[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This volume, edited by Albio Cesare Cassio and Sara Kaczko, contains the proceedings of the final conference of the HERA JRP UP project MuMIL. Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Ancient Europe, which took place at the Università di Roma “La Sapienza” in June 2019. The aim of this research, as the editors state in the introduction, is to show that issues of refusal or integration of speakers of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds are well documented in antiquity.
This book consists of thirteen specific case studies and consequently the main idea of the project is somewhat blurred throughout. However, in general terms, an effort has been made in most chapters to have a common thread of ancient multilingualism, linked in particular to the Greek language. In fact, the cultural framework of this work is mainly the Greek world in its broadest sense (including Sicily, southern Italy, Illyria, Epirus, Macedonia, Thrace, Egypt and Asia Minor) and its contacts with other cultures. The time span covered in this book is very broad, from the 6th c. BCE to the present day, including studies framed in the Hellenistic period and Late Antiquity.
The volume begins with a short introduction which summarizes the MuMIL project, explains its main concept and more specifically describes one of its priorities, the acquisition of 3D images of the inscriptions written at the Grotta della Poesia sanctuary (Roca Vecchia, Lecce). Unfortunately, as the authors state, this task could not be completed before the book’s publication, which is completely understandable, due to the immense number of inscriptions found in this cave.
The selection of authors is one of the book’s strong points, as all of them are renowned experts in the subjects they deal with. Chapters are not grouped thematically but are arranged in alphabetical order according to the authors’ surnames, which is slightly confusing for the reader, but in any case is not a problem as this work is not intended to be read in one go but in isolated chapters: if readers are interested in a particular concept, they can refer to the useful index of concepts at the end of the book. However, chapters will be commented here following a thematic order to provide a clearer idea of the contents of the volume, considering two basic pillars: linguistics and sociolinguistics.
Five chapters approach multilingualism from a strictly linguistic point of view, mainly investigating word formation. These are the chapters by Alfieri, Cassio, Janse-Vandewalle, Kaczko and Weiss. Besides these, Logozzo-Tronci’s, Mancini’s and Marchesini’s contributions deal with linguistics and not directly with multilingualism, as they focus on a single language (New-Testament Greek, Oscan and Messapic, respectively).
Luca Alfieri takes us back to Late Antiquity and the theorization of word-formation in Greco-Latin grammar proposed by the celebrated grammarian Priscian, who distinguished between the divisio graeca and the divisio latina.
One of the two editors of the book, Albio Cesare Cassio, focuses on the suffixes of the names of monetary values. Cassio convincingly breaks with the usual doctrine according to which the Greek suffix “-ᾶς, -ᾶντος” (e.g. τριᾶς, τετρᾶς, ἑξᾶς, etc) is formed after the Latin suffix –āns, –antis, proposing the reverse path. According to the Cassio, Latin speakers would have assimilated the forms sextāns and quadrāns with Latin present participles such as comāns. The form τριᾶς would have given way to Lat. triēns, on the analogy of participles such as faciēns, veniēns, etc. given that in this case, [i] preceded the suffix -ᾶς.
Mark Janse and Johan Vandewalle demonstrate that the Cappadocian (Greek dialect from Eastern Asia Minor Turkicized under the Ottoman Empire) phrasal compound παιρ-παίνω has parallel structures in the Turkish language.
Co-editor Sara Kaczko writes a thought-provoking article that provides new data on the place name of the colony Poseidonia / Paestum in Magna Graecia. This chapter starts with a piece of Lucanian pottery dated to between 410-390 BCE, a pelike from a tomb at Policoro / Heraclea on which the hapax Posdan (a variant of the theonym Poseidon) was written. One of its main points is that it is a disyllabic word (and not trisyllabic like the original form). This is possibly due to the Lucanian origin of the painter, as it would reflect the pronunciation with an initial stress accent (at least from the 6th BCE onwards) leading to the syncope of the unaccented vocalic element in the medial syllable. This phenomenon would also explain the Latin toponym of Poseidonia, Paestum, whose first coins with the legend “Paistano” would contain the same vowel syncope as in the label Posdanon on the pelike from Policoro.
Felicia Logozzo and Liana Tronci study two types of multi-verb constructions in the New Testament, their distribution in the four Gospels and the conditions in which both constructions appear in the text.
Marco Mancini impeccably explores in detail the etymology and semantics of the Oscan term pukam. The author proposes that Oscan pukā- could stem from IE. *kwVḱ-, “to see” and also “to appear”, a root that until now had seemed productive only in Greek and Iranian. More precisely, pukam would mean “representation” and would belong to the semantic field of “sculpture”, “monument”, “memorial”, to which the Oscan term seg(ú)núm (“votive symbol”, according to Mancini) also belongs.
Simona Marchesini’s paper consists of a thorough examination of the Messapic inscription MLM 3 Ro. After a theoretical introduction in which she contextualizes the epigraph within Frame Semantics, she convincingly proposes a new etymology and meaning of the verb eipeigrave/ipigrave: “to offer” instead of “to write”, which is the commonly accepted interpretation.
Michael Weiss offers an essay on numismatic terms, in this case on uncia. The commonly accepted etymology for this word is connected to Lat. ūnus, “one”, which poses phonological problems, as Weiss conclusively argues. He proposes instead to connect uncia with Gk. ὄγκος, “mass, volume”, following Heron of Alexandria (1st c. CE).
A second block of studies deals with multilingualism from a sociolinguistic point of view. Bruno, Crespo, Filos, Guijarro and Lombardo-Boffa are responsible for these chapters. Except for Bruno’s paper, in which the documentary sources are papyri, the rest of the studies are based on inscriptions.
