Chiasmus and Chalcis

Neoclassical art theorist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in his 1755 book Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Art, says “art should aim at noble simplicity and calm grandeur” (translation via Kenneth Clark in The Romantic Rebellion). What struck me about the quote was its word order: “noble simplicity calm grandeur” can be called “chiastic.” The words “noble” and “grandeur” are linked semantically, that is, they come from the vocabulary of a shared idea of greatness, loftiness, etc.; “Simplicity” and “calm” are similarly linked. What makes them chiastic is that it you literally stack the pairs, “noble simplicity” atop “calm grandeur,” and draw a line connecting each semantic pair, it will form the Greek letter chi, X.

In my experience, chiasm in English literature is accidental, but I’m sure that it was done intentionally by Winckelmann, a Hellenist, that is, someone who studies Greek culture. Because Latin and Greek authors used chiasm with intent, I looked up the term in two grammar books, Essential Latin Grammar, ed. Anne Mahoney, and Smyth’s Greek Grammar, in the hopes of finding Classical examples as opposed to Winckelmann’s Neoclassical example. Smyth gave me Demosthenes: “having one body and soul sole” (my translation); Mahoney gave me Cicero: “That day was horrific for them, for us? Nice” (my translation). I looked up Biblical chiasmus, but mostly found narrative chiasm, where stories or parables are arranged in chiastic order by subject. So, I grabbed my Greek New Testament and was like, “alright, trying to find chiasmus, better start with John, the most Greek Gospel” and literally the first sentence: “the Word was with God and God was the Word” (my translation).

But, if I may, a note about chi: it’s pretty popular trivia that the term “X-Mas” is not an attempt to “take Christ out of Christmas,” but rather the innocuous substitution of the first letter in the Greek of the word Christ—chi, X. This may be an especially difficult idea for readers using the standard Roman alphabet, which has only one single-letter double consonant, X, which sounds nothing like X, chi, kh. The Greek alphabet has several: theta (Θ, th), xi (Ξ, ks), phi (Φ, ph), chi (Χ, kh), and psi (Ψ, ps) and the Roman alphabet came to the Romans from the Greeks via the Etruscans, but the Greeks and Romans pronounced the letter X differently. To account for this, I’ll be pulling from Greek Inscriptions by B.F. Cook and, in the same Reading the Past series, Etruscan by Larissa Bonfonte, as well as The Etruscans by Michael Grant

​Among the several broad dialects of Ancient Greek is Ionian, which would become the greater part of the Greek language that existed after all the dialects coalesced into Koine, literally “Common,” for you D&D nerds out there. So, we know that Ionian was a very influential dialect, but it had local alphabetical variants like Euboean, which is the one we’re concerned with. The “official” Ionian pronunciation of X is kh, which would be the case in Koine and modern Greek. But in Euboea (north of Athens and Thebes; the name means “good for cows), the sound values of Χ and Ψ were switched, probably because different places or peoples in Greece got their alphabet at different times from the Phoenicians after their native alphabet (a “syllabary” actually) from Crete died with the civilization that invented it. This detail is important because the first Greek folks to establish trade with the Etruscans, the inhabitants of northwestern Italy in a region called Etruria, north of Rome’s regions of Latium (hence, “Latin”) and Campania (hence, “campaign,” from where they held elections), were the Euboeans, particularly the Chalcidians from the island’s biggest city, Chalcis. With the Chalcidians where people from “Cyme,” a long-forgotten Euboean town, though it is possible (but quite unlikely) that these were from Cyme on the Greek coast of Turkey, called Ionia. From the people of Euboean Cyme came the name Cumae for the city that was the trading hub between Chalcidians and Etruscans. So, when the Etruscans got their alphabet from these Euboeans, X sound ed like ks, and the Romans would model their alphabet after the Etruscans’.

Actually, while we’re here, I’d like to also add that the Etruscans are the reason F in the Roman alphabet signifies the sound f, when its antecedent in Greek sounded like w. Whatever they called the letter themselves, there was a letter in Ancient Greek that didn’t make it into the alphabet, F, which we call “digamma,” because it looks like two stacked gammas, Γ. The Greeks didn’t actually have a letter for the sound f, because Φ, phi, wasn’t pronounced the way we do today as in, ironically, “phonetic,” but more like p-h. To the Greeks, the letter eta (H) was a vowel and the reason we use it as a consonant is that the Roman alphabet doesn’t have separate letters for long or short Os or Es (omega and omicron, epsilon and eta), so they were happy with E from epsilon and appropriated H as a consonant, h. That is all to say that the Etruscan spoken language had the sound f, but the Greek alphabet reflected the spoken Greek language, which at the time didn’t have that sound, so they approximated it in Greek letters as FH and the Romans made the first letter their symbol for f. In modern Greek, “Euboea” is pronounced “Evia” because “eu” makes ef, but “b” makes v, and f and v are linguistically similar sounds, so they’re contracted into the “stronger” sound, v.

AI Art
San Francisco-based artist Nathan Shipley uses AI to create generative art. Nathan uses AI to see what historical figures would look like if they were alive in our modern world.