[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
What do we teach when we teach Ancient Greek? To keep the material manageable for a beginner, we have to make uncomfortable choices that oversimplify the variation found in Greek as it was spoken and written in antiquity. Perhaps one makes the decision, reasonable enough, to teach the language of Classical Attic prose as a relatively standard form of Greek. After all, Attic is a good starting point for branching out to the Ionic of Herodotus, the Koine of the New Testament, and even the morphological complexity of the Homeric Kunstsprache. But what counts as Attic? Do we exclude Xenophon because of his penchant for dialectal forms like Doric κατακαίνω in place of Attic ἀποκτείνω? And what, for that matter, counts as a standard? In modern sociolinguistics, standard languages are generally seen as characterized inter alia by a high level of codified regularization, but it is far from clear that this is the best framework for thinking about languages in an age before the printing press. The former question, at least, is one that exercised the ancients as well, and this collection of eleven chapters arising out of the Anchoring Innovation mega-project engages with them both, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, as is inevitable with edited volumes.[1]
On the whole, the book is the strongest when the contributors are at their most concrete. To start with the two chapters that deal with papyri, Winnie Smith’s chapter on tremas and adscripts in roughly 200 letters offers specific figures on the distribution of the iota adscript: more common for second-declension dative singular -ωι than for first-declension -ηι, with unetymological adscripts especially well represented among verbs, presumably because writers found it easier to remember that τῶι, used so regularly of the recipient in the address line, was one place where the adscript was needed. Klaas Bentein’s contribution works with a corpus of about a hundred petitions from the third to fourth centuries ad. In attempting to disentangle the vexed question of defining Koine Greek relative to the concept of a standard language, Bentein laudably tries to introduce a more meticulous theoretical underpinning to the typology of norms, but I am not convinced that it pays off especially well. The first major section of his piece concludes with a hierarchy of twelve types of norms (looking suspiciously like a generativist right-branching tree diagram), which then play little role in what follows, where the organizational principle is instead a separate taxonomy of five different approaches to understanding linguistic norms, not all of which are obviously parallel to one other. The first, for instance, is variationism (the approach, associated with Labov, of determining how variations in language correlate to sociolinguistic factors like age and gender), whereas the remaining four are less theoretical approaches than types of material one can work with (e.g. statements of ancient grammarians or scribal errors). That said, the discussion of specific linguistic features contains several points of interest: for instance, in the archive of Aurelius Isidorus, petitions addressed to higher officials show fewer places where editors have had to regularize the language (61).
Xenophon is the subject of two studies in the volume. In an expansion of material from the introduction to their 2019 Cambridge commentary on Anabasis 3, Luuk Huitink and Tim Rood’s chapter on his lexicon, especially military vocabulary, achieves two aims within remarkably short compass: not only do they set out the eminently sensible grounds for assuming that the dialect mixture in Xenophon is deliberate, rather than haphazard, but they also work through the technical language of An. 3.4.36–38 to suggest that the historian is here using words that come from a professional military register, including the first recorded use of φάλαγξ to refer to the hoplite formation (166). Gabriella Rubulotta also considers the language of Xenophon, in her case its ambiguous status in the Second Sophistic: the grammarian Phrynichus could simultaneously reject some of his vocabulary as insufficiently pure, while also explicitly including him in his Attic canon. In particular, she draws attention to several places in which Aelius Aristides, one of the strictest Atticizers, found passages of Xenophon worth imitating, such as the praise of Attica in Panathenaicus drawing on the Poroi, or the simple style (apheleia) of To Rome 71 recalling Cyropaedia 8. While the parallels are certainly noteworthy, I would have liked more discussion of the linguistic details: what significance, for instance, should we attach to the fact that, where Xenophon in Cyr. 8.2.6 uses the -μι verb inflection στρώννυσι, Aristides opts for the -ω form στρωννύουσι (182–3)?
