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