I’m reading Arrian’s Anabasis of Alexander, and in the section detailing the jobs given to Alexander’s friends who were exiled on his behalf during Phillip’s reign, he says that Alexander appointed “Eriguios as cavalry commander of the allies, and his brother Laomedon (who was bilingual) commander of the barbarians taken in war.” I’m assuming that “allies” in this context means Greek troops, and “barbarians” means any non-Macedonians or Greeks? So what does “bilingual” mean in this context— what language are we supposed to understand Laomedon as speaking that is valuable? Is it Greek, or would speaking Greek be assumed for cavalry-class Macedonians (or was the native Macedonian language of the time similar enough to Greek to be interoperable?) If it were Greek, wouldn’t it make more sense to put him in charge of Greek-speaking troops? Or are we supposed to assume barbarian=mostly Persian at this point, and assume he speaks Persian?
More generally, I’d be grateful for any resources someone could point me to on multilingualism at the time— what kinds of people would speak what second languages, where did translators come from, etc.
Thank you!
Good question. Strictly speaking, we don't know. You assume right about the "allies." Arrian uses summachos, meaning "ally," to refer to the Greeks and Macedonians throughout his Anabasis. We don't know exactly what the ancient Macedonian language was like, but it's generally thought to be either a dialect of Greek or a closely related Hellenic language. They were not always mutually intelligible but they were usually presented as close by ancient authors.
I assume you're reading the Landmark Arrian translated by Pamela Mensch since that's what came up when I googled the quote. It sticks reasonably close to the original Greek, but the original is what we need to answer this question. I've bolded the section we're interest in:
Ἐριγύϊον δὲ ἱππάρχην τῶν ξυμμάχων, Λαομέδοντα δὲ τὸν τούτου ἀδελφόν, ὅτι δίγλωσσος ἦν ἐς τὰ βαρβαρικὰ γράμματα, ἐπὶ τοῖς αἰχμαλώτοις βαρβάροις.
A lot of that bolded section is verbs and modifiers - mostly the short words - and you might have a guess at the meaning of barbarika even in Greek (barbaric/barbarian as an adjective). That second word diglossos would literally mean "two tongued," as in "two languages" as an adjective to describe Laomedon. The last word in bold is grammata and I think that's probably the crucial word here. It means "writing."
So a kind of literal, unwieldy translation would be:
Erguios commanded the cavalry of the allies; Laomedon his brother, who was two-tongued in the barbaric writing, was over the captive barbarians.
Arrian's exact wording leaves it kind of open to interpretation if Laomedon could speak two languages at all or could just read two of them. "Barbarians," is hardly specific. It just means non-Greeks. In ancient Greek literature this could refer to foreign peoples in general or whatever specific non-Greek group the author was talking about in the moment. It all depends on context. In this case, the context is Alexander's army preparing to leave Egypt in Spring 331 BCE.
Up to that point, Alexander had fought all sorts of "barbarians," ranging from Bactrian cavalry to Persian Immortals to local levies from Lydia, Phoenicia, Syria, and Gaza, but the majority of those taken as prisoners of war probably fell in that last category. Those people would just have made up the bulk of the available manpower to resist Alexander and we know that the cavalry and the Immortals/royal honor guard retreated with Darius III after the Battle of Issus.
This lines up nicely with Arrian's "barbaric writing." The Persian empire was a huge place, spanning dozens of ethnic groups and languages, but communication across that vast domain was standardized in Aramaic - a language that had emerged from the Arab-Syrian desert at the end of the Bronze Age and spread throughout the region before becoming a language of commerce under the Assyrian Empire. By the time the Persians took over, Aramaic was already the lingua franca for trade in the western half of their Empire and they simply adopted it. Official letters from Persian satraps to the garrisons even within a province that didn't speak aramaic in day to day life, like Egypt, were written in Aramaic. When a royal proclamation like the Behistun Inscription was disseminated to the wider Empire, it was translated into Aramaic. When there was no local writing system to keep records in, as in Bactria, scribes were trained in Aramaic.
There was a Persian writing system, in a cuneiform-style alphabet, but that never seems to have spread beyond Persia and Media. The most widespread "barbaric writing" the Greeks under Alexander would have been familiar with was Aramaic. Whether Laomedon could speak Aramaic fluently is up to how you interpret Arrian's phrasing, but it definitely indicates that he could read and write. Given that his new charges were all former members of a Persian army, written orders in Aramaic translated into their local languages through intermediary officers was probably already a familiar system.
More can be said, but in the meantime, we have a FAQ section about how people in the past learned languages. In particular, you'd enjoy: