Lampas - Volume 53, Issue 4, 2020

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it argues that the Mycenaean Greek world served as a nexus for international trade between the Near East and Europe during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 to 1100 BCE). Rather than a barbarian periphery, Europe – and in particular regions such as the Carpathian basin and the southern Baltic (Denmark and Scania) – was an integral part of the much better known ‘civilised’ world of the ancient Near East. Second, it argues that ‘mercenaries’ (a term that I will use rather loosely, and which includes both private entrepreneurs and military captives) served as a hitherto overlooked conduit for knowledge exchange between Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Near East. It will do so by highlighting a number of remarkable archaeological finds, and by discussing these against the backdrop of contemporary (Late Bronze Age and Iron Age) texts as well as later legends.

This article analyses Xenophon’s lexical choices in Anabasis. It examines ancient and modern critical approaches to his language: Xenophon has often been criticized for lapses from ‘pure’ Attic, but this notion of a ‘pure’ Attic should be regarded as a conservative response to the increasing variety of spoken Attic in the fourth century BC. Xenophon’s lexical choices reflect the influence both of this ‘Great Attic’ (which developed into koine Greek) and of the non-parochial historiographical tradition inaugurated by Thucydides.

The division in capita of Herodotus’ Histories goes back to the edition of Gottfried Jungermann of 1608. What were his model, motive, and method when undertaking this editorial task? The answers to the first two questions can be found in one of his prefaces (Ad candidum lectorem), the relevant section of which is here offered in a transcription and translation. The last question can only be tentatively answered by looking at the actual division itself, since he does not say anything about it, except that he wanted to keep together speeches.

The sixteenth-century Hellenist Adolf van Meetkercke (1528-1591) was a talented humanist and diplomat, who divided his time between philology and politics, excelling in both professions. Meetkercke’s first scholarly work was his Commentary on the ancient and correct pronunciation of the Greek language (De veteri et recta pronuntiatione linguæ Græcæ commentarius), published in 1565 by Goltzius in Bruges and reedited in 1576 by Plantin in Antwerp. In this work, the scholar from Bruges defended the reconstructed pronunciation today closely associated with Erasmus. After offering a biographical sketch of Meetkercke and briefly recapitulating the pronunciation debate, I discuss his innovative treatise, which was the first freestanding systematic outline of the reconstructed pronunciation. I argue that the Commentary was tremendously influential and had an impact beyond the subject of pronunciation. In particular, I intend to illustrate that Meetkercke elaborated a linguistic ideology which advocated the active usage of the Ancient Greek language as a learned lingua franca next to Latin, and which involved appropriating this classical language from the Byzantine teachers who had brought it to western Europe in a ‘corrupt’ state. In the conclusion, I dwell on Meetkercke’s importance for language studies and briefly relate his rather aggressive domestication of Ancient Greek to the position of this language in the present-day Low Countries.