astonished at the multiplicity of languages which
they encountered during the Argonautic expedition, and that they were much
inconvenienced by the want of skilful interpreters.(60) We need not wonder
at this, for the English army was hardly better off than the army of
Jason; and such is the variety of dialects spoken in the Caucasian
Isthmus, that it is still called by the inhabitants "the Mountain of
Languages." If we turn our eyes from these mythical ages to the historical
times of Greece, we find that trade gave the first encouragement to the
profession of interpreters. Herodotus tells us (iv. 24), that caravans of
Greek merchants, following the course of the Volga upwards to the Oural
mountains, were accompanied by seven interpreters, speaking seven
different languages. These must have comprised Slavonic, Tataric, and
Finnic dialects, spoken in those countries in the time of Herodotus, as
they are at the present day. The wars with Persia first familiarized the
Greeks with the idea that other nations also possessed real languages.
Themistocles studied Persian, and is said to have spoken it fluently. The
expedition of Alexander contributed still more powerfully to a knowledge
of other nations and languages. But when Alexander went to converse with
the Brahmans, who were even then considered by the Greeks as the guardians
of a most ancient and mysterious wisdom, their answers had to be
translated by so many interpreters that one of the Brahmans remarked, they
must become like water that had passed through many impure channels.(61)
We hear, indeed, of more ancient Greek travellers, and it is difficult to
understand how, in those early times, anybody could have travelled without
a certain knowledge of the language of the people through whose camps and
villages and towns he had to pass. Many of these travels, however,
particularly those which are said to have extended as far as India, are
mere inventions of later writers.(62) Lycurgus may have travelled to Spain
and Africa, he certainly did not proceed to India, nor is there any
mention of his intercourse with the Indian Gymnosophists before
Aristocrates, who lived about 100 B. C. The travels of Pythagoras are
equally mythical; they are inventions of Alexandrian writers, who believed
that all wisdom must have flowed from the East. There is better authority
for believing that Democritus went to Egypt and Babylon, but his more
distant travels to India are likewise legendary.