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2 results

  • 2 - Greece after the Persian Wars

  • Edited by David M. Lewis, John Boardman, J. K. Davies, M. Ostwald
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    26 March 1992, pp 15-33

  • Summary

    To identify the Greek world as a cultural system is at first sight fairly easy. For all the divergences of phonology and vocabulary among and within the four major dialect groupings, Attic/Ionic, Arcado-Cypriot, Aeolic, and Doric/North-west Greek, the dialects were mutually intelligible. If one now thinks of the Greek world of the 470s not as a cultural system but as an economic system, its unity is much less perspicuous. Developments of a rather different kind were affecting the public, intellectual, and social life of the 470s and were exposing the strains and contradictions inherent in the very institution which had shaped Greek political life for so long, the republican polis. To diagnose crisis, at a moment when the Persian Wars had just been fought in defence of and in terms of the polis and when their outcome had to all appearance vindicated it as a system of government.

  • CHAPTER XXXIX (a) - THE PREHISTORY OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE

  • Edited by I. E. S. Edwards, C. J. Gadd, N. G. L. Hammond, E. Sollberger
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Ancient History
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    18 September 1975, pp 805-819

  • Summary

    Historic Greek may be defined as the language as it is known from texts and monuments from the eighth century BC onwards. All Greek dialects exhibit certain features in common, and these are numerous and particular enough for us to be able to presume a common origin for them. This chapter presents a list, which though incomplete, can give some indication of the features which distinguished Greek from the other languages of the Indo-European family in the second millennium BC. These are divided on the basis of phonology, morphology and syntax, and vocabulary. It has been customary to regard the three main dialect groups, Doric, Ionic and Achaean, as corresponding to three separate waves of invaders, who brought to Greece their distinct dialects of the Greek language. All Greek dialects share a number of words borrowed from unknown languages, and some of these show differing forms in the dialects which prove that the borrowing took place in prehistoric times.