Die Pelasger
(Vienna,
). Sayce, ad loc. (pp. - n. ), loses patience with Herodotus: ‘We must leave He-
rodotus to harmonize [his] inconsistent statements… His speculations on philology and
ethnology are never very profound.’
Herodotus’ Conception of Foreign Languages
bers: barbarians are, in general, archetypally numerous.
) On the question
of language, however, the passage begs a number of questions. First, He-
rodotus manages to maintain an ideal of Greek linguistic purity, but only
because of the convenient theory that while they spoke another language
they were not in fact Greek. How did the Athenians become Greek? What
does it mean to change to become Greek? Herodotus makes it sound almost
as though learning a language was a condition of joining the club.
Finally,
how did the Greek language come about? No answer is given. Greek was
always Greek and the Greeks always spoke Greek:
these are Herodotus’
priorities.
In other instances, however, Herodotus concedes a greater degree of
non-Greek influence on Greek. Herodotus’ account, for example, of the
adoption by the Pelasgians of the names of the gods (..) suggests a much
closer relationship between the Pelasgian and Greek languages. Before they
heard the names of the gods, the Pelasgians (assuming, interestingly, the ex-
istence of a number of gods
) called them simply
θεοί
,
on the grounds that
they had ‘established (
θέντες
) all affairs in their order’. This etymology, ad-
For example, the image of the Asian hordes of Xerxes presented in Aeschylus’
Per-
sians,
e.g. -, and in Herodotus, e.g. .., .-; cf. Pi.
Isthm.
.-, E.
Tro.
,
Hipp.
AWP
.
As Myres puts it, op. cit. (n. ) , ‘Herodotus rests content with a view of the
process of Hellenization which… assumes a kind of spontaneous generation.’ See, how-
ever, the reaction of Laird, op. cit. (n. ) -, citing the gradual Dorianisation of the
Cynourians (.), ‘due to being subject to the Argives and the passage of time’. Cf.
Thuc. .. on the linguistic ‘hellenisation’ (
ἡλληνίσθησαν τὴν γλώσσαν
) of the Am-
philocians through the influence of some Ambraciots they asked to live with them.
As Robert Fowler has commented to me in correspondence, ‘once the Hellenes and
their language were differentiated from the Pelasgian, they never changed. Hellene and
Pelasgian are immutable essences; one can abandon one essence for the other, but the
essences do not adapt, evolve or commingle. As it happened, historically the traffic was
all one way (how satisfying).’
Contrast Burkert’s characterisation of the Pelasgian
θεοί
as an ‘ungeschiedene Ein-
heit’, ‘Herodot über die Namen der Götter: Polytheismus als Historisches Problem’,
MH
() - (at p. ), or the remark of Immerwahr, op. cit. (n. ) , that the Pe-
lasgians ‘had perceived a unity of religious forces that Herodotus also detected behind
divergent traditions’. How and Wells and H. Usener, whilst they also read too much into
Herodotus’ words, do so in an opposite fashion: How and Wells, ad loc., offer the com-
ment ‘without having definite names for them… e.g. the sun, but not Apollo’; Usener,
Götternamen: Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung
(Bonn, ) , sees the Pe-
lasgian
theoi
as Sondergötter described only adjectivally as opposed to gods with person-
alities, myths and proper names. See also the rather over-ingenious theory of Myres, op.
cit. (n. ) (usefully summarised by Lloyd, II.-.)
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