A couple of the contributions look particularly at Jewish and Christian Greek. Enrico Cerroni, in examining the language of 2 Maccabees, usefully triangulates between the Septuagint and Polybius: because of the frequency of Septuagintal hapax legomena, the work comes across as closer to the mainstream of Hellenistic Greek than do other books of the Greek Bible. He spends most of his time on the author’s lexical choices, arguing that they represent an eclectic mix: use of γοῦν is reminiscent of Polybius and Diodorus, whereas διό and διόπερ are more characteristic of the Kanzleisprache; some of the vocabulary is abstract, recalling philosophy or (in the case of διάληψις ‘opinion’) Polybius, but other words, like κατάκοπος ‘very weary’, are more suggestive of a colloquial register. Turning to the intersection of morphology and bilingualism, Robert Crellin considers the inflection—or not—of personal names in the New Testament. After setting aside Semitic names that end in vowels or guttural consonants (e.g. Isaiah), which are regularly given Greek inflections, Crellin focuses on those that end in non-guttural consonants, where a distinctive pattern emerges. Those referring to historical figures remain uninflected in the New Testament, as is standard in the Septuagint, whereas names of contemporary figures are divided roughly evenly: ten are inflected, eight are not, leading to a convenient minimal pair, with Jacob the patriarch left uninflected, but James the disciple given an -ος ending (269). Given that, when there is variation, non-inflection is preferred in Jewish settings, inflection in Greco-Roman ones, and that Josephus goes much farther in inflecting names from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament’s adherence to Septuagintal practice hints that its authors primarily had a Jewish audience in mind.
Another genre well represented in the collection is comedy. Robert Machado’s investigation of the dual in Aristophanes reveals some unexpected findings. While the use of the dual number is clearly optional in his plays, what is less obvious is that the pattern of usage, correlated to animacy, is typologically consistent with number systems in modern languages, and therefore much likelier to be a genuine portrayal of spoken language than an artificial literary construct. That is, whereas Aristophanes employs the dual 58.3% of the times that he could have used it, the usage rate is 63.1% for animate referents, but only 49.5% for inanimate ones (248). Furthermore, that base rate for inanimates is skewed higher by the presence of four anomalous body-part nouns, ὀφθαλμός, πούς, σκέλος, and χείρ, which all pattern far more like animate nouns than like inanimates. One might suppose that these nouns retain the dual because they form natural pairs, but Machado notes that other natural pairs (e.g. οὖς, ὦμος, terms for shoes) are found either exclusively in the plural or only rarely in the dual, leading to the conclusion that Greek speakers treated the four dual-preferring body parts as quasi-animates because of their role in human agency.
While a sociolinguistic approach is certainly not absent from Machado’s chapter (the dense cluster of duals in the language of Dercetes of Phyle in Acharnians, a play otherwise low in dual usage, probably marks him off as a bumpkin), it comes more to the fore in the other two chapters that focus on comedy. Like Rubulotta’s piece on Xenophon, so too Chiara Monaco’s considers the ambiguous status of a writer’s Greek, in this case Menander’s, in the world of the Second Sophistic. The playwright was prominent in the educational system, but his language stood right on the cusp of the transition from Attic to Koine, retaining duals and optatives, but also generalizing -ω inflection to a greater number of former -μι verbs and deploying more verbal prefixes than earlier Greek. (Monaco could have exercised a little more care in the examples that illustrate the latter change: in offering “compounded forms which have the same meaning as the verb in its simple form” (120), she cites ἀναθεάομαι, which she herself glosses ‘to contemplate again’, with the adverb showing that ἀνα- retains its force, and ἐξεργάζομαι ‘to achieve’, already found in earlier Attic prose.) The chapter’s center of gravity lies in working out what the grammarians mean when they say that the Ἀλεξανδρεῖς use a word: mostly, it refers to generic speakers of Koine, and whether it is a term of approval or scorn depends on the strictness of the commentator’s Atticizing principles.
Anna A. Novokhatko’s contribution starts from Eupolis’ use of the verb ἀττικίζειν and gathers evidence for sociolinguistic awareness of dialect differences already in the period of Old Comedy. The compilation of relevant passages is welcome, but the argumentation sometimes strays from the actual Greek: for instance, she concludes her section 3 (“Shaping Attic Identity: Wasps and Grasshoppers”) by asserting that “The implications of the verb ἀττικίζειν are as far-reaching as they seem. To be Attic, to speak Attic, meant much more to the Athenian audience than just the prosodic norms of a standard dialect but also more than certain peculiarities of behaviour” (226). This conclusion—or, at any rate, the framing of it in the first sentence—does not seem very well-supported by the evidence, considering that neither of the two long passages of Aristophanes discussed in the section actually uses the verb ἀττικίζειν.
