
construction of periods from rhythmical cola. Aristotle, in requiring that a period should be above all easily
apprehended, notes that this follows from being easily remembered (
), and this quality is enhanced if
the period is rhythmical.
Such was the linguistic orchestra that emerged after half a century of experiment in the writing of artistic prose.
With the ingrained Greek sensitivity to the distinctions of genre and their appropriate styles it is not surprising that
the different writers should differ in their instrumentation, or that one and the same writer should write in different
styles in generically different parts of his compositions. This is above all true of Plato, the 'Homer of prose' as he
has been called, who in the dialogue passages captures the easy conversational tone of educated men but elsewhere
rises to heights where he consciously hovers between prose and poetry. As Eduard Norden has written: 'The
Symposium is a drama, the
of Socrates in the Phaedrus a lyrical poem, the beginning of the
Phaedrus a prose idyll.' In oratory, too, there is a gamut of styles, the extremes of which are represented by the
plain and severe expository style of Lysias and the elaborate epideictic style of Isocrates' Panegyric, in which be
insists (11) on the difference between the plain manner (
), appropriate in court
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pleadings, and the exhibition manner ( ) appropriate to grander occasions.
With Isocrates, Greek artistic prose reached its technical perfection. Though he was a pupil of Gorgias, the
consummate instrument that he elaborated owed no less to Thrasymachus. His general aim was to fashion a style
for prose compositions which could rival that of poetry and even replace it in certain branches. In his Panegyric (8)
he stresses the manifold power of words:
... 'But since words have such a nature as
to be able to dilate on the same subject in many different ways and to make the great humble and to give
magnitude to what is trivial, to expound old things in a new way and to expound recent events in an antique way.'
Elsewhere he insists on the notion of 'propriety' (
) 'to
adorn the whole speech in a way which is appropriate to the thoughts'. In general, 'propriety' imposes restrictions
on vocabulary: he avoided not only poetical words and expressions but also newly-coined words, which were so
abundant in archaic prose. Apart from precision and purity of diction the supreme achievement of Isocrates was the
elegance and logical transparency of his periods. Finally, attaching importance to the rhythmical and musical
qualities of such formal speaking (
), he recommended the chief employment of iambic
and trochaic rhythms, while among the 'musical' devices was the avoidance of hiatus which makes sentences limp (
).
The Panegyric belongs to the genre of fictitious speeches which had become one of the instruments of political
propaganda. Occasions for launching such compositions on the public were provided by the general religious
assemblies of the Greeks (
), such as the Olympic Games. Isocrates in his Panegyric, from which our
example is taken, was following the example of his teacher who in 392 had published his Olympic Oration with
much the same general themethe appeal for unity among the Greeks and for a war of liberation against the Persians
It is possible that Isocrates first conceived the general
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idea of his own work at this time for, although it was published first in 380, there is a tradition that he worked on it
for ten to fifteen years. It was the most polished of all Isocrates's compositions and its literary influence was
immense, for it became the supreme model for later writers of exhibition oratory.
75-7
'Those responsible for the greatest number of benefits and worthy of the highest praise were, in my opinion, those
who risked their lives in defence of Greece. And yet it is not right to forget those who lived before this war, and
held power in each of these two cities. For it was they who trained the rising generation, impelling the masses to
manliness and making them into tough opponents for the barbarians. They were not heedless of public affairs, nor
did they profit from public wealth as though it were their own while disregarding it as though it belonged to others,
but caring for it as though it was their personal possession, they abstained from it as though they had no right to it.
Nor did they measure happiness by money but thought that the most secure and honourable wealth was obtained by
the sort of man who acted in such a way as would bring him personally the highest repute and would leave to his
children the greatest glory.'
Modern scholars and critics who come to Isocrates from a reading of Demosthenes's 'Ninth Symphony', the De
Corona with
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its force and vehemence, its passion and singleness of purpose, its infinitely varied and controlled stylistic
virtuosity, find it difficult to understand the unique position which Isocrates occupied not only in Greek but also in
Latin prose literature and, via Cicero, in Renaissance writers. Particularly puzzling is that Aristotle almost entirely
neglects the Attic orators. Evidently we are viewing the problem from the wrong angle. The object of enquiry is
form not content, manner not matter. While some scholars have saluted Isocrates as the father of humanistic
education and also as a great political thinker, these are not questions of concern to the historian of the Greek
language. The linguist will confine his attention to expression rather than content, and it would be presumptuous to
dismiss what is an historical factthe admiration of the generations who shared the language of Isocrates and strove
to imitate him. However, the verdict of antiquity was not unanimous. One critic, Hermogenes, used an illuminating
phrase when he described Isocrates's style as 'senile and schoolmasterly' (
). Here he
put his finger on the cancer to which Greek prose rapidly succumbed. If perfection of style is perfect adaptation of
the linguistic means to its end and a writer's achievement is measured by his response to an occasion in the way
that Demosthenes used all the resources of his eloquence to arouse the Athenians of his day to the danger of
Macedonian imperialism, then it will be understandable why the loss of Athenian freedom and independence was
fatal to prose. The reason was the drying-up of stimulus and occasion. Both Demosthenes and Isocrates had been
writers of speeches for others to deliver on their own occasions. But whereas Demosthenes occupied the centre of
public political debate, Isocrates never appeared even in court himself and for about forty years conducted a school
of rhetoric at Athens before devoting the last dozen or so years of his long life to writing on themes of general
interest. His 'schoolmasterliness' was a faithful reflection of his life.
