What's in a Name | Being Greek

Mavi Boncuk

The Byzantines did not call themselves Byzantines / Βυζαντινοί. They called themselves Romaioi / Ρωμαίοι. The Byzantine empire was not called by its citizens Byzantion / Βυζάντιον, it was called Romania / Ρωμανία.

The word Greek /Γραικός was rarely used by the Greeks themselves. It first appears in the 8th cBC writings of Hesiod, and it was used as a national name by the Greeks of Southern Italy, the Magna Graecia. Since the first Greeks/Hellenes that the Etruscans and the Romans came in contact with were the Magna Graecia Greeks, the name Graecus became established as descriptive of Greeks and through the Romans it is the accepted name for Greeks and Greece in the western world. The Eastern world met the Greeks first as Achaeans / Αχαιοί (the Hittite tablets speak of Ahhiyawa people) then as Ionians Ιωνες. The Persian name for the Greeks was Yauna, an obvious paraphrase of Ionia. When the Persians had to describe the Macedonians, who were the first Greeks they met as they entered Europe, they called them Yauna Katabara (Ionians wearing a shield-like hat), from the Causia / Καυσία the typical hat of the Greek speaking Macedonians.

The people of the Middle East and beyond starting from the Persians and still now call the Greeks Yauna, Yunan, Yunani, Yavani, etc. The Greeks of the Classic Greek, Hellenistic and Roman eras identified themselves using the name Hellenes / Ελληνες. The name Hellene / Ελλην fell out of use after the establishment of Christianity having become identified with the old religion and philosophical systems which the new religion from the East found threatening. It lingered on, as a cultural name and it reappeared at the end of Byzantium as a name defining the Greeks, and then again after the Ottoman conquest.

During the later Roman years, people around the empire started abandoning their own particular identification and accepted their identity as being Romans. The Roman army, where a man would serve the best part of his life guarding frontiers and fighting barbarians became the melting pot for conscripts throughout the empire. You had Africans serving in Syria, Illyrians serving in Germany and Thracians serving in Britain, for example.

By the end of antiquity the Roman world was becoming basically a two language empire. Starting from central Italy until the forests of Germany and from the land of the Dacians to Britain and the western part of northern Africa, including the Iberian peninsula north of the Heracleian straights, it became Latin speaking, pushing Gaelic to the fringes of the Atlantic, where it still survives today, slowly pushing into extinction a multitude of languages that included all the Illyrian dialects, the Italian dialects besides Latin, most of Dacian and northern Thracian etc. Greek was dominant following the conquests of Alexander's Macedonians in the eastern part of noreth Africa and into the Middle East, and the lower Balkans, supplanting local languages like Thracian, Phrygian, Paeonian, Lycian, Gaelic of Asia Minor, Phoenician, Capadocian, etc.

A man that spoke Greek or Latin could easily go from Syria to Portugal and be able to communicate flawlessly. Both languages were also literary languages, and later became liturgical languages too. Latin was predominant in the State and the Army, while Greek was predominant in the east as the language of the market and literature.

By the time the Roman empire in the west collapsed under the onslaught of the Germanic tribes, the West was almost completely Latin Speaking and the East almost completely Greek speaking. After the Arabs took over North Africa, Syria and Palestine from the Roman empire, Greek and Latin virtually disappeared from there, leaving only traces of their previous strength, being supplanted now by Arabic. Other languages that disappeared under the Arabs was Syriac and Egyptian, lingering on only as ecclesiastic languages. Greek now was spoken in the rest of the empire almost exclusively, with the exception of Armenian and Slavic that had had now appeared on the Balkan scene from the north.

Heraclius / Ηράκλειος saw that now the language issue had to be addressed. Greek became the official language of the empire, taking over Latin even in its last remaining stronghold, the army.
The Roman empire was now remaining and functioning and flourishing on a area defined by the Danube to the north, to the southern frontiers of Asia Minor to the south. From Euphrates to the east to the Southern Italy to the west.

Today we call this the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire. Its citizens saw it differently. To them, it was Autokratoria Romaion / Αυτοκρατορία Ρωμαίων, or Romania / Ρωμανία and they were Romaioi / Ρωμαίοι.

Their language and culture was Greek. The liturgical language of the Orthodox church was Greek, the language of the state bureaucracy, the army, the commerce, the law, the contracts, the inscriptions secular and religious and the songs of the people that survive to us are all in Greek. The language of literature, lexica, history, religion and philosophy are all Greek. The language of the people is Greek. All modern Greek dialects from Pontian of the Caucasus and the black sea to Grico in southern Italy, Cypriot, Cretan, Epirotan, Mikrasiatica, Macedonian, and Constantinopolitan are all formed in this period.

The Byzantine historians often speak of "Macedonian army", "Thracian army", "Roman army". The Thracians, Macedonians, Illyrians, Bythinians, Carians, Phrygians, Armenians, Lydians, Galatians, Paphlagonians, Lycians, Syrians, Cilicians, Misians, Cappadocians, had to speak Latin and Greek in order to communicate among themselves, but they must have used their original languages to communicate within their own ethnic boundaries, which of course does not make them "Greeks". If we were to write a script for a cheap Hollywood movie, then the statements above would suffice as being presentable enough for the uneducated and uninformed public. But if someone is attempting to write history then the sources have to be dealt with in a more respectful way. Nowhere is there to be found among the Byzantine historians such utter nonsense as [i]"[/i]Macedonian army", "Thracian army", "Roman army", all mixed up as if we were talking of a federation of medieval national armies of supposed ethnic Macedonians, ethnic Thracians and ethnic Romans. This is unheard of and it has no bearing to reality or the saourses. To the Byzantines, it was always the Roman army / Στρατός Ρωμαίων, when the reference was for the Byzantine army, their own army. What we see here is a shameless attempt to falsify and twist reality and present the army of the Makedonikon or Armenikon or Paphlagonikon Thema (which means the provincial armies into which the army of the Eartern Roman empire was divided) and present it as somehow being a "multinational" army of the Byzantines. Nothing would have been farther from the truth. Thema was the name of the province in Byzantine Greek. The word "theme" in English is basically from the same ancient Greek word, and it is still used in modern Greek. When we say that we use the "thematic" approach to teaching or to investigation, we mean that we separate the issues into "themata". Each Thema was both an administrative and a military unit. Each Thema had to collect its taxes, and it had to sustain its own army, the Thematikon army. Was the Byzantine army multinational? Of course it was, but this is not becasue the population was multinational, but because foreigners were habitually beings paid to join the Byzantine army as mercenaries. Englishmen with huge axes and Varangoi (Swedes) with Nordic swords were for centuries the preffered nationalities for the imperial guard and Turks, Avars, Italians, English, Bulgars, Sweds, Russ and Serbs were coming to offer their services as mercenaries, joining the army of the Byzantines. But the core of the army the conscripts were always Greeks. On the walls of Constantinople, we see Constantinos Palaeologos fighting with Greeks Italians and Turks against the equally multinational army of Fatih Sultan Mehmet/ the Conquerer attacking from the outside.

Source: History Forum