Читать книгу Pilgrim in the Palace of Words - Glenn Dixon - Страница 10
Оглавление2 At the Gates of the Western World
I got on the wrong bus. All the signs were in Greek, and the lettering was indecipherable to me. Ironic, considering that the Greek letters alpha and beta make up the English word alphabet. In Hebrew they are aleph and bet; in Arabic alif and ba. It didn’t make any difference, though. I couldn’t read any of it.
When I bought a ticket to Athens, the man in the booth waved me generally in the direction of a row of buses behind him. I hoisted my backpack and trudged toward them, squinting at the cardboard signs displayed on their windshields. Finally, after a little deliberation, I got on the bus whose sign read: . As it turned out, I should have gotten on the one that read: .
I tried to check that I had the right bus, but when I asked the driver, I got completely confused. To say yes in Greek, one says né, which to me sounded a lot like no. And to further complicate matters, no in Greek is okhi, which sounds suspiciously like okay. So when I asked the driver if his bus was going to Athens, he said, “Okay,” and waved his head at me.
After I climbed on, we took off in approximately the right direction. It wasn’t until we’d been travelling for an hour that I knew something was wrong. We came to a broad stretch of water, and I was pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be crossing anything like that. With a sinking heart I glanced around the bus for someone who might speak English. I found a middle-aged woman from France. “But, of course, we’re not going to Athens,” she said. “Unless you want to go the long way.” She laughed cruelly. “Mais oui … a very, very long way.”
I sat with her, anyway. For an hour or two she lectured me on the geometric period in ancient Greek pottery shards, often breaking into French when her English wouldn’t do. It turned out she was a professor in Paris and looked down on the world over a long, aquiline nose. I tried to keep up, but mostly it was beyond me. Our bus puttered into the green mountains past almond trees and olive groves until we stopped at a little town on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth. We had arrived at Itea, just down from , or what turned out to be the legendary ruins of Delphi.
Back behind the town a huge mountain, Parnassus, reared up, and we waited a while for the connecting bus that would carry us to a natural amphitheatre in the rock that held Delphi, home of the legendary Oracle.
Delphi is where the human world touches the divine. Zeus, it is said, released two golden eagles. One flew west and the other soared eastward. They circled the globe, and where they met again was Delphi, the centre of the world, the navel of the universe.
I had come to Greece to search for beginnings, so perhaps I hadn’t made a mistake getting on that bus, after all. Maybe it was fate, since there was little doubt that I had come to the right place.
No one really knows how languages began. Somewhere in the primordial jungle a system of sounds developed. A particular shout, “yeeee,” for example, might have alerted our ancestors to a predator that was on its way, while another, “yaaaa,” might have told them that a snake was coiled in a tree. And that, in a nutshell, is what language is: a random set of sounds to which we’ve affixed meanings. Simple as pie.
Languages developed almost organically, so much so that we can talk about them in terms of families. We can build the lineages for most of them, tracing their relationships and their roots farther back than one might think. Joseph Greenberg, one of the grand old masters of linguistics, hypothesized a proto-language for the Earth’s tongues. By reverse engineering from a mountain of data, he and his colleagues came up with a list of twenty-seven words from this presumed initial language.
The sniffing out of bloodlines, a favourite pastime of linguists, is usually based on the study of cognates, which are similar-sounding root words in different languages. Salam in Arabic and shalom in Hebrew are good examples and clearly demonstrate a common ancestry. Cognates, typically, tend to show up in the roots of the most basic concepts: kin relationships such as mother, brother, sister, father; and words for the most fundamental descriptions of nature — hand, bird, cat, tree.
Greenberg’s team hunted for cognates that would pertain to every language on the planet. Tik, for example, is what Greenberg claims is the first word for finger. It’s daktulos in Greek and digitus in Latin. These come to us in the English form digit (and from that, digital), and that’s how cognates tend to work. Languages tumble around, swapping, quite predictably, a t for a d, or a b for the pop of a p. Phonetic changes over time, in fact, are so predictable that they provide a sort of carbon-dating for languages.
