Greek history

A Brief History of the Greek World and the Greek Language

This brief history of the ancient Greek world focuses on the development of the Greek language. Because of this emphasis, many important details, features, and characteristics of ancient Greek history and culture are absent. This is in no way to imply that those details of Greek history and culture are unimportant; they are, in fact, incredibly important. Particularly when you begin reading ancient texts, it is these details which will provide context essential to truly understanding what those texts are saying. Since, however, the relevance of those details will differ between texts, we will restrict ourselves to the details relevant to the development of the language.

For ease of reference, here is a list of the relevant periods of Greek history:

The Bronze Age
The Mycenaean Period
The Dark Age
The Archaic Period
The Classical Period
The Hellenistic Period
The Roman Period
The Byzantine Period
The Ottoman Period
The Modern Period

ca. 3200 to ca. 1200 BCE
ca. 1600 to ca. 1200 BCE
ca. 1200 to ca. 800 BCE
ca. 800 to 480 BCE
480 to 323 BCE
323 to 31 BCE
31 BCE to 330 CE
330 to 1453 CE
1453 to 1821 CE
1821 CE to the present day

The Bronze Age (from ca. 3200 to ca. 1200 BCE)

At some point, probably in the middle of the 4th millennium BCE, a group of migratory Indo-Europeans entered the Greek mainland and brought with them their language and culture. The land was already inhabited by non-Indo-European people who today are referred to as the Pre-Greeks. Greek culture as we know it started when the Indo-Europeans and Pre-Greeks intermixed. This first period of Greek history is called the Bronze Age, which began in roughly 3200 BCE and ended around 1200 BCE.

It is clear that Indo-European culture dominated the new one formed from the mixing of the Indo-Europeans and Pre-Greeks. The nascent Greek language was Indo-European, and the pantheon was ruled by the Indo-European sky god, now called Zeus. However, the Pre-Greeks also contributed to this earliest Greek culture, as attested by the prevalence in Greek mythology of localized female earth deities thought to be characteristic of this Pre-Greek society.

The last centuries of the Bronze Age are called the Mycenaean Period (from ca. 1600 to ca. 1200 BCE). This period is noted for urban settlements centered around fortified palaces. The most prominent of them was at Mycenae, whence the Mycenaean Period gets its name. A legendary wanax (“warlord,” wanaktes in the plural) of Mycenae was Agamemnon. Myth says that he brought the most soldiers to fight against Troy in the fabled Trojan War. However, contrary to popular modern belief, this does not mean that Agamemnon was ever “King of Greece,” let alone “King of the Greeks.”

“Greece” comes from the Latin word Graecia; the Greek word is Hellas. It refers to the region in southeastern Europe historically inhabited by Greek speakers and roughly equivalent to the borders of the modern country of Greece. There was not a “country” called Greece in the modern political sense of the term until very recently (relatively speaking). So nobody, not even Agamemnon, could be “King of Greece,” as there was not really such a place.

Moreover, to be “Greek” (Graecus in Latin, Hellên in Greek) first and foremost meant to be “a speaker of the Greek language.” Greek speakers also lived beyond the traditional geographic region we call Greece, so we must distinguish the Greek world (where Greek speakers lived) from the Greek mainland (the portion of southeastern Europe roughly equivalent to the modern country of Greece). Individual Greek peoples strove fiercely for independence from foreign powers, where “foreign” refers to both non-Greeks and other Greeks. Although powerful, the wanax of Mycenae was just one of hundreds of wanaktes. To posit a “King of the Greeks” is like positing a “President of the English speakers.” The historian Thucydides admits as much when he says:

“Now since he lived on the mainland, Agamemnon couldn’t be in control of the islands beyond those neighboring [his city]—and there couldn’t be many of these islands—even if in some way he had a fleet” (The Peloponnesian War 1.9.4).

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As we see, few islands lie near Argos:

Until recently, there was no linguistic confirmation that these inhabitants of mainland Greece were in fact Greeks. The reason why we know that Greek was spoken during this period is due to the particular way the Bronze Age ended.