One of Isocrates's latest works (346 B.C.) is the Philippus, addressed to Philip of Macedon, the new master of
Greece, to whom he appeals as the 'benefactor' (
) of the Hellenes. In the year in which Isocrates died (338
B.C.) Philip crushed the Athenians and Boeotians at Chaeronea. Thereafter the
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story of Greek prose is one of decline and degeneration. In the centuries that followed, as public life receded from
the writers and orators who might have found energy in serving the state, they retired to the class-rooms and
lecture halls of the rhetoricians and played at being public men, writing compositions on set themes invented for
imaginary political and forensic occasions, or others of an even more ridiculous triviality. Now the school was
master, and the further development of Greek prose was like a retreat into second childhood.
In one form of such academic exercises the pupil, continuing the practice of the early Sophists, conducted debates
with an imaginary opponent. This had two consequences: loose and slovenly diction and the abandonment of the
period in favour of short, balanced clauses. Moreover, the moralizing character of the set themes prompted a tone
of theatrical pathos. This set of circumstances favoured the revival of Gorgianism. Such was the origin of one of
the two styles which later came to be known as 'Asianism'. Despite its evident Sophistic origins, ancient critics
traced Asianism to Hegesias of Magnesia, whose floruit was the middle of the third century B.C. His is a
voluptuous and sensual style, its vehicle being minute clauses with insistent rhythms (often contrived by insertion
of superfluous words), which critics found 'lascivious'. His Gorgian devices of constant antithesis, clause
equalization, jingling word-play, highly poetical vocabulary and far-fetched metaphor combined to produce a style
which later critics found revolting.
We may also trace to the Sophists a second Asianic style which has been described as a prose dithyramb, aspiring
to grandiloquence but suffocating through the sheer bulk of its flabby corpulence, while its diction was archaic in
being both poetical and full of neologisms. The periods are tricked out with every device of the rhetorical schools
and natural word order is distorted in the interest of rhythm. Such tumidity and bombast were traced by Quintilian
(XII 10. 17) to the 'passionate and boastful character of the Asiatic race (Asiana gens tumidior atque iactantior); it
carried to absurd lengths the stylistic excesses which Aristotle (Rhet. III 3, 1405 b) summed up as 'frigid' (
).
It is not surprising that such excess should have provoked a reaction, though it was long in coming. In the
Ciceronian age Greek teachers of language and rhetoric at Rome preached the
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gospel of Atticism and urged the imitation of the ancient Attic models of style and eloquence. Yet this reaction
was in effect a counsel to keep company with the dead. The more successful such literary antiquarianism is, the
less interest it holds for the historian of the Greek language.
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VI
Post-Classical Greek
I. The Common Dialect
In its most creative period, that is when the great works of literature were produced, Greece was politically and
linguistically fragmented. The 'Greek language' was in fact a congeries of local dialects which were used by the
separate city states in their public documents. The development of certain of these dialects into rich and subtle
instruments of high literature with pan-Hellenic status has been traced in the previous chapters. The manifold
variety of dialects in the archaic and classical periods contrasts strangely with the rigid uniformity of the
documents of the Mycenaean world, but this, as we have argued, may be illusory. The language of the Linear B
tablets was presumably the technical instrument of the Palace administrations, a governmental common language,
based on a Peloponnesian dialect that screens from our view the doubtless greater variety of the real Mycenaean
dialect world. The fact remains that on present evidence a common language was in exclusive use for the limited
purposes attested by the Linear B archives, and such uniformity, matched as it is by the unity of culture observed
by the archaeologists, implies a high degree of intercommunication, if not centralization. Whatever the place and
date at which this Mycenaean Koine emerged, it appears everywhere in virtually the same form.
A general point may be made. Speech is acquired by imitation of those with whom we come into contact. Intense
communication tends to produce uniformity of language within the limits of the social unit which uses it. On the
other hand, differentiation of speech results from barriers to, and interruptions of, such intercommunication. So it
was that after the twelfth century B.C., when the Mycenaean world was shattered, Greece broke up into restricted
local communities, the isolation of which favoured the linguistic separateness mirrored in the dialect map of post-
Mycenaean times. Yet this new Hellenic
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world was destined to grow together, culturally and politically, into larger units until it was forcibly unified by the
Macedonian conquerors after the decisive battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C. Once again a new Common Dialect was
evolved for the purpose of government and administration. This was the Koine, which smothered and replaced the
ancient local dialects. Its basis was historically determined: it was Attic.
