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