The Bronze Age ended around 1200 BCE with large scale destruction of kingdoms and empires across the eastern Mediterranean. This destruction is attributed to an enigmatic group today referred to simply as “the Sea Peoples,” about whom we know nothing secure. Mycenaean palaces were burnt. In the process, clay tablets used for writing palace documents were fired and therefore preserved. The script the Mycenaeans used is called Linear B. When those clay tablets were discovered, the script could not be read, and therefore the language it represented was unknown. That all changed when a crew of Anglo-American academics (namely, Prof. Alice Kober, Prof. Emmett L. Bennett, Jr., Michael Ventris, and John Chadwick) deciphered it in the middle of the 20th century. Their decipherment revealed that the language was an early form of Greek. Thus, mainland Greece was indeed Greek during the Bronze Age.

The most important event in ancient Greek mytho-history is the Trojan War. It so happens that a large city located where ancient Greeks thought Troy was in Asia Minor was burnt around 1250 BCE. While the various stories Greeks told about the Trojan War clearly belong to myth, there may be some vague kernel of truth behind the event: Mycenaean Greece was a warrior society, it sent mercenaries far and wide, and it was encroaching upon territory in Asia Minor by the time this city was destroyed.

The historicity (or lack thereof) of the Trojan War is irrelevant for us. What matters is the importance of the myth to the ancient Greeks. It was the one time in Greek mytho-history that all Greeks far and wide fought together for a common cause. The Trojan War pitted Greek speakers against non-Greek speakers, who the Greek speakers referred to as barbaroi (“barbarians”), a derogatory word that means “people who say ‘bar bar’ when they talk.” In other words, at least rhetorically, “bar bar” is what non-Greek languages sounded like to Greek speakers.

The Greek worldview was dominated by binaries — things were either x or not-x, either y or not-y. While there was significant political and cultural disunity among Greek speakers, and the “barbarian” distinction referred to countless non-Greek languages, the binary of Greek language versus non-Greek language was central in Greek popular ethnographic thought. Thus, the Trojan War was essentially the first World War, informed by a linguistic binary between Greek and non-Greek. As such, it was the first Panhellenic (“all-Greek”) event in Greek history.

The Dark Age (from ca. 1200 to ca. 800 BCE)

The end of the Bronze Age ushered in what is today called the Dark Age, running from roughly 1200 BCE when the Mycenaean palaces collapsed to the advent of the Greek alphabet around 800 BCE. This era is called “dark” because there are no written records from the period. We have no evidence that the Linear B script remained in use.

Archaeological and art-historical evidence confirms that the Dark Age was, in spite of its name, a robust period of cultural development. Of particular importance to language is the oral poetry that thrived in this period. To understand the literary productions of the Dark Age requires that we jump ahead for a moment to the Archaic Period that follows it.

The epic poems of Homer, renowned as the greatest poet of the Greek and Roman worlds, were first written down in the Archaic Period, after the Greeks developed an alphabet. These epics tell tales about the legendary Trojan War. While they are by no means accounts of historical events, they preserve some distinctly Mycenaean details, such as a description of a boar’s tusk helmet like the one below — a type of Mycenaean helmet unknown to Greeks when the poems were written down. Compare the helmet to Homer’s description of it:

“Meriones gave Odysseus a bow and a quiver and a sword, and he put a leather helmet on his head made of hide. It was stretched firmly on the inside with many leather straps. On the outside bright teeth of a white toothed boar were close-set one after the other thoroughly and skillfully. The lining joined in the middle.” (Homer, Iliad 10.260-265)

How could a poet who wrote his poems down in, say, the 7th c. BCE know so well the intricacies of a helmet that had not been used, let alone seen, for centuries? And if there is a kernel of truth to the Trojan War, how would a poet know about it hundreds of years later? The answers to these questions have to do with how Greek poetry was composed and transmitted.

In the first half of the 20th century, Professor Milman Parry and his assistant, Albert Lord, discovered that oral poets in what is now the former Yugoslavia used formulae — memorized phrases, complete lines of verse, or entire passages — to sing long, seemingly improvised, poems orally, and to sing roughly the same poem again at a later date. As it turns out, an oral poet does not need to memorize hundreds or thousands of lines of verse, as formulae significantly decrease the amount of material needed to learn. With them, the poet may repeat roughly the same story, and even improve it. They also make oral poetry easier to pass down from one generation of poets to the next, preserving old content while allowing new content to be added. This is how stories from the Mycenaean Period survived through the Dark Age until they could be written down in the Archaic Period.