We can tell fairly accurately when Old English split from High German. We can surmise when Norwegian diverged from Icelandic and when Portuguese hived off from Spanish. Greenberg simply pushed this research as far as he could. Some say he shoved it too far. While claiming that he had found cognates for the word finger across all of the language families, he also posited as many related concepts as he could imagine. For example, if he didn’t find the word for finger, he would look at the words for hand or thumb, or in quite a lot of cases, the number one, which according to him is described in most languages by holding up a single finger.
Greenberg’s theories are highly controversial, and talk of a single proto-language is largely downplayed in academic circles today. In fact, most linguists find it a load of bunk. It was a brave idea and obviously a hell of a lot of work, but unfortunately the truth probably leans more toward the opposite dynamic. Whereas there are now some six thousand languages spoken on Earth, chances are there were as many as fifteen thousand before written language appeared. So the languages we speak today aren’t the result of a Tower of Babel phenomenon. They probably didn’t all come from a single source. More likely, a multitude of languages sprang up around the same time independent of one another, and today, sadly, most of them have already disappeared.
The French professor and I strolled to a little hostel that had staggering views over the Gulf of Corinth. She was put into a room with Chantal and Valérie, two young women who also spoke French. As it turned out, they were from Quebec, my country … more or less. I was in the next room, and the girls soon escaped the professor’s dry lectures and found their way over to my balcony. A couple of cheap bottles of Greek wine appeared, and far from home we talked about Canada.
Chantal and Valérie were from Quebec City, though Chantal had born in the Province of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She was from the little town of Notre-Dame-du-Portage, which has, she insisted, one of the most beautiful sunsets in the world. The sun dips into the wide St. Lawrence River, and the colours, she told me, are magnifique.
Valérie pursed her lips in agreement, and I couldn’t help but remember a woman I once worked with. This woman always claimed that before she spoke French she had to make her face “go French.” It sounds ridiculous, but there’s actually something to her contention. Speaking a language is a whole way of being. You can feel it in the very sounds of the words (French, phonetically, tends to be a bit more forward in the mouth than English). And that’s even before you get to the meanings, the ways languages describe the world. Languages are direct reflections of ourselves. We think in them. We dream in them. We exist in them.
I could come at language from a linguistic point of view. I could describe noun clauses and verb stems, but I didn’t live the language the way Chantal and Valérie did. Chantal shook her head at me. “You don’t understand. You see French on your cornflakes.”
“My cornflakes?”
“Yes. You see the French. On the box. The translation. But you don’t really understand.”
“That’s true,” I said, sloshing some wine onto the floor of the balcony.
Chantal tugged at her floppy woollen hat and smiled. She saw that I at least understood that, even if I could speak a few words of a language, I didn’t know what it was like to be “in” that language … to live it. And that, for Chantal and Valérie, was a start.
I spent the next few days with Chantal and Valérie, traipsing around the ruins of Delphi. The most famous one is the Temple of Apollo. It lies halfway up a cliff, and in a little grotto at its foot there once sat the famous Oracle. The Oracle was always a woman, and it’s generally agreed that there must have been some fissure in the rock that leaked a kind of gas that put the Oracle into her trance. An earthquake closed up the whole thing a thousand years ago, but scientists now say it was methane gas with traces of ethylene. Essentially, the poor woman was sniffing a hallucinogen.
In ancient times the Oracle’s ruminations were considered the height of wisdom. Pilgrims came from distant lands to ask questions. The Oracle’s answers, of course, were enigmatic, but there were legions of priests on hand to interpret them. Monarchs and emperors frequently sought advice, and one of the many famous tales is that of King Croesus of Asia Minor. He was set to attack Persia and asked the Oracle if he would be victorious.
In her gas-induced trance the Oracle answered that once Croesus crossed the river a great empire would fall. The king understood this to mean that once his troops crossed the Euphrates River into what was then Persia, victory would indeed be his. Unfortunately, the reverse was true, and he suffered a devastating defeat. Years later the broken king returned to Delphi to pose a second question. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” he cried.
“I did,” the Oracle said. “The great empire that fell was your own.”
