After his Historical Reader (2007), intended for students of Greek with little knowledge of historical linguistics, C. has now produced a brief history of ancient Greek that is meant ‘to be accessible to readers who know little or no Greek’ (p. xi). To this aim all Greek is translated, and single words and short passages are transliterated (without accents). Endnotes and references have been kept to a minimum. Bridging the gap between scholars and the broader public is a tricky business, and C. inevitably strays here and there, but on the whole he has produced a work that will speak to a wide readership.

The set-up of the book is conventionally diachronic, starting from ‘The Indo-European Beginnings’, then describing the emergence of the Greek language as ‘An Aegean Co-Production’, before turning to ‘Mycenean Greek’. In the initial chapters, C. sometimes struggles to find the balance between nuance and accessibility (see below), and his exploration of ‘The Dark Ages’ is by his own admission (p. xi) quite technical. Then follow four familiar components of any history of the Greek language: ‘The Alphabet’, ‘The Greek Dialects’, discussed within a contemporary framework, ‘Homer and the Epic Tradition’ and ‘The Language of Greek Poetry’. Ample space is reserved for a study of the origins of the koine in ‘Bare Words: the Start of a Common Language’, followed by the development of Greek from the Middle Ages to today in ‘Greek to Romaic and Back’. The book is completed by an appendix, ‘The Greek Alphabet and Pronunciation’, a glossary, references and a well-articulated index. The book is not without editorial and typographical errors, though they appear to be limited to three chapters.Footnote ¹

The reader may question whether we need another history of ancient Greek, which will have to compete with Palmer (1980) and the excellent second edition of Horrocks (2010). The other recent works available to the classical scholar are Christidis (ed.) 2001 (now available in an English translation, published in 2007) and Adrados 1999 (translated into English in 2005).Footnote ² The sprawling volume edited by Christidis is at times impenetrable, and the contributions are of varying relevance and quality; for a judgement about Adrados I refer the reader to reviews by Clackson in JHS 127 (2007), 239 and by Katz in The Classical World 100.4 (2007), 454–5. Although it is not C.'s aim to fish in this particular pond (‘there are other, excellent books for specialists’, p. xi), his work does have significant value for the Greek student and scholar: first, his socio-linguistic approach to issues of historical linguistics; second, the (almost) fair balance – perhaps for the first time in this kind of brief history – between classical and post-classical Greek.

Especially in his chapter on the origins of Greek and the chapter on the Greek dialects, C. manages at once to educate classicists on the subject of linguistics and inform the linguist reader about the peculiarities of Greek. Mainstream scholarship on ancient Greek still regards the language more as a knowable artefact than as a dynamic means of communication only partially revealed by the available evidence. The image of language development as linear oversimplifies the complex interactions that go on both within groups of speakers and between different groups of speakers. Thus, C. emphasises the multiple unknowable factors that contributed to the emergence of Greek in the Aegean. From its very beginning, the ‘Greek language’ was a socio-cultural construct rather than a linguistic reality, representing a multiplicity of dialect varieties that overlapped to differing extents. Classicists need to hear this, so that we may become sufficiently humble about our knowledge of the Greek language at any point in its long life.

Probably taking his cue from Horrocks, C. has devoted almost a quarter of the book to the emergence of the koine and its development into the Byzantine period. Palmer, whose history of ancient Greek (Part 1) likewise covers about two-hundred pages, only reserves five pages for the post-Hellenistic period, of which one paragraph (pp. 196–7) is devoted to Byzantine Greek. By its very nature, C.'s brief discussion of post-classical Greek cannot compete with Horrocks's in depth and detail, but it offers a more inviting first port of call for classicists who venture into the uncharted waters of Byzantine Greek.

For the most part C. is attuned to the diversity of his intended readership, but here and there the mix of specialist and lay terminology is out of balance. For example, at first mention (p. 38) the term ‘aspirate’ is introduced without further introduction: ‘Greek distinguished between voiceless, voiced, and voiceless aspirate stops’; a few pages on (p. 46), however, we find ‘Later Greek seems not to have liked two h-sounds (aspirates) in the same word’. Much later (p. 85), on the same topic, C. starts a new section as follows: ‘In modern printed texts the presence or absence of h- is marked by the (mandatory) addition of a diacritic sign ‛ (h-) or ’ (no h-) above the vowel’. Since C. does not give an example I can imagine that the lay reader might not follow that the topic here is the presence or absence of an ‘h-sound’ at the beginning of words starting with a vowel. A similar problem crops up in the chapter on Mycenean, when C. states (p. 48) that the augment, described as ‘a prefix e-’, can be seen ‘most clearly in a-pe-do-ke’, without further clarification. The lay reader cannot be expected to see that the augment here occurs after the elided pre-verb a-po and thus appears within the word.

Leaving aside this slight issue of language, C. offers a number of erudite flourishes that manage to be brief, accessible and insightful. In the section on social dialects (pp. 109–11), C. offers the most poignant brief overview of classical Athenian society I have come across, linking language to issues of population, class, gender, culture and education. He demonstrates the same light touch in a brilliant little overview of the Homeric question (pp. 122–4). Such embedded brief histories are not unparalleled in C.'s book, and they hint at the depth of knowledge that lingers beneath the surface of this light reading.

True to his aim of reaching a non-specialist audience, C. succeeds in making his work accessible throughout, all the while writing with enough eye for detail that the scholarly reader is not deterred by oversimplification. The book complements existing short histories by providing a more extensive exploration of Byzantine Greek in both its literary and subliterary guises, which C. combines with a comprehensive overview of proto-, archaic and classical Greek, an area in which Horrocks has been found wanting (see A.H. Sommerstein, E. Jeffreys and P. Mackridge, ‘A New History of the Greek Language’, in Dialogos 6 [1999], 69–82, esp. 71 [Sommerstein] and 78–9 [Mackridge]; see also Horrocks [2010²], p. xvi). I read the book with mounting interest, and warmly recommend it to scholars, students and laymen alike.