Ancient Greek ideas on speech, language and civilization

Extract

Deborah Levine Gera, Ancient Greek ideas on speech, language and civilization. Great Clarendon, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. vii-xii, 252. Hb $94.88.

In her Preface to this book the author calls it a survey, and it is indeed a survey, but a very welcome one. Even though the sources on which Gera builds are numerous and heterogeneous, suggesting that there has been work done in this direction previously, we have not had in the past a book-length treatment focused exclusively on linguistic ideologies in ancient Greece. The book is useful and timely in helping us reexamine and deconstruct some inherited ideas concerning the role that we imagine ancient Greek ideas have played in shaping a large part of Western thinking. But a basic value of this work is also its major implication, and not merely what is explicitly stated on its pages, for the simple reason that the author does not make a commitment to any large-scale theory or paradigm. This way of approaching the subject is a warning against crediting ancient Greeks with an internally coherent philosophical scheme, which has been frequently imagined as lying at the roots of later rationalist thinking prioritizing reference and leading to Cartesian and modern linguistic rationalism-positivism. Not that such lines of theorizing are absent from ancient Greek thinking, but they do not stand alone, and the actual situation must have been more complex. The situation described by Gera resembles the one put forward by Dodds (1951:180) in his treatment of the rational and irrational elements of Greek thought with regard to the “soul” or “self”: “On questions like that [pictures of soul, self, shadowy image in Hades, etc.] there was no ‘Greek view’, but only a muddle of conflicting answers.” In Gera's book the same holds true for matters linguistic and ideological, implying that later treatments of the subject have constructed Greek thought as being of this or that kind, reading in it a more monolithic and internally coherent content than it actually had. The powerful process of erasure, a selective ideological reading (Gal & Irvine 1995), has played a decisive role in giving shape to what Greek metalinguistic thought has been or should have been, according to the historical contingencies and interests of each era and each individual thinker. Nevertheless, even though Gera deserves a credit for not allowing homogenizing readings to influence a realistic assessment of the variety of ancient Greek views of language, one would expect her to provide at least a basic understanding of her own of what kind of social species linguistic ideologies are.