In Homer, heroes and characters of different cities and countries understand each other without the need for interpreters or translators. In the course of his wanderings, however, Odysseus does encounter people “speaking other tongues”; and the same happens during the travels (also mentioned in the Odyssey) of other mythical characters such as Mentes, Nestor, and Eumaeus. In the Iliad, the plurality of non-Greek languages is evoked by Iris when describing the Trojan army in the following terms (Iliad 2.803–804; see also 4.437–438):
full many are the allies throughout the great city of Priam,and tongue differs from tongue among men that are scattered abroad.
In this somewhat contradictory frame, Homeric poetry leaves only a marginal role to the term and concept of “barbarian,” which then becomes prominent in Greek culture after the great watershed of the Persian wars (492–478 BCE), most notably in fifth-century Attic tragedy.1 Joining the linguistic aspect with the ethnic and cultural one, barbaros now covers a wide range of non-Greek tongues and utterances, which are sometimes rudimentarily reproduced on the Athenian stage by means of cacophony, solecism, or unusual acoustic effects: the monody of the Phrygian slave in Euripides’s Orestes is perhaps the best-known case, while Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women (119, 130) at Argos probably spoke Greek with a strong Egyptian accent (see also the confused utterances of the drowning Persians in the slightly later choral lyric of Timotheos).
In Sophocles’s tragedy Women of Trachis (1060) Heracles contrasts Greece with the aglossos ge, the “tongueless land,” an undifferentiated ensemble of territories where Greek is not spoken. It is only in comedy (and especially in the late fifth-century author Aristophanes) that inserts of foreign languages acquire a specific function and visibility: plurilingualism is here funny and conducive to laughter or sarcasm, sometimes colored by a touch of “tabloid xenophobia.” However, even in these instances, knowledge of the mimicked or satirized language can rarely be assumed: in some cases, scholars still debate if the “strange” words actually reproduce a foreign tongue (e.g., the “Persian” inserts in Aristophanes’s Acharnians or the “Triballian” words in his Birds) or simply render camouflaged Greek or a sort of incomprehensible gibberish.
This broader context is important as a general frame of reference for the fifth-century historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, the father of ethnography, who worked and wrote most of his Histories at Athens during the acme of its “golden age”: while never developing a full-fledged theory of language, Herodotus did devote an acute interest to the main linguistic features of the numerous populations he mentioned throughout his Histories. Herodotus was a native of Caria, and scholars still debate whether he had any knowledge of Carian or Aramaic; he probably used interpreters during his journeys to Egypt and to other parts of the world. On the other hand, we know for sure that his slightly later colleague Thucydides, author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, did not know any foreign language, never mentions interpreters, and—focusing on the political history of Greece—displays comparatively little interest in language altogether.2 Throughout the fifth century, the only well-known Greek who is credited with proficiency in a foreign language is the Athenian general Themistocles, whether he learnt Persian (the language of his enemies) out of genuine interest or as a purely strategical move.3
Turning to Herodotus, whether we stress the element of the “Greek vs. barbarian” opposition in him, or whether we regard him as philobarbaros, especially in his earlier books (this is the object of a long-standing academic quarrel), his Histories represent our primary witness for a number of elements:
First, the regular use of interpreters, which is clearly presupposed by the manifold commercial and cultural contacts of the Greek world with the surrounding nations: these men are often slaves, hardly ever Greeks (many of them Carians, Lydians or Lycians; in the whole of Herodotus we only find one Greek speaking a word in Persian, in 6.29.2), and they are rarely presented as meaningful individuals per se, but rather as technical “instruments” of communication; the role of the interpreters will be slightly more relevant in Xenophon’s Anabasis (early fourth century).
Second, the focus on the problems of the correspondence between Greek and foreign words, both in terms of existence or lack of exact equivalents (etymology is often applied), and particularly when it comes to proper names of places and gods: Herodotus’s statement that “almost all the names of the gods came to Hellas from Egypt” (2.50) is debated, but it probably points to an original contact that went beyond the mere onomastic aspect, and involved the main features of the pantheon; in his surprising relativism, Herodotus also tells us that (2.158.5) “the Egyptians call ‘barbarians’ all those who do not share their language.”
Third, the inclusion of language as an integral feature of a foreign culture: India has many different nations and as many different languages (3.98.3); the Gelonoi speak a language half-Greek, half-Scythian (4.108.2); the Ammonians “are colonists from Egypt and Ethiopia and speak a language compounded of the tongues of both countries” (2.42.2); the Aethiopian Troglodytes “speak a language different from all others, it is like screeching of bats” (4.183.4); the Dodonian women “speak like birds” (2.57); the Atarantes “are the only men known to us who have no names” (4.184.1); the Scythians use many metaphors in their language, “it is therefore in a figurative sense … that the Scythians and their neighbors call the snow ‘feathers’ ” (4.31.2); “all Persian names end in -s” (1.139: a false statement in itself, but the symptom of a “scientific” interest in formal aspects of grammar).
