Ptolemy
02-27-2007, 06:01 AM
"Hellenicity" by Jonathan Hall, Page 111
BARBAROPHONOI: THE LINGUISTIC FACTOR
It is sometimes stated that the primary criterion in Hellenic self-definition was linguistic and that this is signalled by the fact that the term barbaros, which, from the fifth century especially, designates those who were not considered Hellenes, is onomatopoeic in its etymology, deriving from the incomprehensible babblings of non-Greek speakers. From there it is no great inferential leap to assume that the concept arose first in the colonial orbit where Greek-speakers were immediately confronted with alloglots. There are, however, some difficulties with this explanation.
In extant literature, the earliest attestation of the term would appear to be in the Catalogue of Trojans (Iliad 2.867), where the Karians are described as barbarophonoi ('of barbarian speech') - a compound adjective which ought to presume the existence of the noun barbaros. Yet many scholars are troubled by the fact that
(i) the occurrence is unique in the Homeric epics;
(ii) the noun barbaros and its cognates are not attested in literature again until the time of Anakreon (fr. 423 Page) in the later sixth century;
(iii) Thoukydides (1.3.3) seems not to have been aware that the term was employed by Homer; and
(iv) of all the populations with whom the Greeks came into contact the Karians were arguably the least alien.
This has led some to suggest that the term is a later interpolation. While this is a possibility, the fashionable tendency of scholars to excise from the Homeric epics any word, phrase or lines that appear out of place (an honourable tradition dating back at least as far as the second-century BC grammarian Aristarkhos of Samothrake) can often be taken to excess. Certainly it is methodologically incumbent upon those who employ Homeric material to exhaust alternative explanations before resorting to excision on the grounds of interpolation. The single attestation of the term prior to the later sixth century could conceivably be a matter of chance, while Thoukydides failure to note the occurrence of the term (unless due to carelessness) might simply indicate the quite reasonable supposition that several variants of the Homeric epics were still circulating in his own day.
It is not, however, certain that the term barbaros originally carried a linguistic connotation simply because it is found qualifying phone in the Iliad’s description of the Karians: in fact, one could argue that this quasi-tautologous qualification suggests otherwise. The notion that the word is onomatopoeic - first suggested by Strabo (14.2.28) — appears commonsensical but is from the linguistic perspective unfalsifiable, and Ernst Weidner (1913) already drew attention to the perils of accepting ancient etymologies. Noting that the Sumerian word barbaru simply means 'strange’ or 'foreign’, he suggested that the term barbaros is in fact a loan-word. Indeed, of the three other attestations of the word prior to the end of the Archaic period, in only one case is the term unambiguously applied in a linguistic sense. It is Anakreon's invocation to Zeus to 'silence the solecian speech lest you utter barbarisms’ (fr. 423 Page). By contrast, there is no clear linguistic connotation to the term in the pre-Sokratic philosopher Herakleitos5 maxim that 'men's eyes and ears are poor witnesses if they have barbarian souls' (fr. 107 Diels-Kranz), while Hekataios (if Strabo is quoting him verbatim) simply uses the term barbaroi to describe the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece (i FGrHiK)). Given the relative familiarity of the Karians to the Greeks, it has been suggested that barbarophonoi in the Iliad signifies not those who spoke a non-Greek language but simply those who spoke Greek badly. It is, of course, a fact that the establishment of Greek foundations overseas produced a situation in which groups enculturated in entirely different linguistic traditions were confronted with one another. It is also the case that the Greeks were aware of linguistic differences. This is particularly true in the case of Attic comedy, where linguistic and even dialectal differences are capitalized upon for comic effect. In Aristophanes' Akharnians (94-110), the phony envoy of the Persian King, Pseudartabas, is made to utter an outlandish and seemingly unintelligible approximation of the Persian language, but in reality the play's main protagonist, Dikaiopolis, can in fact understand him and ultimately the emphasis of the scene is concerned less with the issue of intelligibility and more on articulating ethnic and cultural stereotypes - just as it is with scenes involving encounters between speakers of different dialects. There is also an awareness of linguistic differentiation in Attic tragedy, but here there are few if any hints of communicational difficulties between Greeks and non-Greeks; the same is true of the exchanges between Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad. Herodotos is similarly conscious of linguistic variety, but no impediments to communication are signalled in the accounts of the meetings of the Athenian Solon and the Lydian king Kroisos (1.30-33) or of the Egyptian Pharaoh Amasis and the Samian tyrant Polykrates (3.40-43). Interpreters (hermeneis) - usually non-Greek - are occasionally mentioned: thus Polykrates’ brother Syloson communicated with the Persian king Dareios through interpreters; the Athenians seem to have managed to procure the services of an interpreter to translate a letter written in Aramaic from the Persian king to the Spartans; and the Athenian general Xenophon (Anabasis 7.2.19; cf. 7.3.25) says that he used an interpreter to make an appointment with the Thrakian prince Seuthes. On the whole, however, references to interpreters are surprisingly few and it would appear that the term hermeneus did not have a specifically linguistic sense until the time of Aiskhylos (Agamemnon 1062).
