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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 514

Part of Session 154: A tale of six cities (Other abstracts in this session)

The language of the countryside of Attica, but not of the city of Athens?

Authors: James, Patrick
Submitted by: James, Patrick (University of Cambridge, United Kingdom)

In the second and third centuries ad, Greek writers throughout the Graeco-Roman world strove to revive the language of the Athenian authors of the fifth and fourth centuries bc in contrast to the long-established and widespread Koine Greek of their day. These so-called Atticists avoided non-classical and non-Attic vocabulary, employed morphology that had long since ceased to be part of the language of administration or even of literature, and reclaimed obsolete syntactic structures. Their achievements in these areas have already been the subject of comprehensive studies.

However, the question of how the Atticists actually spoke during their performances, declamations and diatribes has remained largely a matter of assumption. By this period, the pronunciation of Greek was very much closer to that of Modern Greek than that of Classical Athens. It is often asserted that an educated pronunciation, probably resembling that of Classical Attic, co-existed with the Koine pronunciation (see, e.g., Horrocks 2010: 159nn. 1-2 and 4-6, 243nn. 1-2) and that Atticists employed this pronunciation (e.g. Swain 1996: 31 and Bowie 2004: 65‑67). However, when the Atticists’ conservative speech is discussed, treatments quickly turn away from phonology to issues of word choice, morphology, and syntax. These assumptions about pronunciation remain in need of corroboration and elaboration.

Nevertheless, it seems very unlikely that these Atticist authors and rhetoricians, who were very particular about using only approved words, about the rhythm of their prose, and about every other aspect of their self‑presentation and performance, would be content to sound just like the masses from whom they otherwise sought to distinguish themselves.

My research aims to substantiate the claim that a conservative, and distinctively Athenian or Attic, pronunciation could have been adopted by the Atticists, since inscriptions demonstrate that the Koine Greek of first- and second-century Athens and Attica was conservative in its phonology as well as in its morphology. Literary testimonia, the Atticist lexicographic tradition, and the evidence provided by the epigraphic studies of Teodorsson (1974, 1978) and Threatte (1980, 1982, 1996) have been drawn upon to support this case.

This paper will concentrate on the literary testimonia for the Atticists' pronunciation. These often intriguing passages are of particular interest in that they reflect debates about where the correct pronunciation was to be found and provide a window on to ancient attitudes to language. For many Atticists, the language of the city of Athens – at that time a greatly admired university city and cultural centre – was debased and contaminated by foreign influences. By contrast, the language of the Attic countryside and Athenian farmers, as idealised in Atticist literature, was characterised by the purity that the Atticists sought. To the cost of the language of the city (however conservative it also had remained), the language of an idealised countryside, once despised as 'rustic', backward, unrefined, and unsophisticated by an urban(e) elite, came to be prized by the Atticists as the language of literature for the Graeco-Roman world.