Greek to Me

by Mary Norris

  And so I fell for all things Greek. What is not to love about Greece, after all? There is the sea, the islands, the combination of ancient ruins and cell-phone towers, the guards at the temples who measure their wealth in olive trees, the Old Town of Rhodes, with its streets named for gods and philosophers, navigable by Google Maps. I love the sharp-witted people, the toothless farmers selling long-stemmed artichokes, the black-clad crones linking arms to muscle their way onto ferries ahead of the tourists, the stark contrast between the blues of sea and sky and the whitewashed homes and church domes of the Cyclades, the beads and icons and charms against the evil eye hanging from the bus drivers’ rearview mirrors.

  I love the landscape of Greece, with its peaks and chasms, its olive groves and orange trees, and the fact that this land has been cultivated since antiquity. I love the animals—the goats and sheep and donkeys, and the crafty cats begging at tavernas, and the stray dogs that sleep in the streets of Athens. The dogs must know far more about the city than any living human, having stored that know-how in their genes and passed it on since the time of Pericles. I love the way the Greeks have squeezed so much out of everything they have: oil from the olive, wine from the grape, ouzo from whatever ouzo is made from—I don’t know and I don’t care; I’ll drink it—feta cheese from sheep’s milk and salt, mosaics from pebbles, temples from stone. It is not a rich land, but they have made it rich in ways that transcend a country’s gross national product.

  I love the mythology, the wealth of stories laid like a series of transparencies over the Old World. The family of gods and goddesses of Olympus—Zeus and Hera and Hermes, Apollo and Artemis and Athena, Poseidon, Ares and Aphrodite and Hephaestus, Hades, Dionysus, Demeter and Persephone—who offer something for everyone. And mythology is not just gods. There are monsters, like the Cyclops, and beings of great majesty, like Pegasus, the winged horse of Bellerophon. There are heroes and victims, whose stories still give us plenty to think about: Odysseus and Achilles, Oedipus and Antigone, Agamemnon and Electra. As background there are the grace notes of nature: a flight of birds seen as an omen of success or failure, a group of rocks or a waterfall commemorating a family tragedy. Above it all, literally, are the stars, blazing with stories, more stories than we can ever tell: Orion the Hunter; the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas; Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, twin brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen; Cassiopeia on her stiff throne opposite Cepheus, her husband, embodying a minimalist castle; Draco the Dragon.

  And most of all I love the language, the ancient slippery tongue—glossa!—from the articles to the epics. Greek isn’t easy, though the modern language is at least phonetic: there are no silent “e”s. Learn a few rules and you can pronounce anything (but beware the shifting stress, which can change an innocent adverb into a shocking vulgarity). I still don’t know Latin, and in Rome, confronted with inscriptions, I feel illiterate, but in Piraeus I can make out the destinations of the ferries, flashing in light-emitting diodes above the hatch: ΠΑΤΜΟΣ (Patmos), ΚΡΗΤΗ (Crete), ΣΑΝΤΟΡΙΝΗ (Santorini) . . .

  Greek has been my salvation. Whenever I have been away from Greek for a while and come back to it, it revives something in me, it gives me an erotic thrill, as if every verb and noun had some visceral connection to what it stands for. I like to think that the first letters were incised into clay and that writing therefore came from the earth. And because the earliest writing to survive was epic poetry, which invokes the gods, writing connects us earthlings to eternity.

  A PHILHELLENE WRITING about Greek cannot please everyone. A living Greek or a student of modern Greek may be put off by Greeklish—the transliteration of Greek letters into their English equivalents—as well as by classical Greek, which is laden with diacritical marks. Classicists, on the other hand, look askance at demotic Greek and wonder where the accents went. In Victorian Britain, when women took up Greek, if they left off an accent their efforts were derided as “ladies’ Greek.” Shortly after I started studying Greek, in the early eighties, linguists removed the Hellenistic accents from the modern language, retaining only an acute accent to mark a stressed syllable. (They also kept the indispensable diaeresis.)