Communication would certainly have been facilitated by bilingualism, a natural consequence of intermarriage between alloglots: thus, Herodotos (6.138.2) recounts how the Athenian women kidnapped by the Pelasgians of Lemnos taught their children the Attic tongue (glossa Attike). But the earliest attested instance of bilingualism in Greek literature is found in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (113-16), where Aphrodite disguises herself as a Phrygian woman who addresses the Trojan Ankhises in his own language. Indeed it is more commonly non-Greeks who are credited with a multilingual proficiency: for example, the mid-seventh-century Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetikhos is said to have entrusted Egyptian children to his Greek mercenaries in order to learn the Greek language; at a vast banquet held in 479 BC to which the Thebans invited Persian dignitaries, Thersandros of Orkhomenos was addressed in Greek by his Persian dining partner; and the Karians and the populations of the Khalkidike were apparently competent in the Greek language. There are, however, also instances of Greeks who possess varying levels of bilingual competence. The characterization of a Lydian woman by the late sixth-century poet Hipponax (fr. 92 West) betrays some knowledge of Lydian and even Phrygian vocabulary; Histiaios, the tyrant of Miletos, is said to have been able to speak Persian and a similar competence in Persian is attributed to Themistokles and to Alkibiades, while Pythagoras’s supposed to have learnt Egyptian.
According to Strabo (14.2.28), the Karian language was peppered with many Greek loan-words, and a reciprocal Karian 'substrate’ influence on the epichoric idioms of Miletos, Myous and Priene has often been suspected on the basis of Herodotos’ identification (1.142.2—3) of these as a distinct subgroup within the Ionic dialects of Asia Minor, though we are not informed further as to the exact linguistic nature of their specificity. Lexical borrowings on their own need not necessitate a bilingual environment for their transmission, but it is different with cases of phonological, morphological or syntactic borrowings, for which Sicily presents an interesting example. In late sixth- and fifth-century inscriptions from the Elymian cities of Egesta and Eryx, the recurring element -emi probably derives from Greek eimi, the first-person singular of the verb 'to be'; the same is true for the -emi which appears together with an apparently indigenous name on a sherd of a sixth- or fifth-century Lakonian krater from the Sikel site of Morgantina.124 In the Greek city of Gela, on the other hand, three graffiti from the akropolis appear to indicate ownership through the employment of eimi ('I am') with the dative case ('to/for x5). The standard formula in Greek employs the genitive case ('of x\ but the use of the dative does seem to be attested in 'Elymian’ inscriptions and may in fact be common to many of the non-Greek languages of Sicily. This level of linguistic interference between Greek and non-Greek idioms requires more than casual intercourse and hints strongly at the existence of a bilingual environment on the island. Though its lateness makes it of dubious value, Iamblikhos’ notice (Life ofPythagoras 34.241) that Pythagoras ordered all Greek Pythagoreans to speak Greek is interesting in that it suggests that many of the Greeks of South Italy may have employed indigenous idioms. Bilingualism would also have facilitated (though it is not necessarily required by) the transmission of the Greek alphabet, adopted by Phrygians, Etruscans and Lydians in the eighth century, the Karians in the seventh century and the Lykians, Sikeloi and Elymoi in the sixth century.
