We do not propose to embark on even the barest outline of a history of Greek culture here. What is important for our purposes is that – precisely because of the unprecedented cultural flowering that occurred in Athens in the 5^th and 4^th centuries B.C. – Attic Greek gradually became the norm to be followed throughout the Greek-speaking world. More importantly, it was Attic Greek that served as the official language of the Kingdom of Macedonia; it was Attic Greek that Alexander the Great’s armies brought with them all the way to Upper Egypt and to the Indus River, and it was in Attic Greek that Alexander’s successors, the Ptolemies and Seleucids, administered the kingdoms they set up in Egypt and Syria.

Once again, this is not quite correct. As Attic was adopted by other Greek-speaking populations, it was inevitably tinged by their own native dialects; and as it spread over non-Greek-speaking populations, it inevitably lost some of its subtleties and peculiar complications. Thus, the form of Greek that gradually displaced the older dialects and became the lingua franca of the whole Eastern Mediterranean was NOT pure Attic, but rather a more “globalized” form thereof, known to specialists as “Koine” or Common Greek. It was into Koine that the Old Testament was translated in Alexandria for the benefit of Jews that could no longer understand Hebrew, and it was in Koine that St. Paul wrote his Epistles to the churches he had founded and that the Evangelists wrote their accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus Christ as the generation that had known Him in the flesh was dying out.

For despite the Roman conquest, Latin did not quite supplant Greek as the common language of the Eastern Mediterranean. It is characteristic that Pontius Pilate reportedly ordered the phrase “Jesus Nazarene, King of the Jews” affixed on the cross in Latin (the language of the secular power), “Hebrew” (in fact Aramaic, the language of the local people) AND Greek, much as advertising billboards are often written in English nowadays, even outside the English-speaking world… The importance of Greek could not but increase when Constantine the Great, the emperor who legalized and later officialized Christianity, moved the capital from Rome in 330 A.D. to the Greek city that came to be known as Constantinople; and even more so when, 60 years later, the Latin-speaking western part of the Empire split off from the eastern half, only to collapse in the following century under barbarian invasions. When, in the 6^th century A.D., Emperor Justinian decided to codify Roman law, he did so in the original Latin; but his own legal innovations, the Novellae or Νεαραί, were drafted in Greek as well; and by the time Egypt and Syria fell to the Arabs, leaving the Eastern Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire with nothing but Greek-speaking territories, its linguistic hellenization was all but complete.

Needless to say, during that whole time, the language had not stopped evolving. In particular, the vowel system was drastically simplified, with ancient distinctions of quantity and tone disappearing completely and a stress accent taking their place. However, because of the prestige of classical Athenian writers, Attic Greek was still held up as the ideal literary standard, and a movement arose, named “Atticism”, that preached strict, even slavish adherence to Attic grammar, lexicon, phraseology and style. In Roman and Byzantine times, Atticism largely prevailed among intellectuals, and as a result the evolution of “real” (spoken) Greek from the 2^nd to the 10^th century A.D. is hard to follow. By the time (late 10^th century) a poet such as Ptochoprodromos decided to write in the idiom he actually spoke, Greek had become a very different language.