Classical scholars have hotly debated the question: who was Homer, the famous poet said to have composed the Iliad and the Odyssey? Perhaps Homer was indeed the name of the poet whose particular poetry was written down in the form of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Or perhaps there were thousands of Homers who sang songs and passed them along to subsequent generations of Homers for hundreds of years from the Mycenaean Period to the Archaic Period and beyond. There is no reason why both cannot be true.

Homeric poetry tells stories about the first Panhellenic event in Greek mytho-history, the Trojan War. Book 2 of the Iliad includes a lenghty catalogue of the Greeks who fought at Troy — who the wanax was, where he was from, and how many ships and men he brought. To be included in this list legitimized the historic origin of one’s city. The catalogue is long, like the credits of a Hollywood movie, but it is hardly dull. Instead, it is easy to imagine proud applause from audience members as their home was sung aloud.

The language of Homeric poetry itself encouraged Panhellenism. Greek dialects are divided into three general groups: western, central, and eastern. The most prominent western dialect was Doric, spoken at Sparta and elsewhere. The most prominent central dialect was Aeolic, spoken on both sides of the northern Aegean. The two eastern dialects were Attic, spoken at Athens, and Ionic, spoken throughout the Aegean and prominently in Asia Minor.

Homeric Greek is an artificial blend of dialects, specifically Old Ionic mixed with Aeolic, and some smatterings of Attic. Thus, linguistically, it unified Greeks across the Aegean region. Although western dialects are absent, many of the most prominent characters in the stories about the Trojan War—Helen, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Nestor — came from Doric speaking regions. With this confluence of eastern and central Greek language, and western Greek mythological content, Homeric poetry was indeed Panhellenic.

The Archaic Period (from ca. 800 to 480 BCE)

The Dark Age ended around 800 BCE when Greek merchants developed the Greek alphabet from the preexisting Phoenician alphabet. (Correctly, the Phoencian alphabet is an abjad, which means that letters represent consonants only, rather than an alphabet, which represents consonants and vowels.) The Phoenicians were from what is now Lebanon, traded widely throughout the Mediterranean, and colonized the northern coast of Africa west of Egypt. Their script is the earliest known alphabet in the world. It represented consonants with single distinct written symbols, or graphemes. See the image below, and note that the alphabet was written sinistrograde, or “right to left,” as the early Greek alphabet was as well:

The Phoenician alphabet developed into the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets. The Greeks altered it so that it also accounted for vowels – this was their great contribution to writing. At about the same time, the Greeks passed this modified Phoenician alphabet on to the Etruscans in Italy, who taught it to the Romans. That script, which English uses to this day, is called the Latin alphabet. Meanwhile, in the 9th c. CE the Greek alphabet was modified for Slavic languages – that script is called Cyrillic. All in all, the Greek alphabet in all of its subsequent permutations is the most widely used script in the world.

The development of the Greek alphabet led to an explosion of writing. Laws and decrees could now be set in stone, notes taken on portable wax tablets, and literature written on papyrus scrolls. While the ancient Greek world remained a primarily oral society, one no longer needed to be present to hear someone speak or sing. Instead, texts could be disseminated and preserved. The ability to transmit literature in writing would fundamentally change the course of literary and intellectual history.

Separately, the Archaic Period saw the rise of the polis (“city-state,” poleis in the plural). Like the alphabet, the polis is not a distinctly Greek thing. For instance, poleis (by a different name, of course) had developed in Mesopotamia long before, in the 3rd millennium BCE. However, the polis is a characteristic feature of the Greek world from the Archaic Period onward.

Polis refers to a city with an autonomous government, or state. Thus, it is translated “city-state.” Poleis differed in types of government. With several hundred of them scattered across the Greek-speaking world, few broad generalizations may be made. They were predominantly aristocratic, where power was held by the nobility. Monarchies (rule by one person) and oligarchies (rule by a few people) were the norm. Eventually some poleis, like Athens, experimented with democracy (rule by the people), but even these were predominantly aristocratic and oligarchic.

Within polis society emerged a binary between political and domestic. Men controlled the political sphere. Women were subordinated and, with few exceptions, relegated exclusively to the domestic sphere. Life for women was not easy even in the best of circumstances.

Slavery existed far and wide. Enslaved people formed the bedrock of Greek societies in both public and private spheres. These enslaved people were often Greeks themselves — foreign Greeks from other poleis. Slavery was not racialized in the way that it was in the United States, but the conception of enslaved people as lesser humans was nonetheless operative. Aristotle, for instance, believed that enslavement was the natural state of certain “barbarian” peoples.