While bilingualism may have facilitated communication between linguistic areas, the conscious act of 'switching' between speech idioms does not necessarily blur linguistic boundaries. On the other hand, to maintain that it was in the act of such 'switching' that a speaker became conscious of his or her linguistic (and hence ethnic) Hellenic heritage, it would need to be shown that there was an awareness of a common Hellenic language, spoken from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. It might be thought that the 'diffusion in performance' of the Homeric epics - characterized by their employment of an artificial and archaizing dialect somewhat removed from the spoken idioms of individual poleis - satisfied this requirement, but in that case it is all the more surprising that an early conception of a singular Hellenic language is so illusory in our documentation. In fact, it is not until the fifth century that we find a concrete expression of this concept in the phrase he Hellas glossa ('the Greek tongue’). This is also the period when the verb hellenizein first appears, but although it is often maintained that the primary and original meaning of the word was 'to speak Greek' and that it only later acquired the sense of 'to act like a Greek', it is not in fact attested in a strictly linguistic sense until the early fourth century. When Thoukydides (2.68.5) employs the verb to describe the Hellenization of the Amphilokhian Argives through contact with the neighbouring population of Ambrakia, he has to qualify it by saying that 'they became Hellenic with regard to the speech they still use. Even in the Classical period, however, it is clear that these expressions are abstractions based on the pre-existing idea of a Hellenic community rather than on any empirical linguistic understanding of the isoglosses which define the Greek language.
The fact is that what we term the Greek language was in reality a collection of myriad regional dialects. It is often assumed that these were mutually intelligible and that therefore the greater ease with which Greeks could have understood one another as opposed to speakers of other languages would have engendered a growing consciousness of a shared Greek language. Yet quite apart from the already noted lack of terminology to express such a consciousness prior to the fifth century, there are many documented instances within ethnolinguistic research which demonstrate clearly that dialect speakers are often able to comprehend dialects of another language group better than some dialects within their own language group. Literary evidence provides little explicit testimony for the difficulty or ease of communication between Greek dialect speakers (just as it is similarly reticent about linguistic interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks), though Thoukydides’ inability to understand the Eurytanes of Aitolia (3.94.5) or Plato's characterization of the Lesbian Pittakos’ dialect as 'a barbarian register’ (Protagoras 3410) offer salutary warnings. Aside from the literary evidence, the belief in the mutual intelligibility of Greek dialects is largely predicated on epigraphical evidence, but here it is necessary to remember, firstly, that the finite limitations of a graphic system conceal a far greater diversity of oral idioms and, secondly, that the vast bulk of the epigraphical evidence available for analysis dates to the Classical period and later - a time when increased intercommunication is likely to have led to dialectal convergence rather than divergence. In reality, intelligibility is governed not by the structural linguistic correspondences that the detached observer can analyse between dialects and languages but the intensity of contact between speakers of different idioms. This means that a Greek citizen of, say, Ephesos could have communicated with a Karian with whom he came into daily contact just as easily as (and perhaps more easily than) with a visitor from remote Arkadia.
BARBAROPHONOI: THE LINGUISTIC FACTOR
It is sometimes stated that the primary criterion in Hellenic self-definition was linguistic and that this is signalled by the fact that the term barbaros, which, from the fifth century especially, designates those who were not considered Hellenes, is onomatopoeic in its etymology, deriving from the incomprehensible babblings of non-Greek speakers. From there it is no great inferential leap to assume that the concept arose first in the colonial orbit where Greek-speakers were immediately confronted with alloglots. There are, however, some difficulties with this explanation.
In extant literature, the earliest attestation of the term would appear to be in the Catalogue of Trojans (Iliad 2.867), where the Karians are described as barbarophonoi ('of barbarian speech') - a compound adjective which ought to presume the existence of the noun barbaros. Yet many scholars are troubled by the fact that
(i) the occurrence is unique in the Homeric epics;
(ii) the noun barbaros and its cognates are not attested in literature again until the time of Anakreon (fr. 423 Page) in the later sixth century;
(iii) Thoukydides (1.3.3) seems not to have been aware that the term was employed by Homer; and
(iv) of all the populations with whom the Greeks came into contact the Karians were arguably the least alien.
This has led some to suggest that the term is a later interpolation. While this is a possibility, the fashionable tendency of scholars to excise from the Homeric epics any word, phrase or lines that appear out of place (an honourable tradition dating back at least as far as the second-century BC grammarian Aristarkhos of Samothrake) can often be taken to excess. Certainly it is methodologically incumbent upon those who employ Homeric material to exhaust alternative explanations before resorting to excision on the grounds of interpolation. The single attestation of the term prior to the later sixth century could conceivably be a matter of chance, while Thoukydides failure to note the occurrence of the term (unless due to carelessness) might simply indicate the quite reasonable supposition that several variants of the Homeric epics were still circulating in his own day.