When we approached the Temple of Apollo, we looked around, but I couldn’t see either a grotto or a fissure. They had long ago disappeared. As we wandered around, we were caught in a sudden cloudburst and got soaked to the skin. The temple is only one of many on the hill, and we still had a long way to walk. Chantal glanced at her watch. “The time is short.”
“Sounds like something the Oracle might say,” I ventured.
“Are you having fun with my English?” Chantal looked at me sternly from beneath her floppy hat.
“No, no … your English is a hell of a lot better than my French.”
“That’s right,” she said. “A hell.”
Later, ploughing wetly back to our hostel, we spotted something bizarre. A single black cloud clung to the top of the cliff. It broiled darkly and was lit up repeatedly by small explosions of sheet lightning.
“Look,” Valérie said, “do you think we’ve angered the Oracle?”
I snickered. “Do you think she’s mad about the ‘time is short’ thing?”
“Don’t laugh about these things.” Chantal was serious. Time wasn’t something to be messed with.
The family groupings of European languages are well understood. That’s no surprise. Until recently, most linguists have been English, American, German, or French, and they’ve been more interested, of course, in how their own languages evolved. Still, over the years, Western linguists have discovered a lot more than they bargained for.
In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar working in India, noticed strange resemblances between Latin and ancient Sanskrit. Like Greenberg, Jones began matching up cognates. Some were fairly obvious like the Sanskrit word for king — raj. In English we have the cognates regent and royal, both deriving from the Latin regina. There’s also the Latin diva, meaning “god,” from which we get the word divine.
However, my all-time favourite cognate is Buddha. It stems from Pali, a dialect of ancient Sanskrit, and literally means “to awake.” But the only tattered remnant we have of this particular cognate, in English at least, is the word bed. It’s amazing how a concept can take different directions. I’m even tempted to say that a culture gets what it deserves. While the ancient wise men of India and the Far East became enlightened, well, we were … sleeping.
Sanskrit was the language of the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts and spread its wings across most of Asia. It spawned languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, the Urdu of Pakistan, Bengali, Kurdish, and Persian … and the list goes on and on. All of these languages seemed to have a common ancestor, the same as European tongues. The evidence this time was simply overwhelming. We now believe that this ancestor language, what today is unimaginatively called Proto Indo-European, was spoken about five thousand years ago by a small band of hunter-gatherers. By an incredible fluke of history, it survived, prospered, and spread even as countless languages around it died out.
More recently the search for this ancient and unwritten Proto Indo-European language has become even more focused. Among the cognates for animals and trees there are only a few that run through all of the hundreds of languages descended from Proto Indo-European. Salmon is one. The cognate here is actually lok. The Old English is leax from which we derive just lake. German has lachs and Yiddish, of course, has lox. The Greek is or solomos where you can find both the English Salmon and an appendage of the old root word in the middle syllable: lo.
The only other cognate that features in all Indo-European languages is the word for beech tree. With a little insight it was realized that Proto Indo-European must have arisen among a people who lived on the banks of a Salmon-spawning river in an area where beeches grew. This observation narrowed the search to the plains of what is now eastern Germany and Poland. There a small tribe of wanderers spoke a tongue that forms the basis for the languages of more than two billion people today, about one-third of the Earth’s population.
Have I mentioned hell journeys? Have I referred to marathons in cramped buses sitting squeezed and stiff for ten or twelve long, impossible hours? Sometimes there’s no other way to get where you’re going. In this case I was headed into the northern reaches of Greece. I’d already veered off track, and there was one thing up there that I thought I might as well see.
I’d been on the road for a full day already when I tucked into the city of Thessaloniki. From there I should have had a short jaunt over the border and into Turkey, but it wasn’t that easy.
Greeks and Turks hate each other passionately. The Greeks on their side of the border warn travellers not to venture into Turkey. “They eat babies over there,” they say. “Don’t go.
It’s terrible.” On the Turkish side, meanwhile, they say much the same thing. “What do you want to go there for? They’re monsters … horrible, horrible.”
Such antipathy no doubt dates back to the Turkish occupation of Greece for hundreds of years, but the discord really heated up in the 1920s when the present borders between the countries were set. Vast numbers of both populations were forced to relocate, sometimes leaving the places their families had lived in for centuries. There were tens of thousands of deaths, and what happened then hasn’t been forgotten by either side.