The extant literature from Greek antiquity is predominantly aristocratic and male. This literature denies both women and enslaved people voices of their own, so we must sift through derogatory caricatures and rely heavily on material evidence to reconstruct their lives.

Another feature of the Archaic Period is colonization. This began toward the end of the Dark Age and continued well into the Classical Period. Largely for commercial reasons, poleis on the Greek mainland established outposts abroad that developed into poleis of their own, called colonies. Colonies were politically independent of their mother poleis but retained important economic and diplomatic connections to them. They also spoke the dialect of the mother polis. As a result, while the Aeolic, Attic, and Ionic dialects were firmly rooted around the Aegean Sea, colonization by Peloponnesian poleis spread the Doric dialect as far west as Sicily, south as Crete, and east as the Black Sea.

<map: Greek colonialism in Mediterranean>

Colonization spread Greek language and culture well beyond the Greek mainland. In turn, engagement with non-Greek worlds shaped the course of Greek history significantly. As we will discuss in greater detail later, the most important event in ancient Greek world history began when the Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor came under Persian rule by the year 542 BCE. The Persian Empire, formed by Cyrus the Great (ca. 600 to 530 BCE), was a truly international empire that extended from the Indus River Valley in modern Pakistan to Asia Minor (now Türkiye) and Egypt.

So long as communities paid taxes to the central Persian government and supplied troops to the army, they were generally left in peace and enjoyed the benefits of transnational exchange. But, dissatisfied with their pro-Persian rulers, Greek poleis in Ionia revolted with the support of Athens and Eretria. Darius the Great (ca. 550 to 486 BCE) put down the revolt and invaded the Greek mainland in 490 BCE. He wished to punish the Athenians and Eretrians for supporting the revolt, and add new territory to the Empire along the way. Miraculously, the Athenians defeated his army at the Battle of Marathon, and the Persians were forced to retreat.

10 years later, in 480 BCE, Darius’ successor, Xerxes the Great (519 to 465 BCE) invaded the Greek mainland again with what was said to be the largest army the world had ever seen. However, a small alliance of southern Greek poleis led by Sparta and Athens repelled the invasion and liberated the Greeks in Asia Minor. Although the alliance consisted of only a fraction (roughly 10%) of Greek poleis, it was widely seen as the second — and now very real — Trojan War between Greeks and non-Greeks to the east. The southern Greeks may have won the battle, but Persia remained in the background of Greek affairs for the next 150 years.

The Classical Period (from 480 to 323 BCE)

The Classical Period begins with the defeat of Persia in 480 BCE. The Greek poleis subsequently split into two antagonistic leagues: the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta, and the Delian League led by Athens.

Athens enjoyed unprecedented prosperity in the Classical Period. It promoted the arts, both literary and architectural; theatre in particular thrived. An Ionian Greek named Herodotus (ca. 484 to ca. 425 BCE) wrote the first extant history, called simply The Histories. In it, he set out to explain what led to the Persian Wars and how on earth the Greeks were able to win.

Tensions between Athens and Sparta quickly developed into full-blown war. This war, called the Peloponnesian War (from 431 to 404 BCE) saw Athens’ glory crumble. But the Athenian literary products of this short period have rightfully earned it the title The Golden Age of Athens. Because the great works of the Athenian Golden Age were written in Attic, Attic became the preferred dialect of much Greek literature, though Homeric continued to be used for epic, and Ionic for science.

The fall of Athens could reasonably be attributed, in part, to its democracy. Politicians rose to power because they knew how to persuade the people to vote for things that might not have been in their best interests. A patriotic Athenian named Socrates (469 to 339 BCE) objected to the use of persuasion for political gain. He was brought to trial in part on the charge that he, not the politicians, were corrupting citizens. His accusers persuaded the jury that he was guilty, and Socrates was condemned to death.

Socrates’ most prominent student, Plato (ca. 429 to ca. 347 BCE) saw the democratic system as innately flawed because non-experts make decisions about things they do not know. His philosophy, Platonism, operated on yet another binary, that between mind and body. He believed that philosophers, who knew what was true, should rule over those people who did not. This philosophy would soon become arguably the most important Greek export to the world at large.

