A Brief History of Ancient Greek by Stephen Colvin

Author:Stephen Colvin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

All three dialects show the results of centuries of areal interaction and convergence by the time they are attested in inscriptions. Boeotian and Thessalian were influenced by West Greek: we can see that Boeotian was heavily influenced, since we have a fair number of Boeotian inscriptions. Inscriptions from Thessaly are unfortunately very few. Thessaly is a large area, and so far as we can judge there were a number of sub-dialects (as one might expect): dialects in the West of the region seem to have been particularly open to influence from West Greek, those in the East (around Larisa) less so. Lesbian, on the other side of the Aegean, was in interaction with Ionic, and the two dialects share a number of important features. In general the three Aeolic dialects are a good reminder that dialects develop in a location, and it is a mistake to assume that their “ancestry” is the most important factor in explaining them.

When ancient writers (mostly grammarians in the Hellenistic and Roman periods) refer to Aeolic dialect they are almost always referring to literary Lesbian, the poetic dialect of Sappho and Alkaios. In the fifth century BC Herodotus and Thucydides are clear that Thessalians, Boeotians, and Lesbians are related peoples who were separated by a series of migrations: this relationship is named with the ethnic adjective Aeolic. Thucydides (1.12) shows that Greeks of his day thought that Boeotians had migrated south from Thessaly: “Sixty years after the capture of Troy the present-day Boeotians were driven out of Arne by the Thessalians, and settled in what is now called Boeotia.”

Furthermore, a passage (7.57) describing the opposed Greek forces at Syracuse during the Athenian campaign to subdue Sicily in 413 BC makes clear his assumption that eastern Aeolis (Lesbos and hinterland) had been populated by emigrants from Boeotia ­following the move from Thessaly:

Besides these there were Aeolians: the men of Methymna, subjects who paid with ships rather than tribute, and men of Tenedos and Ainos, who paid tribute. These, though Aeolians, were constrained to fight against Aeolians, that is, the Boeotians, their founders, who were on the side of the Syracusans.

Of the three regions, only Lesbos had a famous and ancient ­literary tradition, going back to the semi-mythical Terpander. Boeotia had two very famous poets, Hesiod and Pindar, but neither used Boeotian dialect: Hesiod composed epic, and so used the Ionic-based epic dialect, and Pindar wrote lyric poetry, for which Doric was the conventional dialect. The Boeotian poet Corinna did indeed compose in her native Boeotian, but the dialect forms in her text suggest that she lived and wrote in the Hellenistic period. The ­grammarian Apollonios Dyskolos (second century AD) distinguishes the Boeotian of Corinna from “Aeolic” (by which he means literary Lesbian): a typical example is his comment on the possessive adjective hos “his, her” (which he says was wos in Aeolic): “The Aeolians have the form with [w] (digamma) … and so do the Boeotians: cf. Corinna in her poem Euonymiae …”

Pausanias, however, who lived

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