Jere's Ars Magica Saga: Language

Greek Language of Byzantium

The Byzantine Empire was always a polyethnic and multilingual society, and especially before the Arab conquests of the mid-seventh century. Greek, however, was always the language of the dominant culture. A person knowing only Syriac or Armenian might play a limited and local role, but Greek language and culture alone gave access to leading positions in state and church. Upward social mobility often involved hellenization, as with the sixth-century Syrian Romanos, whose religious poetry is in Greek; with the many Armenians who adopted the Greek language and Orthodox Christianity; also with the Slavs Niketas and Ioannikios, who in the eighth century became, respectively, patriarch and saint.

Throughout the Byzantine period, the Greek language was marked by an internal bilingualism or diglossia inherited from the Greek culture of the Roman empire. On the one hand there was the Greek used by all classes in daily life; on the other, an archaizing Greek based on imitation of classical models and used in writing or formal speech. The spoken language was subject to gradual change; in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages it underwent radical structural changes that foreshadowed modern Greek. The literary language was in theory changeless. They learned the spoken language in childhood. They acquired the literary language through long study of grammar and rhetoric. The spoken language, in somewhat stylized form, had been the normal vehicle of prose literature in the Hellenistic age but thereafter was confined to technical writing and the internal communication of minority groups such as the early Christians. From the first century of the Christian era the literary language became a mark not only of intellectual attainment but also of social status.

As Christianity spread among the urban upper classes, it abandoned the language of the New Testament in favor of the prestigious and classicizing learned tongue. The great church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries, men of education and social distinction, wrote in literary Greek. Only the best would do for the service of the Lord. Therefore, in Byzantine eyes literary Greek enjoyed a double prestige, as the vehicle both of classical wisdom and of Christian doctrine.

Active command of literary Greek was always restricted to a small intellectual elite, concentrated largely in Constantinople. Knowledge of it was never a clerical monopoly though, as was the knowledge of Latin in many parts of western Europe. Passive understanding of literary Greek was more widespread; it was not a foreign language, and was familiar to all from its use in the liturgy.

Up to the ninth century they wrote some literature in a language that owed little to classical models and showed some of the morphological, syntactical and lexical innovations of the spoken tongue. It consisted mainly of lives of holy men and naive world chronicles, and was often of provincial origin. They composed more serious literature in classicizing Greek. Technical writing often followed a middle course, neither archaizing nor popular. As the Byzantine Empire turned from defense to expansion at the end of the ninth century, and once again became the dominant power in Europe and much of the Near East, a new consciousness of superiority found its expression in more profound imitation of its language and style. They rewrote the old popular saints' lives for liturgical use in inflated classicizing Greek. World chronicles, state papers and private letters were replete with archaic words culled from dictionaries and obsolete grammatical forms like the dual and the optative.

Any departure from rigorous classicism called for an excuse: that the subject matter was technical, that the text was of a private nature, or that the writer had not studied grammar. Some writers, such as Michael Psellos and Niketas Choniates, handling the literary language with flexibility and its opportunities for literary allusion. For others, like Photios or Anna Komnena, anxiety over the form hindered free self-expression. Perceptive men of letters in the twelfth century (among them Theodore Prodromos and Eustathios) were sometimes interested in everyday language, drew upon it to explain features of classical Greek, and even imitated it in satirical genre pieces.

The destruction of the Byzantine Empire by the crusaders in 1204 interrupted the educational tradition that was the support of te classizing literary language. The Tradition was revived, first by the government in exile in Nicaea and then by the restored Byzantine Empire after 1261, as part of its assertion of legitimacy and the new Byzantine self-identification. The hated Westerners might have military power, but they were considered barbarians, since they lacked direct access to classical learning and Christian revelation that only Greek culture could give. Classicism became part of patriotism.

The Non-Greek Languages in the Byzantine Empire

Languages other than Greek were important in the polyethnic late Roman Empire. Latin was not only spoken throughout the western Mediterranean but remained the language of bureaucracy in Constantinople until the sixth century and of the army even later. Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian had their areas of indigenous population, and bilingualism remained a common phenomenon. In the seventh century when the Syriac and Coptic speaking provinces were lost to the Arabs, and most Latin-speaking regions in the West passed from Byzantine control, they abandoned the use of Latin in administration. At the same time Slavic settlers occupied most of the northern Balkans and much of mainland Greece. The Slavs in Greece were largely hellenized by the tenth century, but those further north retained their linguistic separateness even after these regions were reincorporated in the empire. Armenian immigration into Anatolia and Constantinople became massive after the Arab conquest of Armenia in the mid-seventh century and continued for centuries. Yet the idea of the superiority of the Greek language remained dominant, and non-Greek languages were often treated as barbaric. Unlike western Europe, however, Byzantium never embraced the concept of an exclusive language.

Literature in non-Greek was written in Byzantine territory, and the church permitted the use of Slavonic, Georgian, Syriac and other tongues in the liturgy. Certain ethnic and religious groups (Jews, Italians, and others) lived dispersed among the Greek populace but retained their languages within their communities. Knowledge of foreign languages by educated Greek speakers was more common in frontier zones, such as Cherson, Thessalonike, and others, than in Constantinople. Some revival of the knowledge of foreign languages is evident from the eleventh century. Latin was studied in law schools and by diplomats. Several scholars studied and translated Arabic, Syriac and Persian. Professional interpreters participated in embassies and in the receptions of foreign potentates at the court of Constantinople.

The Order, Latin and this Tribunal

The Order recognizes Latin as its primary language. The magi of this Tribunal accept this, if sometimes only begrudgingly. Thus, they teach Latin to all apprentices as a standard part of their apprenticeship. A thorough knowledge of Latin is required to understand tomes written in other Tribunals and to partake in the wider political life of the Order. However, in this Tribunal Greek is the primary language and all magi trained here will be fluent in the spoken and written form.

Return to the Theben Tribunal Sourcebook

Last modified: Thurs Dec 10, 1998