01. Harrison, Herodotus' Conception Foreign Languages 1-45

Ars Gramm. 
(ch. )
 
p.  
(Hilgard). Aeschylus’ picture of man’s acquisition of letters depends on the agency of 
Prometheus, A. 
PV. 
-; it is the combination of letters (
γραµµάτων τε συνθέσεις
, 
) 
that makes letters useful for memory and the muses (the priority of literature is striking), 
as it is the combination of letters in a name that captures the essence of a thing, Pl. 
Crat. 
d-e. For Greek ideas of the origins of writing, see H. Grassl, ‘Herodot und die 
griechischen Schrift’, 
Hermes 
 () -, S. West, op. cit. (n. ) , but especially 
L. H. Jeffery, 
‘Archaia Grammata
:
 
some ancient Greek views’, in W. C. Brice (ed.) 
Europa. 
Festschrift Ernst Grumach 
(Berlin, ), -; see now also Deborah Steiner, 
The Tyrant’s 
Writ 
(Princeton, ). For the manner in which the alphabet was really introduced into 
Greece, see now the survey of J. M. Hall, op. cit. (n. ) -. The idea that the invention 
of the Greek alphabet was the work of a single man is alive and well in the theory of the 
‘single adapter’ of Phoenician script: see Lejeune, op. cit. (n. ) , and now B. B. Pow-
ell, 
Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet 
(Cambridge, ) -, and in his ‘Homer 
and writing’, in I. Morris and B. Powell (eds.) 
A New Companion to Homer 
(Leiden, ) -
; Powell even speculates as to whether ‘Palamedes were the actual name of the 
adapter’ (p.). 

---

Herodotus’ Conception of Foreign Languages
 
based, of course, on his observation of the differences between the letter-
forms of his day and of his 
Καδµήια γράµµατα
from Thebes. (It is perhaps 
the relatively familiar form of these inscriptions that made it necessary for 
him to reconstruct the development of the Greek alphabet in two stages.) 
The shapes of the letters of the alphabet, however, appear in Herodotus’ ac-
count almost to mould themselves to the sounds of the Greek language. 
Why should a change of language necessitate a change in letter-forms? 
Clearly this was not a question which Herodotus thought to ask himself. 
Does he, however, assume that there is an ideal fashion in which a letter 
represents a sound?

We might also expect signs of non-Greek influence on the Greek lan-
guage in Herodotus’ discussion of the Pelasgian origins of the Greeks (.-
). Herodotus’ argument here requires a fairly lengthy précis.
His discussion comes in the context of his first introduction of the 
Spartans and the Athenians (..), one of the Doric 
genos
, one of the Ionic. 
These two peoples were ‘in ancient times one Pelasgian, the other a Hellenic 
people’, one a people which had never left its home, the other one which 
had wandered widely. (Herodotus then recounts the wanderings of the Hel-
lenes in the reign of Deucalion until the point at which they enter the Pelo-
ponnese and are called Dorian, ...) What language the Pelasgians spoke, 
Herodotus cannot say for certain, but if it is possible to say (
εἰ τούτοισι 
τεκµαιρόµενον δεῖ λέγειν
, ..), the evidence of the surviving Pelasgians, 
those who dwelt at Creston,

or those who had founded Placia and Scylace 
on the Hellespont, suggests that the original Pelasgians spoke a barbarian 
language. That the language these peoples speak is Pelasgian (or at least a 
reliable index of the barbarian nature of Pelasgian) is suggested also by the 

We may ask whether a similar idea lies behind the analogy between painting and 
naming by a combination of letters at Pl. 
Crat. 
 d-e. Of course, a change to Phoeni-
cian script did take place, the addition of vowels, leading Powell to approve of Herodo-
tus’ version of the introduction of the alphabet, Morris and Powell op. cit. (n. ) ; it is 
questionable, however, in the light of his 
Καδµήια γράµµατα
 
whether Herodotus had any 
such accurate knowledge of the nature of the differences between Phoenician and Greek 
script. On the question of the significance of the (actual) changes from Phoenician to 
Greek script, see now the arguments of R. Woodard,