It is not, however, certain that the term barbaros originally carried a linguistic connotation simply because it is found qualifying phone in the Iliad’s description of the Karians: in fact, one could argue that this quasi-tautologous qualification suggests otherwise. The notion that the word is onomatopoeic - first suggested by Strabo (14.2.28) — appears commonsensical but is from the linguistic perspective unfalsifiable, and Ernst Weidner (1913) already drew attention to the perils of accepting ancient etymologies. Noting that the Sumerian word barbaru simply means 'strange’ or 'foreign’, he suggested that the term barbaros is in fact a loan-word. Indeed, of the three other attestations of the word prior to the end of the Archaic period, in only one case is the term unambiguously applied in a linguistic sense. It is Anakreon's invocation to Zeus to 'silence the solecian speech lest you utter barbarisms’ (fr. 423 Page). By contrast, there is no clear linguistic connotation to the term in the pre-Sokratic philosopher Herakleitos5 maxim that 'men's eyes and ears are poor witnesses if they have barbarian souls' (fr. 107 Diels-Kranz), while Hekataios (if Strabo is quoting him verbatim) simply uses the term barbaroi to describe the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece (i FGrHiK)). Given the relative familiarity of the Karians to the Greeks, it has been suggested that barbarophonoi in the Iliad signifies not those who spoke a non-Greek language but simply those who spoke Greek badly. It is, of course, a fact that the establishment of Greek foundations overseas produced a situation in which groups enculturated in entirely different linguistic traditions were confronted with one another. It is also the case that the Greeks were aware of linguistic differences. This is particularly true in the case of Attic comedy, where linguistic and even dialectal differences are capitalized upon for comic effect. In Aristophanes' Akharnians (94-110), the phony envoy of the Persian King, Pseudartabas, is made to utter an outlandish and seemingly unintelligible approximation of the Persian language, but in reality the play's main protagonist, Dikaiopolis, can in fact understand him and ultimately the emphasis of the scene is concerned less with the issue of intelligibility and more on articulating ethnic and cultural stereotypes - just as it is with scenes involving encounters between speakers of different dialects. There is also an awareness of linguistic differentiation in Attic tragedy, but here there are few if any hints of communicational difficulties between Greeks and non-Greeks; the same is true of the exchanges between Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad. Herodotos is similarly conscious of linguistic variety, but no impediments to communication are signalled in the accounts of the meetings of the Athenian Solon and the Lydian king Kroisos (1.30-33) or of the Egyptian Pharaoh Amasis and the Samian tyrant Polykrates (3.40-43). Interpreters (hermeneis) - usually non-Greek - are occasionally mentioned: thus Polykrates’ brother Syloson communicated with the Persian king Dareios through interpreters; the Athenians seem to have managed to procure the services of an interpreter to translate a letter written in Aramaic from the Persian king to the Spartans; and the Athenian general Xenophon (Anabasis 7.2.19; cf. 7.3.25) says that he used an interpreter to make an appointment with the Thrakian prince Seuthes. On the whole, however, references to interpreters are surprisingly few and it would appear that the term hermeneus did not have a specifically linguistic sense until the time of Aiskhylos (Agamemnon 1062).
Communication would certainly have been facilitated by bilingualism, a natural consequence of intermarriage between alloglots: thus, Herodotos (6.138.2) recounts how the Athenian women kidnapped by the Pelasgians of Lemnos taught their children the Attic tongue (glossa Attike). But the earliest attested instance of bilingualism in Greek literature is found in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (113-16), where Aphrodite disguises herself as a Phrygian woman who addresses the Trojan Ankhises in his own language. Indeed it is more commonly non-Greeks who are credited with a multilingual proficiency: for example, the mid-seventh-century Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetikhos is said to have entrusted Egyptian children to his Greek mercenaries in order to learn the Greek language; at a vast banquet held in 479 BC to which the Thebans invited Persian dignitaries, Thersandros of Orkhomenos was addressed in Greek by his Persian dining partner; and the Karians and the populations of the Khalkidike were apparently competent in the Greek language. There are, however, also instances of Greeks who possess varying levels of bilingual competence. The characterization of a Lydian woman by the late sixth-century poet Hipponax (fr. 92 West) betrays some knowledge of Lydian and even Phrygian vocabulary; Histiaios, the tyrant of Miletos, is said to have been able to speak Persian and a similar competence in Persian is attributed to Themistokles and to Alkibiades, while Pythagoras’s supposed to have learnt Egyptian.
