As we have seen, Ionians, Aetolians and Dorians tended to level local peculiarities and make a generally intelligible dialect in which treaties and other important records were framed. The language of literature is always of necessity to some extent a κοινή: with some Greek writers the use of a κοινή was especially necessary. The local dialect of Boeotia was not easily intelligible in other districts, and a writer like Pindar, whose patrons were mostly not Boeotians, had perforce to write in a dialect that they could understand. Hence he writes in a conventional Doric with Aeolic elements, which forms a strong contrast to that of Corinna, who kept more or less closely to the Boeotian dialect. For different literary purposes Greek had different κοιναί. A poet who would write an epic must adopt a form of language modelled on that of Homer and Hesiod; Alcaeus and Sappho were the models for the love lyric, which was therefore Aeolic; Stesichorus was the founder of the triumphal ode, which, as he was a Dorian of Sicily, must henceforth be in Doric, though Pindar was an Aeolian, and its other chief representatives, Simonides and Bacchylides, were Ionians from Ceos. The choral ode of tragedy was always conventional Doric, and in the iambics also are Doric words like δράω, λάω, &c. Elegy and epigram were founded on epic; the satirical iambics of Hipponax and his late disciple Herondas are Ionic. The first Greek prose was developed in Ionia, of which an excellent example has been preserved to us in Herodotus. Thucydides was not an Ionian, but he could not shake himself free of the tradition: he therefore writes πράσσω, τάσσω, &c., with -σσ-, which was Ionic, but is never found in Attic inscriptions nor in the writers who imitate the language of common life—Aristophanes (when not parodying tragedy, or other forms of literature or dialect), Plato and the Orators (with the partial exception of Antiphon, who ordinarily has -σσ-, but in the one speech actually intended for the law-courts -ττ-). Similarly Hippocrates and his medical school in Cos wrote in Ionic, not, however, in the Ionic of Herodotus, but in a language more akin to the Ionic κοινή of the inscriptions; and this dialect continued to be used in medicine later, much as doctors now use Latin for their prescriptions. The first literary document written in Attic prose is the treatise on the Constitution of Athens, which is generally printed amongst the minor works of Xenophon, but really belongs to about 425 B.C. From the fragment of Aristophanes’ Banqueters and from the first speech of Lysias “Against Theomnestos” it is clear that the Attic dialect had changed rapidly in the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., and that much of the phraseology of Solon’s laws was no longer intelligible by 400 B.C. Among the most difficult of the literary dialects to trace is the earliest—the Homeric dialect. The Homeric question cannot be discussed here, and on that question it may be said quot homines tot sententiae. To the present writer, however, it seems probable that the poems were composed in Chios as tradition asserted; the language contains many Aeolisms, and the heroes sung are, except for the Athenians (very briefly referred to), and possibly Telamonian Ajax, not of the Ionic stock. Chios was itself an Ionicized Aeolic colony (Diodorus v. 81. 7). The hypothesis of a great poet writing on the basis of earlier Aeolic lays (κλέα ἀνδρῶν) in Chios seems to explain the main peculiarities of the Homeric language, which, however, was modified to some extent in later times first under Ionic and afterwards under Athenian influence.
Of Dorian literature we know little. The works of Archimedes written in the Syracusan dialect were much altered in language by the late copyists. The most striking development of the late classical age in Doric lands is that of pastoral poetry, which, like Spenser, is “writ in no language,” but, on a basis of Syracusan and possibly Coan Doric, has in its structure many elements borrowed from the Aeolic love lyric and from epic.
