A Historical Greek Reader, Mycenaean to the Koiné by Stephen Colvin

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS A Historical Greek Reader, Mycenaean to the Koine\ By Stephen Colvin. Oxford:OxfordUniversity Press. 2007. Pp. xx,301. This book is intended to be a history of the ancient Greek language for university levelstudents.It joins a smalllistof recendypublishedbooks on thehistory ofGreek that areaimed at classicists who have no or litdelinguistic training. As aReader,Colvin's book is essentially a collection of illustrative texts accompanied by translations and linguistic commentary, but it is unique in the field and makes a happy complement to narrative historiesof the language such asG. Horrocks, GreekA History ofthe Language and Its Speakers(rev.ed.,Oxford 2010), F.-R. Adrados,A History ofthe Greek Language (Leiden 2005), and tomulti-authored works such asA.-F. Christidis (ed.),A History of Ancient Greek^Cambridge 2007) andE. Bakker (ed.),BlackwellsCompanion tothe AncientGreek Language (Oxford2010), toname fourof therecent best. The book falls into two halves. The first contains a short grammatical introduction thatbreezes through a longlinguistic history:theIndo-European background, Mycenaean Greek,Greek inthealphabetic period,dialectdiversity, literary languages,andpost-classical prose. The notes are very concise but serviceable, and they provide a working grammar that is referred tomany times in the subsequent notes attached to the text selections. Students with no linguistic background will find these seventy pages approachableand, hopefully, an inducement to further, more detailed study. The terse presentation occasionally has its drawbacks, however. There is neither a discussion of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European nor even the phonemic inventory from which Greek developed. One repercussion of this is that Colvin never discusses the palatovelar series of obstruents *?, *g, and he reconstructs without themthroughout hisbook, forexample,*genhy for*genh\- (200), *wrg-for*ivrg (204), htg-for *hjg- (205), *sejf-for *segh-(208, 211, 240). Some otherminor details are disputable: pace Colvin, I would argue that there is good evidence that Grassmann's Law did not operate inMycenaean texts (9), and that a convincing explanation for the double outcome of initial*yhas been advanced (but is ignoredhere, 10). I find the Schulze-Sommer model for the spread of movable nu, which goes unmentioned here, far more convincing than Kurylowicz's (38). Part Two is a collection of texts, each of which is accompanied by a translation and linguistic commentary. This part of the book falls into three subsections: Mycenaean Greek, dialect inscriptions from the eighth to the third centuries, and literary texts from Homer to the koine. I would have enjoyed more Mycenaean texts; Colvin only includes six (two from Knossos, four from Pylos), and they are all very familiar, ready-to-hand, and amplynotated in works likeJ. T. Hooker's LinearB:An Introduction (Bristol1980). There are about sixty-five dialect selectionsin thebook. All of themajor dialects are coveredandColvin has includedtextsfroma chronologicalrangeaswide as the eighth centuryto the late thirdcenturyb.c Although the collectionof textsisnot especially unique, since most of these inscriptions (overforty) will be familiarfromcollectionssuch asC. D. Buck, The Greek D/ator (Chicago 1955),L. H. Jeffery, TheLocal Scripts of Archaic Greece (Oxford 1990), orR. Meiggs andD. Lewis (eds.),A SelectionofGreek Historical Inscriptions to the End ofthe FifthCenturyB.C.(Oxford 1969), I suspect thiswill prove nevertheless tobe the most usefulsectionof thebook justforits good translations ofdialect PHOENIX, VOL. 63 (2009) 3-4. 385 386 PHOENIX inscriptions. So,while thisbook isdifferent in itsfocusand isnot nearlyas inclusiveas an old standbylikeBuck, the readingsand bibliographyforthe textsitoffersaremore up-to-date and come with fine translations and notes; itwill be a very welcome addition to every Greek Dialects course. The selections of literary texts, more thanthirty, arearranged partly bygenre (epic,Ionic elegyand iambus, Aeolic monody,Doric chorus,lyric monody) and partly by chronology: the classical world (Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Herodotus, Hippocratic corpus, Thucydides,Xenophon), hellenisticpoetry(Theocritus, Callimachus), post-classicalprose (Septuagint,Polybius,New Testament, Lucian, Galen). Students should find most of thesereadingsquite entertaining(e.g.,Hector beforehis duelwithAchilles in theIliad, theCologne epode of Archilochus, Semonides onwomen,Thucydides on thedebate over Mytilene, Lucian's fraudulent professor and his tips on duping an audience, etc.). In spite of this, it seems to me that this section is perhaps not as well-suited to the format of the book as are the others. These literary texts and good commentaries on them are readily available elsewhere. Furthermore, the text...

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