I arrived in Thessaloniki in time to learn that I had missed the sole train across the border. There was only one other option — a bus that departed from the train station at three in the morning. This seemed to be typical: you could travel from one country to the other, but it would be as inconvenient as possible.
After idling away the rest of the day, I tried to sleep, and when I finally got to the bus at the ungodly hour of a quarter to three in the morning, I discovered it was pretty much full. There were no tourists here. Most of the people appeared to be local. This was a chicken-on-your-lap bus. Everyone glanced at me as I got on, wielding my backpack as I buffaloed down the aisle. Their eyes followed me to see what I would do, since it was apparent there was only one place free. A small space was vacant on a bench near the back, but the other person sitting there was one of the largest human beings I’d ever seen, and I don’t mean he was fat. This guy was African, well over two metres tall, at least one hundred and forty kilograms of muscle, and was draped in gold chains. I shuffled in beside him, and every head in the bus swivelled to see what would happen next.
“How do you do?” the huge man asked. His hand enveloped mine, and I shook it.
“Uh … I’m okay. How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you. My name’s Cole.”
Cole was from Nigeria and turned out to be exceptionally polite. He was soft-spoken and remarkably thoughtful. In fact, he had just finished his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Athens. He talked a lot about his own country. Nigeria had a lot of oil, he said, but nasty things were occurring there, and he fervently hoped he could put his education to use to help the nation extricate itself from corruption and dictatorship. “Two hundred languages are spoken in Nigeria,” he told me. “Did you know that?”
“Is that right?”
“I’m afraid it is. We’re a divided community, sometimes quite fiercely.”
We talked until just before dawn and then I slept a little, huddled into my corner of the seat. The bus stopped often, and most of the passengers got off at little towns before the Turkish frontier. When we arrived at the border, a full twelve hours later, Cole and I were almost alone on the bus.
Cole was travelling on to Istanbul, but I planned to head south along the coastline. He had a bit of time, though, and walked with me to the next bus. It was kind of fun striding through the streets with this towering giant. I was in a country once more where the shopkeepers were quite persistent, always trying to bully tourists into their stores. They didn’t bother us, however. The hawkers shrank into their doorways, faces pale and alarmed. At my next bus I said goodbye to Cole, shook his massive hand, and wished him well on his return to Nigeria.
Besides the Indo-European family of languages, there are at least a couple of dozen other groupings. Most of the languages in Nigeria, for instance, are part of a family called Niger-Kordofanian. The Sino-Tibetan languages, which include Mandarin and all other Chinese dialects, boast about a billion speakers.
Most of the language families, though, are much smaller, such as Uralic, which includes a pocket of languages — Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian — that are European but not Indo-European. There are oddities such as Khoison, which features the clicking languages — the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert’s Bushmen, for example — but the real peculiarities of the linguistic world are the isolate languages. There are only a few of them, perhaps a hundred or so, and they exist completely by themselves. As far as anyone can tell, these isolate languages aren’t related to any other languages on the planet.
Of course, all this categorization of languages is a bit academic. The fact is that one can make a very good case, and some philosophers have, that languages don’t really exist at all. A language, quipped the linguist Max Weinreich, is only a dialect with an army and a navy. And he was correct. Languages shade into one another subtly. There are rainbows of dialects, and when one rises to take precedence, when one is called a language and the rest are termed dialects, well, that’s often a political distinction more than a linguistic classification.
On a nameless hill, on a long anonymous plain, stands the broken city of Troy. There’s not much to see, just a few leaning rock walls and a couple of archaeological trenches, but this literally, figuratively, and chronologically is the beginning of the Western world.
I had always wanted to visit Troy. So, with a dog-eared copy of Homer in my backpack, I slipped across the Dardanelles into what is now Turkish territory. The sea today is far away, the land having silted up over the millennia. Gazing across a long plain of grass with an old broken wall slightly angled, just as the mighty walls of Troy had been described in The Iliad, I knew that from these battlements a war had indeed been waged circa twelfth century B.C.
