Prerequisites: Foundations
Next: Morphology
Ancient Greek was never one language. It was spoken for more than a thousand years, in cities that kept their own speech, and its great authors wrote in dialects fixed by their genre as much as by their birthplace. This page gives the reader a map before the paradigms begin: the periods of the language from the Mycenaean tablets to the Koine, the main dialect groups and the genres that used each, the sound changes that separate Attic from the other dialects, and a method for reading a text in a dialect that the grammar does not describe. The grammar takes Attic as its base, and the Homeric dialect, Ionic and the Koine have pages of their own in the section Dialects and verse.
| Period | Approximate dates | Language and main texts |
|---|---|---|
| Mycenaean | 15th to 12th century BC | the Greek of the Linear B tablets from Knossos, Pylos and Mycenae |
| Dark Age | 12th to 9th century BC | no written Greek of the usual kind; the alphabet is adopted from the Phoenicians by about 800 to 750 BC |
| Archaic | 8th century to about 480 BC | the epic of Homer and Hesiod, the lyric poets, the first inscriptions in local dialects |
| Classical | about 480 to 323 BC | Attic of tragedy, comedy, history, philosophy and oratory; the Ionic of Herodotus |
| Hellenistic | 323 to 31 BC | the Koine: Polybius, the Septuagint, the papyri |
| Roman and late antique | 31 BC to about AD 600 | the Koine, and the Atticising prose of authors such as Plutarch and Lucian |
| Byzantine and modern | after about AD 600 | outside the scope of this grammar |
The dates are approximate, and the periods overlap. The Homeric poems were composed over a long oral tradition and reached their present form in the eighth and seventh centuries BC, and their language is older than the date of composition.
Linear B is a syllabic script used for accounts on clay tablets in the Mycenaean palaces. Michael Ventris deciphered it in 1952 and showed that the language was Greek, and Greek written some six hundred years before Homer. It preserves forms that later dialects lost: the semivowel w, which Attic dropped, appears in the word that Linear B writes wa-na-ka, later ἄναξ (lord) and in Homer ϝάναξ, a form kept in the metre. Mycenaean has no direct literary descendant, and the grammar does not treat it.
After the collapse of the palaces, the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, added vowel signs and spread it, and every region developed its own local variant. The cities used these local alphabets for their inscriptions until the fourth century BC, when the Ionic alphabet that Athens had adopted in 403/402 BC became the standard. The inscriptions are the main evidence for the dialects that left no literature.
A Greek dialect is the speech of a region, and there was no standard language before the Koine. Modern scholarship divides the dialects into four groups.
| Group | Dialects | Region |
|---|---|---|
| Ionic–Attic | Ionic, Attic | the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, Euboea and the Cyclades; Athens and Attica |
| Aeolic | Lesbian, Thessalian, Boeotian | the island of Lesbos; Thessaly; Boeotia |
| West Greek | Doric (Laconian, Corinthian, Argive, Cretan, Sicilian), Northwest Greek (Phocian, Locrian, Aetolian, Epirote) | the Peloponnese, Crete, the Greek cities of Sicily and southern Italy; central and northwestern Greece |
| Arcado-Cypriot | Arcadian, Cypriot | Arcadia; Cyprus |
Arcado-Cypriot is the closest to Mycenaean and left only inscriptions. The other three groups account for almost all of Greek literature.
A Greek author did not write in the speech of his own town. Each genre had its own dialect, which the author learnt as part of the genre, so that the dialect of a work follows the tradition and not the birthplace. Herodotus came from Halicarnassus and wrote in Ionic, Pindar was a Boeotian and wrote choral lyric in a literary Doric, and Hesiod, also a Boeotian, wrote in the dialect of epic.
| Genre | Dialect | Authors |
|---|---|---|
| Epic | the epic dialect, an artificial blend with an Ionic base, Aeolic elements and older forms | Homer, Hesiod |
| Elegy and iambic poetry | Ionic with an epic colouring | Archilochus, Mimnermus |
| Monodic lyric | Lesbian Aeolic | Sappho, Alcaeus |
| Choral lyric | literary Doric | Alcman, Pindar, Bacchylides, and the choral odes of Attic tragedy |
| Ionic prose | Ionic | Herodotus, the Hippocratic writers |
| Attic prose, tragedy and comedy | Attic | Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, the orators, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes |
| Koine | Koine | Polybius, the Septuagint, Plutarch |
The dialogue of Attic tragedy is in Attic, and the choral odes keep a Doric colouring, with long ᾱ in place of Attic η. Dictionaries mark the dialect of a word with an abbreviation, such as Ep., Ion., Dor., Aeol. and Att.
