Re: Hell(en)ish oddities

On Thu, 23 Nov 2000 06:10:08 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:

>At 7:40 pm -0500 22/11/00, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>[....]
>
>Sometime in the 3rd cent. AD, one of the Emperors whose name I don't recall
>at the moment, granted Roman citizenship to _all_ feeborn peoples in the
>Roman Empire (cynics have pointed out that by that time most freeborn
>people had already acquired Roman citizenship - I'm not so sure).
>
>We in the west habitually talk about 'Byzantium', the Byzantines, the
>Byzantium Empire etc.  Over in the eastern part of Europe (and at one time,
>Asia Minor) they weren't aware that the Roman Empire had mysteriously
>disappeared and was replaced by a "Byzantine Empire".   They were under the
>impression (quite correctly) that Constantine had moved the capital to
>Constantinople, that indeed the city was called 'Konstantinou polis', that
>the Emperor in Constantinople was the _Roman_ Empreror, that a remnant of
>the former great Empire still survived and, therefore, that the peoples of
>that Empire were Roman citizens.
That's very interesting, thank you. I hadn't thought the Greeks had been
Romanized enough to ever call themselves Romans. I thought the Eastern
empire to be, on the contrary, strongly Hellenized, in spite of a Roman
administration. So this is very significant new information to me, which I
wish they had mentioned at school.

Speaking of school, I wish history teaching would be more "relative", i.e.
that it would try to describe also the events as the contemporaries saw
them, not just how we see them in retrospect. In all the teaching about the
collapse of Rome and the later "Byzantine" Empire, I've never been told how
the people of that time felt about it, and how they really viewed the Roman
Empire.

>Even when Constantinople eventually fell to the Turks and the last remnant
>of the Roman Empire fell, the non-Turkish, Greek speaking (remember Greek
>even in classical Roman times had become the L1 or L2 language of many
>originally non-hellenic peoples in Asia Minor) peoples of the area still
>called themselves Romans.   The greeks were doing this right up to the
>early years of the 20th cent.  I don't know when the practice actually died
>out.
BTW, how did the "Greek" name come about? Were the Romans the first to call
them "Graeci"? What does the name mean? Somebody tried to tell me it means
'slave' in Turkish, which I immediately disbelieved because the name's much
older than the Turks.

Also, on Greek being a major language in the Eastern Empire, were there many
Greek Roman citizens who did not speak Latin? Did all of the Roman
administration there speak Greek? Was Greek equally strong in Palestine,
Syria and Egypt? Or were there some prestigious Semitic languages there?

And regarding the Turks; has there been any significant exchange between the
Greek and Turkish languages?

Hmm, lots of questions I'm having, hope you don't mind answering some of
them :)

Óskar