Now with the backing of Persia, Sparta emerged as the strongest force on the Greek mainland after the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War. However, subsequent decades of conflict between southern Greek poleis resulted in the irreparable weakening both of them and of the other prominent poleis. Watching from the north was Philip II (382 to 336 BCE), King of Macedonia. Intent on solving “the Persian problem” once and for all, he unified the war-torn Greek mainland under his command with diplomacy and a bit of military ingenuity. He wished to defeat Persia by invading it but was assassinated in 336 BCE. This left his son, Alexander the Great (356 to 323 BCE), to see the invasion of Persia through.

Alexander conquered the entire Persian Empire with surprising speed. He was fast and did not let nature — rivers, mountains — deter his advance. This caught his opponents off guard. He embraced features of the cultures he conquered; for instance, he depicted himself as an Egyptian king to Egyptians and as a Persian king to Persians. This habit seems to have been born of a desire to be received as a liberator rather than a foreign invader.

Alexander raises important questions about ethnicity. The Macedonian language was either a Greek dialect or a sister language of Greek in the Hellenic language family. If the latter, then Macedonians were not linguistically Greek. Regardless of linguistic heritage, many Athenians held deep anti-Macedonian sentiments and hardly considered the Macedonians to be Greek. The Macedonian nobility, however, was enthusiastic about Classical Athenian culture and spoke the Attic dialect. Greeks identified first and foremost with their polis, and as such Alexander was certainly not an Athenian. Nonetheless, he wished to avenge Athens for the wrongs he thought Persia had done to it.

As he conquered the Persian Empire, Alexander built cities and imported Athenian culture to them. All the while, he appropriated the customs of Persian kings and became the first truly multiethnic ruler the ancient Mediterranean had so far seen.

Alexander’s multiethnic predilections were not received well by many of his Macedonian companions, not least because he forced multiculturalism on them and, like Greeks, the Macedonians were deeply xenophobic. Alexander’s vision of a multiethnic world died with him.

Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BCE without naming a successor. His companions divided up his empire and waged wars against each other that lasted for centuries. This period, beginning with the death of Alexander, is called the Hellenistic Period.

The Hellenistic Period (from 323 to 31 BCE)

“Hellenic” means “Greek,” and “Hellenistic” means “related to Greek things.” In the Hellenistic Period, the Greek language spread well beyond the traditional boundaries of the Greek-speaking world, particularly in the Middle East and Egypt. Greek cultural ideas developed in these regions by native and non-native Greek speakers alike. Thus, the period is called Hellenistic because it is not tied to the traditional region in which Greek was the native language. The Greek language promoted in these regions was a new form of Classical Attic called Koine, or “common Greek.” Koine quickly became the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, the common language used by peoples whose native language was something else.

Of the many Hellenistic cities Alexander established throughout his new empire, Alexandria in Egypt was by far the most important. At the heart of the city was a great library called the Mousaion, or “place of the Muses.” The library collected all great Greek literature, and it promoted academic research, both literary and scientific. Alexandria became the first truly international cultural center of the ancient world.

Although many intellectuals across the Mediterranean welcomed Greek as the high literary language and embraced Greek cultural products like Platonism, Hellenistic influences were not always welcome, and were sometimes aggressively rejected. For instance, the Maccabees in Coele-Syria denounced Hellenism and established the independent Hasmonian Kingdom in Judea. They saw external Greek influences as a threat to the purity of Judaism as they understood it. This aversion to outside influences will take center stage in the Roman Period that follows.

The city of Rome had been growing in power throughout the Italian peninsula. A series of wars with the North African city of Carthage beginning in 264 BCE resulted in Rome’s increasing control over the western Mediterranean. Conflicts between various Hellenistic kingdoms in the east led to one kingdom after another asking Rome for help. At first, Rome was cautious to oblige. Eventually, in 146 BCE, it sacked Corinth as a symbolic gesture that mainland Greece was now fully under Roman control.

The Roman Period (from 31 BCE to 330 CE)

Many historians identify the sack of Corinth in 146 BCE as end of the Hellenistic Period and the beginning of the Roman Period. However, since the death of Alexander, Greek culture thrived well beyond the traditional boundaries of the Greek world. The Egyptian city of Alexandria was particularly renowned for Greek intellectual development. While the sack of Corinth was significant, the advent of the Roman Period — when Rome comes to control the Hellenistic world — is better dated to the incorporation of Egypt (and thus Alexandria) within the Roman political sphere. That date is 31 BCE.