  Every writer on Greek chooses her own way. I admire the restraint of writers who are much better versed in Greek than I am and don’t flaunt it. Is there a word of Greek in Edith Hamilton? Or has it all been transliterated? The translator Edmund Keeley, in his book Inventing Paradise, about the great modern Greek poets, never gives the reader pause with a foreign-looking word, except in the dedication—and that’s not for us anyway. Even a recognizable food word like tzatziki might be referred to as yogurt-garlic-cucumber sauce (though a Greek might point out that tzatziki comes from the Turkish).

  But sometimes I can’t help myself. How can a book about Greek not throw in some actual Greek, like delicious morsels to tempt you to try something ambrosial? You already know more Greek than you think you do. Much of it has passed through the crucible of Latin, but bits of Greek are recognizable in thousands of English words.

  And yet Greek is held to be impenetrable, and Greece is treated like the butt of the European Union, dominated by Germany, its citizens the poor cousins of Italy, its economy in perennial crisis. You see more and more English in the neon signs of Athens, and that worries me. While classical Greek flourishes—there is truly a renaissance in translations of Homer—modern Greek may be a dying language. We use names from mythology in every walk of life: the Apollo space mission, the luxurious Hermès scarf, thick Olympus yogurt. I spotted Athena Parking in Los Angeles, City of Angels, which gets its name, through Spanish, from the Greek: άγγελος (ángelos), angel, messenger. There is more connecting us to Greek than there is estranging us from it. I wish people weren’t intimidated by the Greek alphabet—Greece gave us the alphabet (αλφάβητο). Every traveler with a shard of imagination ought to be able to discern from a distance the word ΤΑΒΕΡΝΑ and head there confident that in the TAVERNA there will be a narrow straight-backed wicker chair (a little uncomfortable for a big American ass, but you can’t have everything) and a glass of ouzo, with ice and water, and something to eat—maybe a plate of tiny fried fish, such as one might feed a seal, or feta cheese cut into cubes the size of dice. And, of course, a cat begging under the table.

  As when Ed Stringham, acting as my travel agent, traced a route in the Aegean, conjuring Orthodox monks and Greek sailors and feasts of roast lamb, and opened for me a new world, so I hope to pass the torch by expressing what Greek and Greece have meant to me, both as a perennial student and as a voracious traveler. There is a spell I sometimes fall under in which the whole world looks Greek to me. I hope this book will cast that spell on you. Πάμε, as the Greeks say. Let’s go!

  CHAPTER 1

  ALPHA TO OMEGA

  A FEW YEARS AGO, in the Frankfurt airport on the way home from a memorable stay in Greece, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, which includes her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” I had just enough cash in euros for a slim paperback and a giant beer. If not, I would have gone for the beer. I was thirsty, and this was Germany, and I already had a copy of The Common Reader at home. But I was impressed that anything by Virginia Woolf was considered airport reading.

  I assumed that “On Not Knowing Greek” was about how Woolf’s father had forbidden her to study Greek the way my father had refused to let me study Latin. I pictured young Virginia Stephen sulking in a room of her own, an indecipherable alphabet streaming through her consciousness, while her father and her brother, downstairs in the library, feasted on Plato and Aristotle.

  Well, apparently I had read only the title of “On Not Knowing Greek.” Of course Virginia Woolf knew Greek. The essay is a paean to Greek. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an editor and critic, and Virginia started studying ancient Greek for fun, at home, when she was about fifteen. She took classes at King’s College (in the Ladies’ Department) while her brother Thoby was studying at Cambridge. Though she was not an academic, s
he had private tutorials for several years with Miss Janet Case, who, as a student at Cambridge, had played Athena in an 1885 production of the Eumenides of Aeschylus, a performance she was remembered for all her life. Together, Miss Case and Miss Stephen (as she was then) read Aeschylus. For Woolf, at the time she published her essay, in 1925, “not knowing Greek” meant that it was impossible truly to know what the playwright meant, because we don’t know what the ancient language sounded like. “We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English,” she writes. In the Agamemnon, the opening utterance of Cassandra—the seer, brought to Mycenae from Troy as war booty, whose fate it was never to be believed—is not just untranslatable but unintelligible: ότοτοτοȋ is not even a word, just inarticulate syllables that represent a barbarian princess’s howl of despair. “The naked cry,” Woolf calls it—perhaps onomatopoeia for a convulsive sob. Both the chorus and Clytemnestra compare Cas sandra’s lament to birdsong. The best an English translation can do is to transliterate the Greek letters—“Otototoi”—or go with something like “Ah me!” or “Alas!” Woolf writes that it is “useless . . . to read Greek in translations.” Virginia Woolf did not know Greek the way bees do not know pollen. Compared with her, I was a child with a set of wooden blocks that had the letters of the alphabet printed on them, along with apples and bananas. Ότοτοτοȋ!