From the latter part of the 5th century B.C. Athens became ever more important as a literary centre, and Attic prose became the model for the later κοινή, which grew up as a consequence of the decay of the local dialects. For this decay there were several reasons. If the Athenian empire had survived the Peloponnesian War, Attic influence would no doubt soon have permeated the whole of that empire. This consummation was postponed. Attic became the court language of Macedon, and, when Alexander’s conquests led to the foundation of great new towns, like Alexandria, filled with inhabitants from all parts of the Greek world, this dialect furnished a basis for common intercourse. Naturally the resultant dialect was not pure Attic. There were in it considerable traces of Ionic. In Attica itself the dialect was less uniform than elsewhere even in the 5th century B.C., because Athens was a centre of empire, literature and commerce. Like every other language which is not under the dominion of the schoolmaster, it borrowed the names of foreign objects which it imported from foreign lands, not only from those of Greek-speaking peoples, but also from Egypt, Persia, Lydia, Phoenicia, Thrace and elsewhere. The Ionians were great seafarers, and from them Athens borrowed words for seacraft and even for the tides: ἄμτωτις “ebb,” ῥαχία “high tide,” an Ionic word ῥηχίη spelt in Attic fashion. From the Dorians it borrowed words connected with war and sport: λοχαγός, κυναγός, &c. A soldier of fortune like Xenophon, who spent most of his life away from Athens, introduced not only strange words but strange grammatical constructions also into his literary compositions. With Aristotle, not a born Athenian but long resident in Athens, the κοινή may be said to have begun. Some characteristics of Attic foreigners found it hard to acquire—its subtle use of particles and its accent. Hence in Hellenistic Greek particles are comparatively rare. According to Cicero, Theophrastus, who came from as near Attica as Eretria in Euboea, was easily detected by a market-woman as no Athenian after he had lived thirty years in Athens. Thoucritus, an Athenian, who was taken prisoner in the Peloponnesian War and lived for many years in Epirus as a slave, was unable to recover the Athenian accent on his return, and his family lay under the suspicion that they were an alien’s children, as his son tells us in Demosthenes’ speech “Against Eubulides.” In the κοινή there were several divisions, though the line between them is faint and irregular. There was a κοινή of literary men like Polybius and of carefully prepared state documents, as at Magnesia or Pergamum; and a different κοινή of the vulgar which is represented to us in its Egyptian form in the Pentateuch, in a later and at least partially Palestinian form in the Gospels. Still more corrupt is the language which we find in the ill-written and ill-spelt private letters found amongst the Egyptian papyri. Not out of the old dialects but out of this κοινή arose modern Greek, with a variety of dialects no less bewildering than that of ancient Greek. In one place more rapidly, in another more slowly, the characteristics of modern Greek begin to appear. As we have seen, in Boeotia the vowels and diphthongs began to pass into the characteristic sounds of modern Greek four centuries before Christ. Dorian dialects illustrate early the passing of the old aspirate θ, the sound of which was like the final t in English bit, into a sound like the English th in thin, pith, which it still retains in modern Greek. The change of γ between vowels into a y sound was charged by the comic poets against Hyperbolus the demagogue about 415 B.C. Only when the Attic sound changes stood isolated amongst the Greek dialects did they give way in the κοινή to Ionic. Thus the forms with -σσ- instead of -ττ- won the day, while modern Greek shows that sometimes the -ρρ- which Attic shared with some Doric dialects and Arcadian was retained, and that sometimes the Ionic -ρσ-, which was also Lesbian and partly Doric, took its place. In other cases, where Ionic and Attic did not agree, forms came in which were different from either: the genitives of masculine ā stems were now formed as in Doric with ᾱ, but the analogy of the other cases may have been the effective force. The form ναός “temple,” instead of Ionic νηός, Attic νεώς, can only be Doric.[1] In the first five centuries of the Christian era came in the modern Greek characteristics of Itacism and vowel contraction, of the pronunciation of μπ and ντ as mb and nd and many other sound changes, the loss of the dative and the confusion of the 1st with the 3rd declension, the dropping of the -μι conjugation, the loss of the optative and the assimilation of the imperfect and second aorist endings to those of the first aorist.[2] There were meantime spasmodic attempts at the revival of the old language. Lucian wrote Attic dialogue with a facility almost equal to Plato; the old dialect was revived in the inscriptions of Sparta; Balbilla, a lady-in-waiting on Hadrian’s empress, wrote epigrams in Aeolic, and there were other attempts of the same kind. But they were only tours de force, κῆποι Ἀδώνιδος, whose flowers had no root in the spoken language and therefore could not survive. Even in the hands of a cultivated man like Plutarch the κοινή of the 1st century A.D. looks entirely different from Attic Greek. Apart from non-Attic constructions, which are not very numerous, the difference consists largely in the new vocabulary of the philosophical schools since Aristotle, whose jargon had become part of the language of educated men in Plutarch’s time, and made a difference in the language not unlike that which has been brought about in English by the development of the natural sciences. It is hardly necessary to say that these changes, whether of the κοινή or of modern Greek, did not of necessity impair the powers of the language as an organ of expression; if elaborate inflection were a necessity for the highest literary merit, then we must prefer Cædmon to Milton and Cynewulf to Shakespeare.
The Chief Characteristics of Greek.
As is obvious from the foregoing account of the Greek dialects, it is not possible to speak of the early history of Greek as handed down to us as that of a single uniform tongue. From the earliest times it shows much variety of dialect accentuated by the geographical characteristics of the country, but arising, at least in part, from the fact that the Greeks came into the country in separate waves divided from one another by centuries. For the history of the language it is necessary to take as a beginning the form of the Indo-European language from which Greek descended, so far as it can be reconstructed from a comparison of the individual I.E. languages (see [Indo-European Languages]). The sounds of this language, so far as at present ascertained, were the following:—
(a) 11 vowels: a, ā, e, ē, i, ī, o, ō, u, ū, ǝ (a short indistinct vowel).
(b) 14 diphthongs: ai, au, ei, eu, oi, ou, āi, āu, ēi, ēu, ōi, ōu, ǝi, ǝu.
(c) 20 stop consonants.
Labials: p, b, ph, bh (ph and bh being p and b followed by an audible breath, not f and v).
Dentals: t, d, th, dh (th and dh not spirants like the two English sounds in thin and then, but aspirated t and d).