Travelling home from this war was Odysseus. I’ve always considered his exploits, as recounted in Homer’s other great epic, The Odyssey, to be the first real travel writing. In Latin he is Ulysses because, of course, the Romans later appropriated everything that was great about Greece. Even the name Homer is actually a Latin derivative. The name in Greek is Omeris.
Here, in the ancient tongue of the Greeks, is a whopping good story of love and misfortune, of adventure and endless travel. “Sing to me,” Homer began, “of the man … the wanderer. Under the wide ways of earth, caught in the teeth of the gods.” The translation I have is by Robert Fitzgerald, my favourite, because it rings and strides like William Shakespeare. Read aloud around a flickering campfire, it booms and thunders like a war drum. “Of mortal creatures, all who breathe and crawl … the earth bears none frailer than man.”
I love that stuff. It’s still some of the finest writing I’ve ever come across, except that in reality Homer never wrote it at all. He was illiterate, if indeed there was a man named Homer at all. The fact is that whoever came up with these tales couldn’t actually read a thing. The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral texts — remembered stories with all the colour and tangle of the spoken word.
This then is the borderline between oral and written cultures. We’ve been speaking languages for perhaps a hundred thousand years, but the writing down of them is relatively recent. Starting about five thousand years ago, we made lists of things, and around the time of Homer (sometime in the ninth century B.C.) written words began recounting the great stories.
It’s important to remember that languages, in essence, are merely arbitrary sounds to which we’ve attached meanings. With writing we took everything a step farther. We assigned random marks to these arbitrary sounds. But it all made sense. It was a way of encoding the world. It was a meaning system we had been working on for a very long time.
Scholars are divided about how Homer’s words found their way into print, how they at last became a written reality. Some say Homer, or someone else, dictated The Iliad and The Odyssey to a scribe. Others speculate that the stories were passed down orally with a few changes here and there for many more generations until they finally settled into their accepted texts. By the sixth century B.C., it’s certain The Iliad and The Odyssey had become the central books of ancient Greece — and by extension of our modern world.
Homer’s telling of the tales probably took place over many nights and numerous cups of wine. The storyteller might have accompanied himself on a stringed instrument, tweaking at the hearts of listeners with a swell of chord and melody. But what’s really important here is that somehow, somewhere, someone began to write it all down. The earliest Greek texts had lines that wove down the page. The first line was read left to right, as you’re reading this, but then the line after that would be read right to left, as in Arabic or Hebrew, so that the eye literally zigzagged down the page. And though this at first seems absurd, at least one modern theorist has wondered why this manner of reading and printing never caught on. It really does seem to make much more sense.
At any rate, none of that really matters. What’s important is that someone wrote the stories down. Writing crystallizes language. It catches it, holding it like an insect in a fossilized drop of amber.
And now here I was, almost three thousand years later, taking in something Homer himself had never actually seen. I wondered how a blind man could have been so precise with his descriptions. Scratching my own poor stories onto paper, I’m still humbled and inspired by his eloquence.
For the next four weeks I followed Homer’s sweet trail of words back into Greece. I plunged into his wine-dark seas. I slept on the deck of a half-dozen rusting and anonymous ferries, chugging southward from island to island across the placid Aegean Sea, and whenever I could I read a line in The Odyssey and came upon the very real place being described.
On Crete I hiked up to the ancient ruins of Knossos. Odysseus brushed past here on his way to the Land of the Lotus Eaters. Knossos is a Minoan palace a thousand years older than classical Greek civilization. It has been largely reconstructed by a French archaeological team, and walking around its ruins, I could feel how impressive it must have once been.
Here one of the very earliest writing systems was unearthed. The Linear B script was discovered on a number of broken clay tablets, but it wasn’t until 1953 that it was finally deciphered. The script is a form of archaic Greek dialect and is based mostly on syllabic signs, a fair number of logograms (where a single symbol represents a whole word), and a base ten number system, the forerunner of our own mathematics. Most of the tablets are simply lists, a kind of accounting of tools, animals, and materials, but they provided the basis for the written language to come. The letters would soon relax and blossom into the call of Sirens and Cyclops, and over time would record the tale of Odysseus, shining among the deathless gods, sailing to his one true love on the distant shores of Ithaca.
