This survey reflects the depth and complexity of Greece, a small country with a world-conquering ethos
When the Greek poet George Seferis rose to give his speech on being awarded the 1963 Nobel prize for literature, he asserted that the Swedish Academy’s honour was not so much for him as for the language in which he wrote: “A language famous through the centuries, but not widespread in its present form.” The peoples who have spoken it in one version or another over the past 3,500 years are the subject of Roderick Beaton’s magisterial new book. He writes: “The Greeks of the title and the pages that follow are to be understood as speakers of the Greek language.”
This language used to be very widespread indeed; and served as a lingua franca, so to speakas it were, across polities and cultures. At its peak, the Hellenistic world stretched from beyond the Hindu Kush mountains in today’s Pakistan to the south of France, its scope revealed in place names that endure to this day. Alexandria, Naples, Nice – all are legacies of a world that used to be, in some sense, “Greek”. Consider the Septuagint, the third and second-century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Done in Egypt, it met a need among Egyptian Jews, losing touch with Hebrew, for an intelligible version of the original text. And as in so many other times and places, intelligible meant Greek.
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