The prestige enjoyed by Athens thanks to the leading role it had played in the resistance to the Persians hardened
into political power. Athens became the metropolis of an empire, attracting thousands of foreigners on their various
political, commercial, and legal occasions, to say nothing of the merles who settled there and the non-Athenians
who served as rowers in the fleet. Command of the sea brought not only raw materials and commodities to the
Piraeus; the language, too, was enriched (some would say 'adulterated') by alien borrowings. The 'Old Oligarch'
wrote (II 8) that the Athenians speak a language that is a mixture of all the Hellenes and Barbarians. This process
was reinforced by the practice of settling Athenians in colonies on imperial territory. Such a stirring-up of the
population was bound to have linguistic effects. Mastery of so complex and sensitive an instrument as the Attic
dialect with its many archaisms and irregularities required constant association and verbal communication within
the native community for its preservation. How easy it was for a man separated from his fellows to lose his purity
of speech emerges from a passage of Solon (36. 10) in which he claims to have brought back to Athens many
Athenians who after long wanderings no longer spoke pure Attic (
).
In the fourth century we hear of one Euxitheos (Demosthenes 57, 18), who found his citizen status challenged
because his father spoke in a foreign way (
). To explain this away he produced witnesses to prove that his
father had been taken prisoner and had lived in slavery for many years before returning home. It was by such
processes that Metropolitan Attic became Imperial Attic. The outstanding example in literature of such linguistic
adulteration is Xenophon, who is rightly regarded as the precursor of the Koine. His life was largely lived abroad
and, as an ancient grammarian (Helladius) observed,' it is no wonder
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that a man who spent much time on campaigns and in the company of aliens should in some respects lapse from
his native speech'.
The challenge of empire was the stimulus which in a comparatively short time transformed Attic from a locally-
restricted dialect of somewhat archaic aspect into a linguistic instrument of pan-Hellenic status. Historically
decisive was the Phil-hellenism of Philip II of Macedon. His court was Greek in its way of life, and he employed
Aristotle as tutor for his son Alexander. More important was the adoption of Attic as his official language and his
use of it in diplomatic correspondence. Once Alexander had destroyed the Persian empire, the whole of the Eastern
world as far as India was opened up to Greek culture. In this way what we may now call the Macedonian Koine
became not only the language of government and administration but the lingua franca of educated men throughout
this huge expanse of territory. Rome in its turn could do no other than use the same instrument of communication
and control once it had expanded into Greece, Macedonia and Thrace, Asia Minor and Armenia, Mesopotamia,
Syria, Palestine and Egypt.
Profound linguistic consequences might have been expected from the adoption of what was basically the Attic
dialect by users of not merely non-Attic, but non-Greek speech. In fact the changes were remarkably slight. In
phonology certain tendencies already observable in the ancient dialects persisted. In the morphology there was
simplification and systematization which ironed out a number of Attic idiosyncrasies. But the main result of the
immense extension of Macedonian power and the use of the language for all the purposes and occasions of life in a
world empiregovernment, science, art and literaturewas a great enrichment of the lexicon.
2. Grammatical Developments
(a) Phonology
The traditional spelling concealed great changes which are partially betrayed by orthographic lapses. The vowels
were affected by the process known as itacism: i,
and h all eventually converged on the value [i]; the same was
true of the
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diphthong
, which first developed to [y], thus coalescing with u in its Attic pronunciation (see p. 205). The
diphthong
was monophthongized and coalesced with e; the long diphthongs and lost their second
element. Important, too, was the change of the pitch to a stress accent and the loss of the phonemic distinction of
quantity in the vowel system. On the development of the inherited diphthong ei to [e:] in Attic by v B.C. see p.
205. The raising to [i:] occurs in other dialects at an early date (on Boeotian see p. 118); in Attic inscriptions the
first examples occur as early as 300 B.C. and in the Egyptian papyri from iii B.C. onwards. The itacism of h
(phonetically [e :]) lagged behind that of [e:]. In the papyri from the middle of A.D. ii it alternates with
and e,
thus revealing its still open pronunciation, although there are also examples of confusion with
and i. As for at
and
, while Boeotian had made early changes in these diphthongs, anticipating developments in the Koine (see p.
118), it was not until ii and iii A.D. that Attic offers examples of
= [e] and = [y], and the value [i] for the
latter did not develop until towards the end of the first millennium A.D.
Fundamental changes took place in the prosodic system of the language. The elimination of the quantitative
distinctions between the vowels went hand in hand with a change in the accent from pitch to stress, which
eliminated the subtle oppositions between acute, grave and circumflex (see pp. 243 ff.). The beginnings of the
blurring of vowel length distinctions can be detected as early as iii B.C. in orthographic alternations, such as e × h
(
for ) and o × w ( for ). Later, in A.D. ii, there is metrical evidence that authors
were uncertain of the old quantities, and by about A.D. 4:00 Nonnus wrote dactylic hexameters which take account
of the stress accent, especially at the end of the verse. At a slightly earlier date Gregory of Nazianzus (A.D. 330-
90), who was versed in the ancient measures and prosodies, also wrote some popular poems based on the accentual
rhythms of the current speech of his day. In the structural presentation of these changes, however, the quantitative
distinctions must be retained, for the long and short vowels had different developmental histories. The following
diagram shows the Attic short-vowel system, which remained unaffected until ii B.C.
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