Until now, I have held back from mentioning the internal structure of the book (rearranging discussion according to the texts covered by each chapter), largely because the three parts into which it is divided, “Setting the Standards,” “Fashioning Language through Literature and Vice Versa,” and “Socio-Political Aspects of Language,” do not seem to yield a very effective organizational scheme. After all, each of these categories easily slides into the others: setting linguistic standards inevitably involves the socio-political aspects of language, and discussion of literary texts is central to contributions in all three parts of the collection. It thus comes across as arbitrary that the Atticists’ uncertainty about the status of Menander as Attic is handled in the first part, but the same question, asked of Xenophon, is treated in the second. This fuzziness of organization at the larger scale is also emblematic of the shortcomings of the final two chapters.
Take Eleni Bozia’s chapter, the penultimate in the volume, on the politics of Atticism. Section four of the chapter is headed “Ἑλληνίζω and ἀττικίζω,” yet the latter term does not make an appearance in the section; section seven, “Mimēsis and Kainotēs as a Means of Re-standardizing Traditional Anchors,” likewise contains no mention of the words καινός or καινότης. As a result of the haphazard organization, it is hard to determine what the argument is, beyond the general idea that “Atticism has moved beyond the standards of dialectical prominence and transformed into an expressive phenomenon of identity and cultural construction” (308), which, to use the volume’s own running metaphor, is a statement that contains noticeably more anchoring than innovation.
The final contribution in the volume, Cressida Ryan’s, also does not go far enough in establishing a clear argument. The question it raises is a good one: how does treating New Testament Greek as a standard language affect our pedagogy of it? But she takes an unusually strong stance in denying the existence of any such variety of Greek: “New Testament Greek is a misnomer. The New Testament is not written in a specific form of Greek and is not made up of linguistically comparable and coherent texts” (314). True, New Testament Greek is not a homogeneous monolith, but it is not self-evident that it is any less standard than, say, Classical Attic. Ryan finds fault, for instance, with the fact that the optative is taught late, if at all, since it gives the impression that it is less common than it is. But it is of course the unavoidable quandary of beginning language instruction that something always has to be left for the final weeks of the term, and, since the optative is indeed less common in New Testament Greek than Classical Attic, it hardly seems misleading to give it less weight accordingly. She concludes that it is problematic to teach a language defined solely by corpus, but since she does not devote any real space to proposing an alternative, it is hard to know what changes we should make in the classroom.
Still, despite these criticisms, all the contributors of the volume deserve credit for tackling important issues. How different varieties of Greek were labeled in antiquity clearly mattered to the ancients, and the sociolinguistic implications of such categorizations as “Classical Attic” or “Koine” remain relevant today.
Authors and Titles
“Introduction.” Chiara Monaco, Robert Machado, and Eleni Bozia
Part 1: Setting the Standards
“Koines, Standards, and What’s behind Them: Capturing Linguistic Norms in Greek Official Writing.” Klaas Bentein
“Orthographic Variation beyond Spelling Mistakes: Tremas and Adscripts in 194 Greek Papyrus Letters.” Winnie Smith
“Menander and the Alexandrian Dialect: the Atticists’ Perspective on Menander’s Language.” Chiara Monaco
Part 2: Fashioning Language through Literature and Vice Versa
“Xenophon, Professional Military Vocabulary, and the Formation of the Literary Koine.” Luuk Huitink and Tim Rood
“Forerunner of the Koine or Attic Bee? The Reception of Xenophon in the Imperial Age.” Gabriella Rubulotta
“Searching for Linguistic Standards in 2 Maccabees.” Enrico Cerroni
Part 3: Socio-Political Aspects of Language
“Eupolis fr. 99, 25 PCG: Imposing Standards on Stage?” Anna A. Novokhatko
“The Dual in Aristophanes and Late Fifth-, Early Fourth-Century Attic.” Robert Machado
“Negotiating Jewish Identity through the (Non-)inflection of Personal Names: Evidence from the Greek of the New Testament.” Robert Crellin
“Politics of Atticism: Prefiguring New Imperial Citizenship.” Eleni Bozia
“Teaching New Testament Greek: What, and How?” Cressida Ryan
Notes
[1] For a general introduction to the sociolinguistics of the classical languages, see James Clackson, Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds (CUP 2015); for Atticism in particular, see Tim Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic (OUP 2005), 41-56, and Lawrence Kim “The literary heritage as language: Atticism and the Second Sophistic,” in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, ed. E. J. Bakker (Wiley-Blackwell 2010), 468-482, and also now Olga Tribulato, Federico Favi, Lucia Prauscello, eds. Ancient Greek Purism: 1: The Roots of Atticism (De Gruyter 2024).