La lingua creola del demos. Sul Vecchio Oligarca (Ath. resp. 2,8) e sui significati sociopolitici del plurilinguismo nel pensiero greco

In [Xen.] Ath. resp. 2, 8 the Old Oligarch attributes to the Athenians a kekramene phone, built with elements taken from «all the Greeks and barbarians» (here ‘Athenians’ means ‘urban demos’, and this situation is considered the result of a conscious choice). Al-though inserted in the section on the advantages of thalassocracy, this kekramene phoneis not seen an advantage, as some commentators have thought. Nor does it have a gener-al derogatory value against the demos, in order to qualify it as ‘ignorant’. As it is shown by the analysis of the Greek attitude towards individual multilingualism and creolization, the kekramene phoneattributed to the Athenian demos is a way of stating that the Athe-nian demos is no longer Greek, perhaps even that they betrayed the Greeks for the barba-rians, and certainly to equate the demos to a mass of slaves (in the Greek world of clas-sical age slaves are the multilingual ones par excellence), just as urban demos is assimilated to slaves in 1, 10-12: this is functional to the ideal of enslavement of the de-mos, envisaged by the Old Oligarch in 1, 8-9.