Herodotus has often been charged with a superficial interest in languages in and of themselves, in issues of miscommunication that may arise in interpersonal contact, in the problems and the dynamics of interlinguistic communication. Recent research (Miletti) has demonstrated that, on the contrary, Herodotus writes much about the contribution of language to the definition of every single civilization he encounters, and displays a genuine enthusiasm for the vocabulary (if not the structure) of other tongues—a comparative and open perspective, that will not bear fruit in the fundamentally monolingual speculation on language that will impose itself in Greek quarters after the later fifth century.
In book one of the Histories, Croesus, the king of Lydia (a region of Eastern Asia Minor) attempts to gather information on the various populations of Greece in view of future alliances against the Persians: the Athenians are for him a “Pelasgic” people, who unlike the Spartans always dwelled in the same place. The historian speculates on the Pelasgians’ ethnic origin by dealing first and foremost with their language: this is a remarkable example of ethnographic inquiry that focuses on language as a distinctive feature in order to establish proximities between different populations. The importance of this step in the use of language as a tool in the Greek construction of ethnicity, and in the reconstruction of a remote past (note the focus on the permanence of fossilized linguistic features in marginal groups), has often been highlighted in modern scholarship.
Greek Text
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Herodotus, Histories 1.57–58, adapted from Herodotus, Historiae, vol. 1, Libros I–IV continens, ed. H.B. Rosén (Leipzig: Teubner, 1987), 36–37. |
English Translation Herodotus, Histories 1.57–58, adapted from Herodotus, The Persian Wars, vol. 1, Books I and II, trans. A.D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library 117 (London, 1920), 65, round parentheses in original. What language the Pelasgians spoke I cannot say exactly.4 But if one may judge by those that still remain of the Pelasgians who live above the Tyrrheni in the city of Kreston5—who were once neighbors of the people now called Dorians, and at that time inhabited the country which now is called Thessaliotis6—and of the Pelasgians who inhabited Plakia and Skylake on the Hellespont,7 who came to live among the Athenians, and by other towns too which were once Pelasgian and afterwards took a different name—if (I say) one may judge by these, the Pelasgians spoke a barbarian language. If, then, all the Pelasgian stock spoke so, then the Attic nation, being Pelasgian, must have changed its language, too, at the time when it became part of the Hellenes. For the people of Kreston and Plakia have a language of their own in common, which is not the language of their neighbors; and it is plain that they still preserve the manner of speech8 which they brought with them in their migration into the places where they live. But the Hellenic stock,9 as to me seems clear, has always used the same language since its beginning; yet being, when separated from the Pelasgians,10 few in number, they have grown from a small beginning to comprise a multitude of nations, chiefly because [the Pelasgians and] many other barbarian peoples united themselves with them.11 Before that, as I think, the Pelasgic stock nowhere increased greatly in number while it was barbarian.12 |
See Pontani’s discussion of Strabo in Chapter 1.7.
In the History of the Peloponnesian War 2.68, Thucydides describes how the Ambracians had acquired their Greek; in 3.94.5 the Eurytanians “speak a language which is almost unintelligible and eat their meat raw” (trans. Warner).
Thucydides 1.138.1; Plutarch, Life of Themistocles 29.5. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 8.3 attests that the sixth-century philosopher Pythagoras knew Egyptian, but this information must be handled with caution.
According to the “Pelasgic theory” (which was widespread in ancient times and has found some echo, if in modified versions, even among modern scholars), in ancient times Greece was called “Pelasgia,” and the various local populations of Greece were in fact “Hellenized Pelasgians,” i.e., Pelasgians (non-Greeks) who became Greek by adopting the Greek language, originally spoken only by other tribes such as the Dorians.
There is a great controversy over the name and the identification of this city: the reading “Creston” (
This is Thessaly, the region west of Olympus and Ossa, often called “Pelasgiotis.”
Plakie and Skylake are two cities on the eastern shore of the Propontis (now Marmara sea), east of Cyzicus.
More exactly, the “character,” i.e., the shape, the original matrix, the “coinage” of the language.
The early Dorians, who spoke Greek from the start, and the Hellenized barbarians.
The nature of this separation—whether local or ethnic—is unclear: what emerges, however, is that Herodotus regards both Dorians and Pelasgians as fundamentally close, albeit distinct from each other.
The transmitted text (
Barbaros (here translated as “barbarian”) means in fact “of foreign speech.”
Bibliography
Primary Text
Critical Edition
Herodotus. Historiae. Vol. 1, Libros I–IV continens, edited by H.B. Rosén. Leipzig: Teubner, 1987.
English Translation
Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Vol. 1, Books I and II. Translated by A.D. Godley. Loeb Classical Library 117. London, 1920.
Further Primary Sources
Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. London: Penguin, 1954.
Further Reading
de Luna, Maria Elena. La comunicazione linguistica fra alloglotti nel mondo greco. Pisa: ETS, 2003.
Harrison, Thomas. “Herodotus’ Conception of Foreign Languages.” Histos 2 (1998): 1–45. http://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/1998.01HarrisonHerodotusConceptionForeignLanguages145.pdf.
Miletti, Lorenzo. Linguaggio e metalinguaggio in Erodoto. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2008.
Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. “Herodotus (and others) on Pelasgians: Some Perceptions of Ethnicity.” In Herodotus and His World, edited by Peter Derow and Robert Parker, 103–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003.
Vignolo Munson, Rosaria. Black Doves Speak: Herodotus and the Languages of Barbarians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.