The south coast of Crete faces Africa. A dusty bus ride gets you there — eventually. Over the backbone of the island I bounced along, heading for a little seaside village named Matala.
In the 1960s, Matala was on the hippie trail. Jimi Hendrix came through here. Cat Stevens stopped by on his way to India. Joni Mitchell lived in one of the caves in the cliffs. Nowadays police sweep through the caves in the evening and eject anybody trying to recapture their youth. The caves are ancient Minoan tombs and stare down over a bright beach, flooded during the day with travellers. I met no one here except for a bedraggled, eccentric old woman. She was from Germany originally, she said, but had lived in Greece for years. The woman cackled, hacked, and told me about the bonfires that used to roar on the beach decades ago. She spoke about the young men with their guitars, about their long hair and their dreams, and the crashing surf that comes in from Africa.
So one dark night, under the starry dome, I went down to sit on the beach. Far off in front of me were the coasts of Egypt and Tunisia. This was the end of the known world for ancient Greek wayfarers. Beyond this was only the strange, the curious mention of elephants, and spices.
I sat on the cool sand and thought about the Rosetta stone, which was used to first decode ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. They hadn’t been read for a couple of thousand years, but when the Rosetta stone was unearthed by a troop of Napoleon’s soldiers in the dunes along the Nile River, it was immediately recognized as the needed missing linguistic link.
The Rosetta stone is just a big flat rock with inscriptions describing the coronation of Pharaoh Ptolemy V. The uppermost lines are unreadable hieroglyphics. The middle lines are demotic (a cursive form of glyphs and a forerunner to Arabic), and the bottom lines are Greek. There were plenty of scholars who could translate the ancient Greek, and since the hieroglyphics carried exactly the same message, well … for the first time in two thousand years the Egyptian pictographs unfolded and all the long stretch of history was revealed.
The above, though, isn’t what I intended to write about. I meant to fashion the old German woman into a modern-day Oracle. I meant to dig up some more on Jimi Hendrix. I meant to go drinking in the Mermaid Tavern, but somehow my thoughts on that beach diverted me and I found myself wading through a deeper history.
Napoleon lost the stone to the British, and they carried it off to London to the confines of the British Museum. I touched it once, this magical Rosetta stone, a gesture very much like blasphemy to a museum curator. Strange, actually, because moments later an urgent siren wailed, and a legion of uniformed guards swept into the large room out of nowhere.
They didn’t head directly for me, though surely the colour of my face had blanched into a pale and guilty white. No, they herded everyone into a group and pushed us out an unmarked door. One minute I was brushing my hand against the Rosseta stone and the next I was standing in a parking lot. What really happened is that someone had phoned in a bomb scare. Obviously, the guards were used to such eventualities and were highly trained. Rightly so, because in a place like the British Museum, a repository of the world’s greatest treasures, the damage an explosion would cause would be a blow against all of humanity.
In any event, through Greek we know the ancients. Those who could write Greek began to record everything. Much of the Bible has come to us through Greek. So have our first solid glimpses of science, medicine, and philosophy. From Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom, we have the first intimations of what we would become.
From Crete I sailed to the Cycladic Islands. Dolphins danced in the ship’s wake, and in a few hours’ time we were under the cliffs of Santorini, the first of the islands. Everyone aboard moved outside to stand at the railings and gawk. Santorini is spectacular. The cliffs rise five hundred metres straight out of the water, and at their very top, miraculously clinging to the rocks, is the whitewashed town of Thera.
The ferry pulled into a little port at the base of the cliffs. We poured onto a bus that then laboured up a switchbacking road. Up and up we went in the swaying bus, stopping sometimes to reverse when a truck rumbled down the other way, loaded with tomatoes or watermelons.
At the rim of the cliff the terraces of the town overlook the frothing ocean far below. The houses are painted in traditional Greek colours — white with blue windowsills and doorstops. From here I could see that the cliffs swept around in a crescent moon shape, forming the one remaining wall of a vast volcanic cauldron. Down below there were smaller islands of black lava, some still steaming with the fury of the Earth’s core.