Romans believed that Latin literature began in 240 BCE when a dramatic text by a Greek from southern Italy, named Livius Andronicus, was performed at Rome. Literature existed in Rome long before this date, but the fact that Romans identified the first performance of a Greek play as the advent of Latin literature speaks volumes about what Romans thought constituted high literature.

Roman culture had long been influenced by Greek, even according to their mythology. As the story goes, before the Trojan War a Greek man named Evander (literally, “Good Man”) brought the Greek alphabet and gods to the Italian peninsula. The Greek hero Heracles, who spread Greek civilization, paid a visit as well, defeating a monster at the future site of Rome named Cacus (literally, “Bad Man”). Thus, Italy was already Hellenized before the Romans came to be.

According to a Roman myth made famous by in the Aeneid of Vergil, the “Roman Homer,” written in the late 1st c. BCE after the Roman conquest of Egypt, the Romans descend partly from Trojan refugees — the mythological first enemy of the Greeks — whom the Trojan prince, Aeneas, led to Italy. In a way, then, the Roman conquest of the Greek world was retribution for the Greek sack of Troy. Vergil has Aeneas’ father, Anchises, instruct the Roman reader:

“Others [the Greeks] will mould breathing bronze more delicately, I dare say, [and] lead living faces from marble. They will argue cases better, delineate the motions of the sky with a measuring rod, and predict the rising of stars. You, Roman, rule peoples with authority—remember, these will be your arts—and add custom to peace. Spare the defeated and subdue the arrogant.” (Vergil, Aeneid 6.847-853)

This passage acknowledges Greek artistic preeminence and identifies political stability as Rome’s contribution to the world. After all, only under Roman authority did Greeks cease to war with each other — or so this train of thought goes. It is a dangerous thought that has been used throughout history to justify conquest and slavery. Indeed, Greeks were among the numerous conquered peoples whom Romans enslaved.

Greek continued to be the native language of regions that had been Greek-speaking prior to incorporation within the Roman Empire. While Latin spread far and wide, particularly in the western provinces of the Empire, Greek remained the lingua franca, especially in the east. There, a Jewish carpenter like Jesus will have spoken at least some Greek if he were doing business in a Hellenized metropolis like Caesarea Maritima, the capital of the Roman province of Judea. Literature continued to be written in Greek both by native and non-native speakers, and Alexandria remained a center of Greek intellectualism.

The Byzantine Period (from 330 to 1453 CE)

There is significant debate about exactly how the Roman Empire fell. Another question is: when did it fall? In 324 CE, Constantine the Great refounded the Doric colony of Byzantium, located at the continental divide between Europe and Asia, as the new capital of the Empire. The new city was completed in 330 CE as Nova Roma (“New Rome”); it was also called Constantinopolis, or as it is called in English, Constantinople. Colloquially, it was called in Greek Eis tan polin, “to the city,” whence the modern name Istanbul comes, as if there were no other city of importance in the world.

While the western, predominantly Latin-speaking, half of the Empire disintegrated politically in the 5th c. CE, Constantinople thrived as the capital of the Roman Empire, now centered in the Greek-speaking east, for another millennium until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. This period when Constantinople was the capital of the Roman Empire, from 330 to 1453 CE, is called the Byzantine Period. According to some, the Roman Empire ended only when Constantinople fell to the Turks.

One cannot talk about the Byzantine Period without talking about Christianity. Christianity began as a Jewish sect and, like Judaism, was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, the religion of Persia. Judaism and Christianity perhaps inherited from Zoroastrianism the belief that cosmic forces of Good and Evil were at war. They saw the Roman Empire as the earthly manifestation of Evil, and guaranteed a place in paradise (a Persian word that means “garden”) for Christians dying in battle against Rome.

Christianity was decriminalized in 312 CE and made the official imperial religion in 380 CE. Thus, many Christians thought, Evil surrendered to Good, and a new Christian world order had come to be. But Christianity lacked a refined systematic theology. Christian Greek scholars appealed largely to Platonism’s rigorous philosophy and combined Christian and Platonic worldviews.