  Fortunately, I like blocks, and I love the alphabet. I have a chunky wooden puzzle of the English alphabet, acquired while I was in graduate school, which I meant to give to some child but have kept for myself all these years. I have been known to polish the letters with linseed oil and a soft cloth. I also have the Greek letters in the form of an alphabet book for children, by Eleni Geroulanou, which I bought at the Benaki Museum in Athens, one of the best museums in Greece. It is like the Morgan Library in New York or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in that it houses the collection of an individual with a good eye and ample means—in this case, the Alexandrian Greek Antonis Benakis, who donated his holdings and his family’s house to the state in 1931. Instead of apples and bananas and cats, the book’s illustrations are of pieces from the collection of the Benaki: alpha is for αεροπλάνο (airplane), beta is for βιβλίο (book), gamma is for γοργόνα (gorgon). I meant to give that to a child, too, at some point, but it cleaves to me.

  Anyone who loves language loves the alphabet. Children have a natural affinity for it, and are helped along by such letter-delicacies as Alpha-Bits cereal and alphabet soup. Do you remember how the letters of the alphabet formed a frieze over the blackboard at school when you were a child? Or maybe they danced along the walls, just below the ceiling, each capital paired with its offspring. I used to think of them as mothers and babies. The Big B and the small b were content to go in the same direction, but the small d faced down the Big D. It was defiant—a word I knew from an early age, because my mother frequently said of me, “She’s a defiant one.”

  The word “letter,” as in a letter of the alphabet, is also the word for something built of letters, as in a letter home or a letter from a friend, and it is the root of the word literature, which is, ultimately, built of letters of the alphabet. To be lettered is to be literate, and to have letters after your name is to have received a higher education. Children learn to sing the alphabet forwards and backwards. The alphabet is the greatest invention of humankind, and even has a spark of the divine: it gave us the written word, which gave us the means to communicate with both the past and the future. Write it down, we say, when we want to remember something. Write it down and make it stick.

  There are other forms of written communication—the Egyptians had hieroglyphs, the Minoans had Linear A to keep track of their food stores, the Native Americans had pictographs, tweeters and texters have emojis and emoticons—but there has never been a system of writing as successful as the alphabet. The magic number, in English, is 26, which is not a small amount of letters to learn when you’re a child, but it’s not insurmountable, either (especially when it’s made into a song), and the combinations of letters that result in meaningful units are infinite. With the alphabet, we can say it long or we can say it short, as when a geneticist invents the term deoxyribonucleic acid and then shrinks it back down to a mere three letters that deliver the same effect: DNA.

  The alphabet has chemistry. It might be compared to the periodic table of elements, the way small things stand for large ones and can be used to represent every known material in creation and to synthesize new ones as well. We know where the periodic table came from—Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, published it in 1869—but where did the alphabet come from?

  The English alphabet is descended from the Greek alphabet, which was derived (as far as anyone can know these things) from the Phoenician alphabet, which had been in use since at least the eleventh century BC. The Phoenicians were famous traders and needed a system to keep track of the merchandise they ferried throughout the Mediterranean. According to Herodotus, the alphabet was imported to Greece by Cadmus, a prince of Phoenicia. Cadmus was the legendary founder of Thebes, a city that was built by warriors who sprang up after Cadmus, on orders from Athena, sowed the earth with the teeth of a dragon. The earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions date the alphabet to the eighth century BC. Aeschylus had a different story. He attributes the alphabet to Prometheus: writing, like fire, was a gift from the god. Letters were sacred: inscribed on a shard of pottery, even without being arranged into a name or a coherent thought, they could be offered as a gift at the temple of Zeus.