On the other end of Santorini, in the opposite crook of the crescent, is Oia, another tiny village. The tourists come here to watch the sunset. Busload upon busload arrives as the sun starts to dip. They line the cliffs and watch the sun boil red and dip at last into the sea. On the day I was there perhaps a thousand people actually broke into applause at the sunset. That was something I had never experienced before. They were clapping as if they had just seen a theatrical performance, and an old man beside me turned my way and smiled wryly. He was from somewhere in England.
“By George,” he said, “that’s the second most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.”
He appeared to be well into his seventies, so I imagined he had watched plenty of sunsets. I wondered, in fact, if he had seen Chantal’s fine sunset in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Of course, I couldn’t help but ask, “So where is the most beautiful sunset in the world?”
“Oh … I don’t know. I haven’t seen it yet. You see, I just like to leave room for improvement.”
The language Homer spoke was only one of a multitude of Greek dialects used in the ninth century B.C. The Greek that’s spoken today comes down to us from only a single one of these many dialects, something we owe largely to Alexander the Great. He was a pupil, we’re often reminded, of Aristotle, who also came from the northern reaches of Greece. But Alexander, thundering across the far plains of Asia, conquering most of the known world, decided there would be only one language for communication in his vast empire. And for this he chose the dialect of Athens.
Attic Greek, as it’s called, wasn’t Alexander’s mother tongue, so his decision was brave and enlightened. He was wise enough to see that in Athens something spectacular was happening. A new world was being forged, and Attic was its language.
Alexander’s decision is a monumental turning point in history, one that’s had a vast effect on humanity. It’s much like the spread of English throughout the world today. English, of course, travelled across the globe under the fist of the British Empire, the one the sun never set on. And in the dissolution of that empire a detritus of English was left in pockets around the planet.
Twenty-five hundred years ago the same was true of Attic Greek. Throughout Europe and the Middle East it became the language of commerce, politics, and religion. Our first democracy and much of the kick-start of Greek philosophy rode on the tails of this one little dialect.
Alexander called this notion of a standard tongue a koine, meaning “to imprint,” in this case a common language stamped upon the various peoples of his empire (from which we get not only the word but the concept of “coining a phrase”). Today Attic roots, largely through the Latin and then the French side of our linguistic ancestry, account for about 30 percent of all English words. And what words they are: tragedy and triumph, poetry and parable, history and tyranny. We have narcotic, embryo, and skeleton. We have arithmetic and paradox. All of these are direct cognates from Attic Greek. Even the name Europe comes from the old Greek tongue. School and music and theatre and symphony and theory and Catholic and character and astronaut — all from the vast encyclopedia that is Greek.
That evening I caught a ferry that would finally take me to Athens. I slept on the deck once more, and in the grey-eyed dawn came to the port of Piraeus. Athens itself is a few kilometres inland. The ferry dumped us off at the dockyards, and I hoisted my backpack once more and ventured up toward the buses.
When I finally arrived in Athens, I was sorely disappointed. I’d taken a huge roundabout, a circling of the entire Aegean Sea, to get here, and what I found was a vast sprawl of ugly concrete apartment blocks. Ten million people live in Athens under a perpetual cloud of exhaust fumes. It’s not a pretty city, and there’s an almost constant barrage of traffic noise.
What was it about this place? Why had I come here?
Way back in graduate school I studied a rather obscure little field in linguistics. I immersed myself in language consciousness. I looked at what it meant to think in one language as opposed to thinking in another. The field was obscure — mostly because everyone else had given up on it. Language consciousness wasn’t politically correct anymore. Anything that could be said or thought in one language could, most surely, be said or thought in another. Wasn’t that true?
Yes, but I still can’t stop thinking that there’s something more to languages, something about them that deeply defines us. I thought about Chantal and Valérie. They had talked about “living” in a language. It was the House of Being thing again, a palace filled with treasures.