Five passages show the dialects side by side. The features in the last column are the ones that the table in the next section explains.
| Dialect | Passage | Markers |
|---|---|---|
| Epic | Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος (Homer, Iliad 1.1) | genitives in -εω and -ῆος, with a single λ in Ἀχιλῆος (Attic Ἀχιλλέως) |
| Ionic | Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης (Herodotus 1, first sentence) | η for the Attic α in ἱστορίης; genitive -έος for Attic -έως |
| Lesbian Aeolic | φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν (Sappho, fragment 31, first line) | κῆνος for ἐκεῖνος; dative plural θέοισιν for θεοῖς |
| Doric | Ἁδύ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα καὶ ἁ πίτυς (Theocritus, Idyll 1, first line) | long ᾱ in ἁδύ for Attic ἡδύ, and in ἁ for ἡ |
| Attic | Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ (Plato, Republic 327a) | εἰς for the older ἐς, and Πειραιᾶ contracted from Πειραιέα |
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
He seems to me equal to the gods. (Sappho, fragment 31, first line; the Lesbian forms are in bold, and the accent of φαίνεταί follows the rule of the proparoxytone before an enclitic, as on the page Accent, proclitics and enclitics)
Ἁδύ τι τὸ ψιθύρισμα καὶ ἁ πίτυς, αἰπόλε, τήνα
Sweet is the whisper of that pine, goatherd. (Theocritus, Idyll 1, first line; the Doric forms are in bold)
The grammar takes Attic as its base for four reasons.
Attic itself changed between the fifth and the fourth century BC, and a text by an author of the fifth century may have forms that Plato and the orators avoid.
| Older Attic (Thucydides, tragedy) | Later Attic (Plato, Xenophon, the orators) |
|---|---|
| ξύν, ξυν- | σύν, συν- |
| ἐς | εἰς |
| θάρσος, ἄρσην | θάρρος, ἄρρην |
Tragedy also has -σσ- where prose has -ττ-: πράσσω in verse, πράττω in prose. The division is a tendency and not a law, and an edition may print either form.
Attic and Ionic are closely related, and the table gives the main differences. Herodotus is the standard author of literary Ionic, and the page Ionic (Herodotus) treats it in full.
| Feature | Attic | Ionic |
|---|---|---|
| Original long ᾱ | η, but α after ε, ι, ρ: χώρα, ἡμέρα, σοφία; τιμή | η everywhere: χώρη, ἡμέρη, σοφίη |
| Genitive plural, first declension | χωρῶν | χωρέων |
| Dative plural | λόγοις, ἡμέραις | λόγοισι(ν), ἡμέρῃσι(ν) |
| Double consonants | θάλαττα, γλῶττα | θάλασσα, γλῶσσα |
| ρρ and ρσ | θάρρος | θάρσος |
| Contraction | ποιῶ, φιλῶ | ποιέω, φιλέω (uncontracted) |
| Interrogative and relative stems | ὅπως, ποῖος | ὅκως, κοῖος |
| Initial h | kept: ἀφικνέομαι | lost in East Ionic (psilosis): ἀπικνέομαι |
| Reflexive | ἑαυτοῦ | ἑωυτοῦ |
No page of this grammar treats these dialects, and the features below are the ones a reader of Greek verse meets most often.
After the conquests of Alexander (died 323 BC), a common Greek, the κοινὴ διάλεκτος (common dialect), spread over the eastern Mediterranean as the language of administration, trade and literature. It rests on Attic, with Ionic elements and with the simplifications of the spoken language. Its sources are the papyri and the inscriptions, the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, begun in the third century BC), Polybius, Plutarch, and the New Testament. In the imperial period, the movement called Atticism tried to restore the Attic of the classical authors, and writers such as Lucian imitate the vocabulary and the forms of Plato and Xenophon. Modern Greek descends from the Koine. The page Koine (overview) treats it.
The sound changes of the Koine and of the later language, such as the loss of vowel length and of the pitch accent and the merging of several vowels into [i], are listed in the table of pronunciations on Foundations.
| Page | Contents |
|---|---|
| Homeric forms | the morphology of the epic dialect |
| Homeric syntax and formulae | its syntax and its traditional diction |
| The hexameter and the elegiac couplet | the metres of epic and elegy |
| Ionic (Herodotus) | the prose dialect of the Histories |
| Koine (overview) | the common Greek after Alexander |
New Testament Greek has no page of its own, and Doric and Aeolic are mentioned but are not treated in full.
| Ionic or epic | Attic | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Ἁλικαρνησσέος | Ἁλικαρνασσέως | η for α after ρ, and the genitive ending |
| ἱστορίης | ἱστορίας | η for α after ι |
| ἑωυτοῦ | ἑαυτοῦ | the Ionic reflexive |
| Ἀχιλῆος | Ἀχιλλέως | the epic genitive in -ῆος, with a single λ for the metre |
| Topic | Rule |
|---|---|
| Periods | Mycenaean, archaic, classical, Hellenistic (Koine), Roman |
| Dialect groups | Ionic–Attic, Aeolic, West Greek, Arcado-Cypriot |
| Literary dialect | follows the genre, not the birthplace |
| Base of this grammar | Attic |
| Attic against Ionic | α against η, contraction, ττ against σσ |
| Doric | long ᾱ, -μες, infinitive in -εν |
| Aeolic | psilosis, recessive accent, π for τ |
| Koine | Attic with Ionic elements, after Alexander |
A. Name the dialect of each form and give the Attic equivalent.
B. Give the Attic form.
Answers
A.
B.
Answers
Next: Morphology