With the establishment of Christianity as the imperial religion, the Roman Empire became a theocratic monarchy, and a complex shift in Greek identity occurred. Previously, the Greek word Hellên referred to the Greek language and its speakers. Now Greeks were politically Roman and culturally Christian. Of course they remained speakers of Greek, but the word Hellên was now reserved for pre-Christian literature, and then generalized to non-Christians broadly, including Persians, Arabs, and Muslims. Thus, the traditional Greek/non-Greek binary shifted to Christian/non-Christian.

The establishment of a Christian theocratic monarchy disenfranchised non-Christians, as well as the Christians who did not believe in the imperial version of the religion. There are many reasons why the Roman Empire lost significant territory during the Byzantine Period, and one is the fact that groups in the Middle East and North Africa found better treatment under neighboring Muslim caliphates.

Intellectuals in the Roman Empire preserved Ancient Greek texts, but their focus was on developing Christian doctrine. Ancient Greek intellectual thought, particularly mathematical and medical, developed during the Islamic Golden Age from the 8th to the 14th c. CE, when Muslim scholars picked up where the ancient Greeks left off and advanced their ideas. Thus, many Ancient Greek texts, long lost in the original Greek, are preserved in Arabic and Turkish.

The Ottoman Period (from 1453 to 1821 CE)

In the 14th century, the Ottoman Turks in Asia Minor conquered large swaths of land formerly under Byzantine control in the Middle East and the Balkans. The city of Constantinople withstood their conquest until 1453 CE, when it finally fell. The Ottomans made Constantinople their capital. They retained the emblematic crescent moon and star of the original Doric colony upon which it was founded. This symbol is now found on the flag of Türkiye and as a symbol of Islam broadly. The Ottomans called themselves Rūmī, “Romans,” as the Byzantine Greeks did. Their capital, now Istanbul, preserved the colloquial Greek name for it, eis tan polin (“to the city”).

<images: byzantine coin with crescent moon and turkish flag>

While some Greeks found a new home under Ottoman rule, others fled to Italy. The Latin west had long lost knowledge of the Greek language, but intellectuals were quite aware of what they no longer had — Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, among others — except where preserved in Latin translations. Educated Greeks from Constantinople quickly found a niche in Italy teaching Greek and Greek philosophy. The Ancient Greek language and its literature once more inspired the Latin (now Romance) world, and in no small way these Greek immigrants kindled the Italian Renaissance.

Meanwhile, on the Greek mainland Greek and Turkish cultures mixed, as seen in modern Greek cuisine and music, among other places. The Greek language, too, borrowed significantly from Turkish and other languages.

The Modern Period (from 1821 CE to the Present Day)

Greek revolutionaries successfully waged a war of independence from the Ottoman Empire from 1821 to 1830 CE. With the help of the Russian Empire, the United Kingdom, and France, southern Greece became an independent republic called the Hellênikê Dêmokratia (“the Hellenic Democracy”). Hellas, “Greece,” was a new national identity.

Greek independence brought to the forefront a debate, ongoing since the late 18th century, about what the modern Greek language should be. Two options were on the table, and independence encouraged the selection of one to be the official language of the new Greek nation. Demotic (“the people’s [language]”) was the vernacular. It developed from Koine and was replete with loan words from Venetian, a dialect of Italian, and Turkish. The alternative was Katharevousa (“the purifying [language]”), a literary construct that fell between Classical Attic and Demotic Greek. Notably, it removed borrowings from modern languages. For this reason, it was called “pure.” The debate was not resolved until 1976, when Demotic was chosen as the official language of Greece.

The modern country of Greece had its first capital at Nafplio in the Peloponnese. The capital was soon moved to Athens largely for symbolic reasons. The country began as an independent nation in southern Greece and over the greater part of a century expanded its borders north to encompass the land it has today. This raises the important question of what defines “Greece”: borders or an idea? If borders, which? If an idea, whose?

Many European cultural and political institutions claim descent from Classical Athens in particular. However, cherry-picked and decontextualized details of this complicated history have perpetuated a fictitious notion of white European superiority. It arises from disingenuous historical narratives at best, and racially motivated reinventions of antiquity at worst. To combat this, we must read what Greeks themselves say, assess their ideas in their proper context, and remember that the ancient Greeks hardly considered themselves “European” in a modern sense of the term. Non-Greek speakers were equally barbarian whether they lived in Europe, Asia, or Africa. We must also remember that ancient Greece was a complex blend of cultures and customs from Europe, Asia, and Africa, like modern European cultures.

We at Reading Morphologically will always support all efforts to shed light on this diversity.