Carla Bruno presents a fascinating case study in which she offers some clues about linguistic choice in the description of certain dream narratives preserved in the Hellenistic archive of the katochoi at the Serapeum of Memphis (2nd cent. BCE). These documents show that Demotic was the appropriate language for describing dreams in this precise context. The author explains that the spontaneous nature of these documents (they are actually quick notes) gives rise to a loosely controlled language with a number of Demotic-Greek multilingual phenomena.
Emilio Crespo contributes an excellent chapter in which he deals with the interaction between dialects in the ancient kingdom of Macedon. As the author explains in a clear and useful overview, this research could be carried out thanks to the abundance of new findings published especially in Epigraphes Katō Makedonias 2 (2015). The chapter demonstrates with illustrative tables how the dialects that the author identifies as variants of Northwest Doric and Attic-Ionic coexist not only in the corpus of inscriptions but also within the inscriptions themselves, giving rise to “hybrid” texts. The language resulting from this dialectal coexistence would later be integrated into the Attic-Ionic koiné, thanks in large part to the socio-political changes of the 4th century BC and, more specifically, to the impact of the Macedonian court, whose main language was the koiné. Crespo takes two significant corpora as a sample (Aigeiai and Pella), and offers the reader their points in common and their differences at the linguistic, epigraphic and palaeographic levels.
Another chapter on linguistic contact between Greek dialects and their koineization is the impeccable work of Paloma Guijarro Ruano. This study focuses on the Greek colonies of the northern Aegean and the border with Thrace (a scarcely studied region so far), dealing with contacts not only between Greeks and Thracians but also between the different Greek dialects and their subsequent koineization. The chapter offers a threefold division of the contacts into the pre-koiné period (when linguistic material is basically restricted to onomastics), the turning point from the 4th BCE onwards and koineization.
A volume devoted to multilingualism must include a chapter on onomastics. The case study chosen for this book, by Panagiotis Filos, addresses the Greek colonies of northern Epirus and southern Illyria (Apollonia, Epidamnos-Dyrrachium, Chaonia and Bouthrotos and the border area between the two regions).The conclusions reached by the author after studying the sampling area are that the vast majority of the onomastic formulae have a “Greek” structure (personal name and patronymic) but, in addition, the linguistic ascription of both elements is also Greek. The very limited proportion of non-Hellenic (“Illyrian”) onomastic material demonstrates that there was little interaction between the two languages in the chosen chrono-geographical framework, at least as far as the written record shows. It should not be forgotten, as Filos points out, that there are no documentary sources for the Illyrian language apart from the onomastic material. The study is methodologically very sound since it analyses separately the adaptation of the “Illyrian” anthroponyms to the Greek context from the transformations of the onomastic formula.
Two of the four contributions in the volume that have the Italic peninsula as their setting study Messapic epigraphic culture, which is closely linked to the Hellenic world. These are the contributions by Marchesini (on which see above) and Lombardo-Boffa. Lombardo-Boffa’s work firstly presents a very useful section dedicated to the historical and cultural context of the emergence of Messapic epigraphy and the fundamental role of the Greeks in it. Secondly, the reader will find an exhaustive study by Giovanni Boffa on the column of Patù, a recently discovered inscription on which was engraved not only an archaic Greek alphabet but also several Messapic texts. The use of abundant and high quality images in this chapter helps the reader follow the text and better understand the dimensions of the recent discovery.
In conclusion, we can certainly say that Albio Cesare Cassio and Sara Kaczko have compiled a very interesting collection of papers on heterogeneous case studies. It is possible that the reader might miss an introductory chapter of greater theoretical depth, explaining the state of the question, the ideas and concepts they have sought to work with and the contents of the chapters. Still, the interest of the thirteen contributions is beyond doubt, even if they are based on very disparate documentary sources in different geographical and chronological contexts and theoretical frameworks. In fact, the editors openly state in the preface that they are aware of the lack of homogeneity of the papers, and that it is one of the vital features of MuMIL. To sum up, this book certainly represents a further step in the research on multilingualism in antiquity.
Authors and Titles
Luca Alfieri, Priscian, the divisio graeca and the History of Word-formation in Graeco-Roman Grammar
Carla Bruno, Dream Language and Dream Ideology: Echoes from the Memphis Serapeum
Albio Cesare Cassio, A Tale of Coins and Suffixes: Syracusan Greek ἑξᾶς, Latin sextāns, and Congeners
Emilio Crespo, Dialects in Contact in the Ancient Kingdom of Macedon
Panagiotis Filos, Onomastic Formulae from N. Epirus and S. Illyria: Lingustic and Sociocultural Connotations
Paloma Guijarro Ruano, Dialect Contact and Koineization: The Case of the Greek Colonies of Aegean Thrace
Mark Janse and Johan Vandewalle, The Cappadocian Phrasal Compound παιρ-παίνω [per-péno] “Take Away” as an Example of Turkish Pattern Replication
Sara Kaczko, Ποσειδῶν, Ποσδαν, Paestum, and a Greek God in Lucanian Attire
Felicia Logozzo and Liana Tronci, Motion and Posture Verbs in Multiverb Constructions: Evidence from the New Testament
Mario Lombardo and Giovanni Boffa, Contact and Interaction between Greeks and Messapians
Marco Mancini, The Etymology and Semantics of Oscan pukam
Simona Marchesini, The Messapic Inscription from Grotta Poesia MLM3 Ro: Analysis with Frame Semantics
Michael Weiss, Latin uncia à la Heron