  The alphabet is not just the stuff of mythology; mythology may have been the reason for the alphabet. The Western world’s biggest, earliest deposit of mythology is in Homer. The Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, began as an oral tradition and continued as such even after they were written down, sometime around the eighth century BC, about the same time the Greek alphabet was developed. One scholar, Barry B. Powell, suggests the controversial idea that the alphabet may have been invented specifically to set down Homer. Powell asserts that “the Iliad was the first work of literature ever recorded in alphabetic writing.” It was a new technology, invented by someone who was inspired. Homer is “the earliest alphabetic document in the world,” Powell says. Whatever one thinks of Powell’s claim, classicists consider the Iliad and the Odyssey the Bible of the ancient Greek world. From Homer the Greeks got their notions of the gods and the stories that taught people how to deal with the moral dilemmas of war and peace, love and death. The creation of the Greek alphabet was a great awakening.

  The Phoenician alphabet that was adapted by the Greeks consisted of twenty-two letters, which were all consonants. Imagine drawing seven consonants in a game of Scrabble. You would have to channel your inner Phoenician or throw the tiles back and forfeit your turn. The innovation of the Greeks—what made the Greek alphabet such a flexible instrument of expression—was the addition of vowels. A lineup of only vowels in Scrabble would not be ideal, but it would have more potential than all consonants. Vowels are the life and breath of a true alphabet—one in which every sound in the language can be represented by a letter or a combination of letters.

  The Greeks initially added just four vowels, including the one at the beginning: alpha (A). Alpha came from aleph, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet. The sound of aleph was barely a sound at all—more like a grunt, the brief redirection of breath known to linguists as a glottal stop. It creates the hitch in uh-oh. The American Heritage Collegiate Dictionary prefaces the entry for the letter A with an illustration of the letter’s evolution from the Phoenician—its lineage. Alpha evolved from a pictorial symbol for ox into a representation of a discrete sound. It originally looked like our letter K: the prongs coming off the straight line resembled ox horns. When we say that the Greeks “adapted” the Phoenician alphabet, we mean they messed with it beyond recognition. They flipped the aleph from right to left (a mirror-image K), moved the vertical l
ine to the center, and rotated it, horns and all, ninety degrees to the left: voilà—a crude A. And all this without benefit of a smartphone camera.

  Pliny the Elder noted that Palamedes, a hero of the Trojan War, was sometimes credited with inventing letters to supplement the Phoenician alphabet so as to make it suitable for Greek. In addition to aleph, other Phoenician “gutturals” gave the Greeks names for some of their vowels. The Greek vowel called eta looks like our letter H and represents a long “e” sound (ee), as opposed to the short “e” sound of epsilon. Ayin, which was round like an eye, became omicron—literally, small O.

  Later, the Greeks added upsilon, which probably had the sound of “u” (oo) but has slid into an “e” (ee) sound. The very last letter, omega (Ω), literally big O, is one of a handful said to have been invented by Simonides of Ceos, a lyric poet. By the sixth century BC, omega was established, and in 403/2 BC, at the urging of one Eucleides, Athenians voted to replace the old Attic alphabet with the Ionic alphabet, making the omega official.

  New consonants were added toward the end of the alphabet, because from the beginning the Greek alphabet doubled as a numerical scheme: alpha = 1, beta = 2, gamma = 3, etc. Mess with that at your peril. Traditionally, the books of the Iliad and the Odyssey were ordered by letter rather than number. Each epic has the same number of books as there are letters in the Greek alphabet: 24. Thus the alphabet gave structure to the text, and that underlying structure feels like an homage to the alphabet.

  The letters of the alphabet don’t just float around at random but line up in a well-established order. The order makes the letters easier to learn. What is important, according to The Straight Dope, a newspaper column signed by the fictional Cecil Adams, “isn’t what order the alphabet is in, but that it’s in order at all.” Imagine if everyone in your first-grade class decided to learn the letters in a different order. It would be chaos.