I had come to Greece to see the birthplace of the Western world, the place where a whole new way of thinking, a whole new world view, was invented. Gazing around Athens, it was hard to imagine that anything special ever happened here. But it did. One rocky promontory still pushes above the clammer and clatter. It’s sadly awash with tourists, of course, here to snap photos and cross one more destination off their lists. And it’s too bad, because this really is the heart of everything. This is the Acropolis, the stony outcropping that’s been inhabited in one way or another for five thousand years. It is a sacred place, an island on the vast Attic plain. Most important, it is the earthly seat of Athena, the goddess of wisdom.
I managed to find a little pathway around the northern edge of the Acropolis. There are some old houses — painted in the traditional fashion. Bougainvillea flowers drape down the walls, and birds chirp in the foliage.
The pathway skirts around the back of the Acropolis away from tour buses and snapping cameras. It overlooks the Agora, a large field of rocks that is, or was, the ancient marketplace of Athens. I wandered into a little museum there, mostly to find some shade. There were the inevitable statues, broken and fragmentary. Old, wise eyes stared at me from marble perches. But one small glass case caught my eye. In it a tangle of metal scraps, like a hairball, looked up at me, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
Nails, the plaque said, cobbler’s nails from the shop of Simon, the shoemaker. The nails were fused together by age, but I read further. It is known, the inscription said, that Socrates often frequented Simon’s little shop. Likely, he held among the first of his lectures here. So, I gathered, this was one of the first informal settings of the Academy of Athens. A young Plato might well have sat beside Simon, helping him to cut leather for shoes while they listened to the great teacher.
For Socrates the great business of life was dialogue. He spoke with many of the citizens of Athens, switching, within a few sentences, from the mundane and trite observations of weather and shopping that usually pepper our talk, to a deep engagement with thought itself. In one of his first dialogues, as related by Plato, Socrates took on some of the philosophers that had come before him. He was particularly interested in the ancient Greek word arete. Now arete refers to the purpose of something, but more than that it’s the measure of how well something performs its required purpose, the measure of its excellence.
The Pre-Socratics had spent long hours attempting to define this arete. Everything has its own measure of arete, they claimed. The arete of a chimney, for example, consists in how well it draws smoke up and out of a room and how well it reflects heat back into a room. Odysseus displayed his arete in his unquenchable thirst to return home, to battle even the gods in his desire to make it back to Ithaca.
But Socrates came to a different conclusion. Just as the purpose of a chimney is to draw smoke up and out of a room, the purpose of a human being is to seek knowledge. Through reason, Socrates said, an individual can free himself from the dark cave of the unknown. Through reason we can unravel the mysteries of the world and venture beyond oracles, gods, and fate.
And that surely smacks of a world view.
Now, of course, it would be foolish to imagine that the whole Western world grew from this single word arete. I only point out that sometimes a single word can contain vast, sprawling ideas. New ideas. And it’s not that these words are untranslatable. It’s not that no one else can understand them. It’s just that they emerged here first, that they were believed here first ... in this language.
I glanced up from the little pile of nails. Had they heard the voice of Socrates? Had these small nails rolled about on the floor while his ideas came into being? Outside, the sun beat relentlessly on the stones. The Acropolis towered blackly above me, and I knew I was onto something. I didn’t completely understand it, but I knew then that languages can contain whole worlds. And I wanted to go and see them.
After a few days in Athens, I caught the train for Patras, a port city on the west coast of Greece. From there I would go to Italy. The train moved across the backbone of Greece, out over the Corinth Canal, across the top of the Peloponnese.
It was evening when I left Patras. The ferry to Italy chugged along so slowly that we didn’t seem to move at all. We inched into the Adriatic Sea. The wide island of Cephalonia eventually reared up, and just north of that was a smaller island, green and double-humped. Something about it kept me on deck. The sun was growing larger and pinker in its descent, and the sea was truly wine-dark for an instant. Then I realized which island I was looking at. This was Ithaca, home of Odysseus. The trip from Troy had taken him ten long years, but in the telling of that journey a whole new world was created.
A single star emerged in the moonless night. I stood for a few moments longer on deck, then ducked back in through a hatchway. I needed rest, so I curled up in a corner and fell asleep to the soft murmur of the sea.