According to Strabo (14.2.28), the Karian language was peppered with many Greek loan-words, and a reciprocal Karian 'substrate’ influence on the epichoric idioms of Miletos, Myous and Priene has often been suspected on the basis of Herodotos’ identification (1.142.2—3) of these as a distinct subgroup within the Ionic dialects of Asia Minor, though we are not informed further as to the exact linguistic nature of their specificity. Lexical borrowings on their own need not necessitate a bilingual environment for their transmission, but it is different with cases of phonological, morphological or syntactic borrowings, for which Sicily presents an interesting example. In late sixth- and fifth-century inscriptions from the Elymian cities of Egesta and Eryx, the recurring element -emi probably derives from Greek eimi, the first-person singular of the verb 'to be'; the same is true for the -emi which appears together with an apparently indigenous name on a sherd of a sixth- or fifth-century Lakonian krater from the Sikel site of Morgantina.124 In the Greek city of Gela, on the other hand, three graffiti from the akropolis appear to indicate ownership through the employment of eimi ('I am') with the dative case ('to/for x5). The standard formula in Greek employs the genitive case ('of x\ but the use of the dative does seem to be attested in 'Elymian’ inscriptions and may in fact be common to many of the non-Greek languages of Sicily. This level of linguistic interference between Greek and non-Greek idioms requires more than casual intercourse and hints strongly at the existence of a bilingual environment on the island. Though its lateness makes it of dubious value, Iamblikhos’ notice (Life ofPythagoras 34.241) that Pythagoras ordered all Greek Pythagoreans to speak Greek is interesting in that it suggests that many of the Greeks of South Italy may have employed indigenous idioms. Bilingualism would also have facilitated (though it is not necessarily required by) the transmission of the Greek alphabet, adopted by Phrygians, Etruscans and Lydians in the eighth century, the Karians in the seventh century and the Lykians, Sikeloi and Elymoi in the sixth century.
While bilingualism may have facilitated communication between linguistic areas, the conscious act of 'switching' between speech idioms does not necessarily blur linguistic boundaries. On the other hand, to maintain that it was in the act of such 'switching' that a speaker became conscious of his or her linguistic (and hence ethnic) Hellenic heritage, it would need to be shown that there was an awareness of a common Hellenic language, spoken from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. It might be thought that the 'diffusion in performance' of the Homeric epics - characterized by their employment of an artificial and archaizing dialect somewhat removed from the spoken idioms of individual poleis - satisfied this requirement, but in that case it is all the more surprising that an early conception of a singular Hellenic language is so illusory in our documentation. In fact, it is not until the fifth century that we find a concrete expression of this concept in the phrase he Hellas glossa ('the Greek tongue’). This is also the period when the verb hellenizein first appears, but although it is often maintained that the primary and original meaning of the word was 'to speak Greek' and that it only later acquired the sense of 'to act like a Greek', it is not in fact attested in a strictly linguistic sense until the early fourth century. When Thoukydides (2.68.5) employs the verb to describe the Hellenization of the Amphilokhian Argives through contact with the neighbouring population of Ambrakia, he has to qualify it by saying that 'they became Hellenic with regard to the speech they still use. Even in the Classical period, however, it is clear that these expressions are abstractions based on the pre-existing idea of a Hellenic community rather than on any empirical linguistic understanding of the isoglosses which define the Greek language.
The fact is that what we term the Greek language was in reality a collection of myriad regional dialects. It is often assumed that these were mutually intelligible and that therefore the greater ease with which Greeks could have understood one another as opposed to speakers of other languages would have engendered a growing consciousness of a shared Greek language. Yet quite apart from the already noted lack of terminology to express such a consciousness prior to the fifth century, there are many documented instances within ethnolinguistic research which demonstrate clearly that dialect speakers are often able to comprehend dialects of another language group better than some dialects within their own language group. Literary evidence provides little explicit testimony for the difficulty or ease of communication between Greek dialect speakers (just as it is similarly reticent about linguistic interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks), though Thoukydides’ inability to understand the Eurytanes of Aitolia (3.94.5) or Plato's characterization of the Lesbian Pittakos’ dialect as 'a barbarian register’ (Protagoras 3410) offer salutary warnings. Aside from the literary evidence, the belief in the mutual intelligibility of Greek dialects is largely predicated on epigraphical evidence, but here it is necessary to remember, firstly, that the finite limitations of a graphic system conceal a far greater diversity of oral idioms and, secondly, that the vast bulk of the epigraphical evidence available for analysis dates to the Classical period and later - a time when increased intercommunication is likely to have led to dialectal convergence rather than divergence. In reality, intelligibility is governed not by the structural linguistic correspondences that the detached observer can analyse between dialects and languages but the intensity of contact between speakers of different idioms. This means that a Greek citizen of, say, Ephesos could have communicated with a Karian with whom he came into daily contact just as easily as (and perhaps more easily than) with a visitor from remote Arkadia.