V. Protonotarios

“The Greek language is one of only three, among those now spoken and written anywhere in the world, that can boast a continuous written tradition stretching back for more than three thousand years. The others are Chinese and Hebrew. The collective heroes and heroines of the story told in this book are all those people who have spoken and written the Greek language throughout the long centuries of its recorded evolution. During that time, Greek was used at first to keep bureaucratic records, then to preserve for posterity the heroic epics, the liad and the Odyssey of Homer, that have been read with wonder by every generation since. It was the language of the world's first fully alphabetic system of writing. It was in Greek that the foundations for modern philosophy and science were laid and, later, that the apostles of Christianity would disseminate the new religion through the New Testament. The original Greek text of the Gospels is still read aloud in Orthodox churches around the world. Evolving as all human speech does over time, Greek in its present-day form is the official language of the Hellenic Republic and one of the two official languages of the Republic of Cyprus. The Greeks of the title and the pages that follow are to be understood as speakers of the Greek language. The story of these Greek speakers will turn out to be a story about identity— or rather, about identities, in the plural. Greek speakers have been adept, ever since we first get to know them through their earliest writings, at asking questions and interrogating themselves. The answers they have come up with have differed greatly over the centuries, according to cultural changes and changing historical circumstances. Throughout history, Greeks have created types of societies and political systems very different from one another. If they have continuously inhabited the same southeastern corner of Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, they have also, at different times, put down roots in many different places. Again and again, they have proved resourceful at reinventing themselves. They have fought against different enemies, traded with different partners around the world, worshipped different gods, even called themselves by different names. We call them 'Greeks', and their land 'Greece, in English today because the ancient Romans first encountered a local tribe of Greek speakers whom they called, in Latin, Graeci. In their own language in ancient times, these people were known as 'Hellenes' and their land as 'Hellas', as they have been known once again since the early nineteenth century. But they have also, at different times, been Achaiwoi (Achaeans) and Romaioi or Romioi (pro-nounced Romyí), meaning literally 'Romans.’ This book asks: What can we learn from the accumulated experience of those who have spoken and written this language, during three and a half thousand years, about how identities are created, perpetuated, and modified or reinvented over time? We all rely on perceptions of the past to establish our own identity in the present. In a world ever more threatened by the clash of mutually exclusive, monolithic identities, we might all do well to reflect, on a more informed basis than we often do, on the ways in which these identities come to be formed and also adapted as the world around us changes. The story of the Greeks, based on their own words, that can be traced all the way back to the earliest period of recorded history, sheds light on this process rather than on any single identity, seemingly fixed and given at any one time.” Preface - The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton