Greeking

Greeking

In B4 Lingua Franca...

Originally shared by Alvin Stearns

"It's Greek to me."  A common English idiom to indicate that something is not understandable--a meaning is there, but it is expressed in a confounding language.

Two thousand years ago, much of the Near East and Europe understood one language.  Greek.  The Greeks were never just in Greece for very long.  Back then, they traveled to Egypt and set up trading communities.  They created cities along the coast of modern Turkey, from the Levant to the Black Sea.  Being Greek was not a national identity as we think of such things today.  It was a culture, a set of commonly shared ideas.  And it was certainly a language.

The Greeks traded with and sometimes fought with everybody in their local Mediterranean world.  The Phoenicians (where they got their alphabet), the Egyptians (where they got many of their later religious ideas and icons), and many many barbarian people.  Who were people too, with lives and cultures and languages just as valid as any others.  The word "barbarian" comes from Greek and may mimic the sound that the Greeks thought other languages sounded like.  "It's all 'bar-bar-bar.'"  So very not Greek to them.

They most famously fought the Persians.  History says that they won the first rounds, but it's worth remembering that the Persians took all of modern Turkey, including the Greek cities there.  The Greeks won in the sense that they were not, particularly in mainland Greece, forced to stop being wholly Greek.  And that was a good thing.  Being Greek was a pretty cool thing (unless you were a slave or a female, and then you'd probably have ample room to bitch).

The Greeks pushed outward into the world.  They set up colonies and founded cities in the Western Mediterranean.  Famously, on Sicily and on the southern end of Italy.  To the north in Italy, along the Tiber River, another people were figuring out how to live together--the Romans.  But, their international story and the spread of the second "world" language, Latin, would come later.  At this time, if you wanted to be relevant beyond your local town, you spoke Greek, or Persian, or Egyptian, or Aramaic.

Then, in the third century BC, Alexander the Great took all of the Greek mainland and steered his army through all of the great centers of the Ancient World.  Things Greek spread from Egypt to India.  From the northern deserts of Arabia to the hills of Armenia.  Even great Persia fell to spectacular Alexander.  He was, by the way, Macedonian, coming from a land north of Greece proper.  The Greek Greeks considered him a polished barbarian--Greek in appearance and style, but still a barbarian with a Greek surface.

And that's what the "world' became for a time.  A Greek-looking world, speaking Greek, taking on Greek forms, learning and expressing Greek ideals.  The Greek language became the language of trade, politics, and science and it stayed that way to a greater or lesser extent for the next 2,000 years.  Everybody had to deal with a Greek way of life.  Some loved it, dived in with both feet.  Some resisted or tried to find accommodation with their way of living.  Famously, because it's recorded, the Jews, who both resisted and created accommodations that reverberated down the centuries, right to us.  If you are Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim, much of what you think and "know" is filtered through ancient Greek ideas, either directly or via a circuitous route that, when traced back, runs right through Greek stuff.

Back in the Mediterranean meanwhile, the Romans would pick up their alphabet from their neighbors to the north, the Etruscans, who got it from their Greek neighbors in the southern part of Italy (that's how circuitous routes often work).  The Romans, though uniquely Roman in so many ways that would shortly make the world tremble and bow, adored things Greek.  They modeled much of their life on Greek ideas and ideals.  Greek became Roman, Roman became Greek, and only the languages competed, sharing prominence in speech and literature.  It became the mark of a cultured Roman citizen to speak, read, and write Greek.  Though, just like us today in America, it was also a mark of pride in being "truly" Roman to deny understanding Greek--just like Americans today might bitch about being asked to punch a phone key to decide which language will be spoken.  "Everybody knows all Americans should speak English!"  How very Roman of you.

It was in a play about a Roman that English got one of its first recorded uses of the Greek expression.  It's used in William Shakespear's "The Tragedy of Julius Caesar."  Anything written by Shakespeare or in the Bible pretty much guarantees it will come down to us.  We daily mouth expressions that show up in the Bible or from the pen of Shakespeare, seldom understanding where it came from.  Much of what you think and seldom consider is the creation of people who lived hundreds of years ago.  Your mind and your ideas, in large part, were created all that time ago.

So, it's OK if it's all Greek to you.  Consider that a good thing.  And examine it.  As an oldey timey Greek (Socrates) once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."  Maybe some clever one among us knows how to write that in the original Greek.

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