I was on the Sacred Way in Ephesus, one of the great cities of the ancient world, on Turkey\u2019s western coast. One marble column had the jolly line \u201c\u1f08\u03b3\u03b1\u03b8\u1f74 \u03c4\u03cd\u03c7\u03b7\u201d \u2013 \u201cGood luck\u201d. Suddenly, all those years spent learning Greek vocabulary at Westminster School clicked into super-sharp focus.<\/p>\n
Those two words are simple enough \u2013 but what a lot of useful baggage they carried. I remembered my old Greek teacher telling me that agathos (\u201cgood\u201d) is behind the name Agatha \u2013 literally \u201cgood girl\u201d. I remember, too, him teaching that agathos meant \u201cbrave\u201d.<\/p>\n
The equation between bravery and goodness in ancient Greece wasn\u2019t accidental. And I remember, also, learning about the power of tuche in ancient Greece, where luck was seen as an elemental, near-divine force.<\/p>\n
In that snap second, I realised how crammed with information those Greek lessons had been; how ideas that seemed unrelated, and irrelevant to my Eighties teenage life, were bound together in an intricate web that spread across the millennia and bound the present to the distant past.<\/p>\n
Again and again, as I travelled in Odysseus\u2019s wake around Homer\u2019s Greece<\/a> over the past three years researching my new book<\/a>, I thanked the gods for a rigorous education in the fundamental language of western European civilisation.<\/p>\n In Alan Bennett\u2019s The History Boys<\/a>, Hector, the inspirational gay teacher with the Trojan hero\u2019s name, talks about the power of great books: when a writer stretches his hand out from the pages and you reach out to take it in recognition.<\/p>\n Homer\u2019s is the oldest, grizzliest hand of all. Time after time, he stretches it out and you think, \u201cYes, that\u2019s what the sea looks like; that\u2019s how a deep sleep feels; that\u2019s the horror of loneliness.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n I never knew I\u2019d stumble upon these magical connections when I was slogging through the present passive of luo at school. I wasn\u2019t wrong to find Greek difficult as a child; there\u2019s a reason that people say, \u201cIt\u2019s all Greek to me.\u201d The language just is tricky, principally because it\u2019s in a different script from English, unlike Latin. Greek also has more inflections, or changing word endings, than Latin. <\/p>\n The average Latin verb has more than 200 endings; English verbs rarely have more than five. Greek ones can have well over a thousand.<\/p>\n Greek has lots of forms not used in English, among them the optative: a type of verb used to express wish or desire. It also has the dual: a word used only of two people or objects. Useless in modern English \u2013 although the writer Stanley Johnson, father of Boris, told me he longed for a dual to argue against his wife and one of his daughters when they ganged up on him.<\/p>\n Greek has the same Indo-European origin as Latin \u2013 and, indeed, Sanskrit, Teutonic and Celtic. But, even though it came before Latin, it is more flexible in expression and meaning. It has more participles \u2013 10 to Latin\u2019s three \u2013 allowing for more subordinate clauses. And it has a whole pack of conjunctions that flip sentences on their head and alter their meaning.<\/p>\n Ancient Greek also had different pitches \u2013 marked from the third century BC with circumflex, grave and acute accents \u2013 making the language extremely musical. Sappho\u2019s poetry had the devilish Mixolydian mode, with note pitches at quarter-tone intervals \u2013 as early as the seventh century BC.<\/p>\n All this was a little impenetrable to me at Westminster; even more so at my north London prep school, North Bridge House, where I started learning Greek at 11. But oh, how much joy Greek has generated in me in later life. It was hard-won joy, admittedly. There were years \u2013 decades \u2013 in the dogged accumulation of the seeds of knowledge, before the appreciation of the fully grown plants could develop.<\/p>\n Now I\u2019m so grateful I wasn\u2019t fed a dumbed-down, supposedly accessible version of classics.<\/i> Watered-down Greek is the opposite of accessible \u2013 it provides access to nothing. Without those long, slow hours, forcing down the vocab and the verb endings, I would never have punctured that hard skin wrapped around the core of Greek, and discovered the beauty within.<\/p>\n How tragic it is that earlier this year Camden School for Girls, the last British comprehensive offering Greek A-level, announced it could no longer afford to do so.<\/p>\n It was only through understanding Greek, and Latin that I also understood the relation between Greece and Rome. Back at Ephesus, Latin inscriptions were rarer than Greek ones. Even though Ephesus became a Roman city in 129BC, under the Romans the Ephesians spoke a mixture of Latin, Phrygian, Lydian, Old Anatolian and Greek.<\/p>\n Greek dominates the inscriptions on Ephesus\u2019s houses, statues and temples. Latin was largely confined to official imperial buildings, such as the grand gate of Mazeus and Mithridates, built by two freed slaves in AD 40 in honour of the emperor Augustus.<\/p>\n The inscription on the gate reads, \u201cMazeus and Mithridates dedicate this to the son of the divine Julius Caesar, to the greatest priest, Augustus, who was consul 12 times, and tribune 20 times; and to Livia, wife of Augustus; and to Marcus Agrippa, consul three times, and tribune six times; and to Julia, daughter of Caesar Augustus.\u201d<\/p>\n I got the picture: formal, highfalutin inscriptions were written in Latin; easy-going, good-luck messages were in Greek. <\/p>\n If you know Greek, you don\u2019t just know the fundamental western European language, you also know the language in which so many firsts were written \u2013 the first tragedy; the first comedy; even, as Milan Kundera said, the first novel, the Odyssey<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n Greek is often the first \u2013 or at least the earliest surviving \u2013 language in which so many emotions and thoughts are framed<\/i>. Because Greek got there first, you get ultra-pure, inherently original descriptions, free of clich\u00e9 or imitation.<\/p>\n Soon after I finished my odyssey, I read an interview with Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the best classicist in the Vatican. \u201cYou don\u2019t study Latin or Greek to speak them,\u201d he said. \u201cYou do so to come in direct contact with the civilisation of two peoples who were the bedrock of modern society; that is, you study them to be yourself and to know yourself<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n I used to scoff at the overblown claims for a dead language. Now I appreciate the resounding truth: the Greeks created the modern European world \u2013 and mind.<\/i><\/p>\n ________ I was on the Sacred Way in Ephesus, one of the great cities of the ancient world, on Turkey\u2019s western coast. One marble column had the jolly line \u201c\u1f08\u03b3\u03b1\u03b8\u1f74 \u03c4\u03cd\u03c7\u03b7\u201d \u2013 \u201cGood luck\u201d. Suddenly, all those years spent learning Greek vocabulary at Westminster School clicked into super-sharp focus. Those two words are simple enough \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,13,317],"tags":[319,5649,5681,1406,5682,72,5680,150],"class_list":["post-2336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greek-history","category-greek-language","tag-ancient-greek","tag-classics","tag-ephesus","tag-greeks","tag-harry-mount","tag-homer","tag-latin","tag-rome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nExcerpts from an article at the Telegraph<\/a>, with emphasis in italics added by Ellopos Blog<\/a>. You may like also to check
\nHarry Mount\u2019s Odyssey : Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"