GREEK LANGUAGE 



3680 



GREEK LANGUAGE 



many foreign intakes, to accommo- 

 date the quite new mind of Chris- 

 tianity. 



A literary language is formed by 

 one of a number of dialects estab- 

 lishing itself as supreme over com- 

 petitors. The most expressive wins, 

 but the power of expression is only 

 then put to the proof when men of 

 genius arise to make the inspiring 

 demand upon its possibilities. As 

 Latin among the ancient, as Tuscan 

 among the medieval Italian dia- 

 lects, so Ionic took the lead among 

 the Greek, because Homer was an 

 Ionian. But the great formative 

 authors a Dante or a Homer 

 borrow freely from other dialects ; 

 and the language, which eventually 

 establishes itself as central, as the 

 mother tongue, prevails by absorp- 

 tion as well as by exclusion. Both 

 these ways of selection belong to its 

 vigour. The language of Homer's 

 Iliad and Odyssey, as well as that 

 of Hesiod's Works and Days, has a 

 strain of Aeolic in it. 



Ionic and Attic 



Ionic, once hallmarked by 

 Homer, was further assured of 

 primacy by Archilochus (7th cen- 

 tury B.C.), a writer whom ancient 

 criticism regularly esteemed as 

 next only to him in greatness. And 

 through the intermediate stage of 

 Old Attic, Ionic emerges into the 

 eventual Attic which is in perfec- 

 tion during the period between 

 Pericles and Alexander. Thanks to 

 the genius of Pindar, Doric main- 

 tains itself in Lyric during the 5th 

 century ; but after that time the 

 mediums for composition are Attic, 

 for prose ; and for poetry, an arti- 

 ficial decorative diction. 



Attic is the most Greek of Greek, 

 and much that is commonly called 

 Greek is distinctively Attic. The 

 greatest legacy which Attic litera- 

 ture bequeathed to the world was 

 not the masterpieces of beauty, 

 crowded thick into two intense 

 centuries (from Aeschylus to 

 Menander is only three lifetimes), 

 but language perfected as a rea- 

 soning instrument. The essence of 

 Attic is that art and science 

 (which in a romantic view are 

 enemies) here are sisters : beauty 

 and truth, two names for one 

 ideal ; writing, just the best of talk 

 immortalised, having shed the 

 triviality, but kept the ease. Attic 

 may be said to culminate in Plato. 



But the qualities to which Attic 

 alone gave an intellectual deter- 

 mination are not absent from the 

 literature of the other dialects. 

 Sappho, whose reputation would 

 probably suffer if her complete 

 works were recovered, Alcaeus and 

 Alcman all have the sharpness of 

 touch which goes with high sensi- 

 bility. The beauty of good Greek 



is naked beauty, a grace of speech 

 like the grace of proportion in a 

 human body. These talents are 

 there, but only devoted to the con- 

 cerns of passion and of fancy ; 

 Athens applied them to discovery 

 and reasoning. 



The Greeks were unrivalled in 

 inventiveness ; they left no liter- 

 ary form undiscovered, if we ex- 

 cept such an essentially informal 

 composition as the Latin Satura, 

 which had no unity about it but 

 the author's personality. Yet even 

 here the Roman claim of originality 

 is doubtful. Forms have developed 

 and shifted ; what existed only in 

 miniature for them has been 

 executed on a great scale by mod- 

 erns (e.g. the psychological narra- 

 tive or novel of character). But it 

 is almost literally true to say that 

 one cannot point to any kind of 

 modern book from which it shall 

 not be possible to ascend by a legi- 

 timate strain of pedigree to a Greek 

 ancestry. Thus Greek is the perfect 

 field in which to study the curi- 

 ous laws (sketched by Brunetiere 

 and Ouvre, but not yet fully ex- 

 pounded) of the Development of 

 Forms in Literature. 



We find certain forms corre- 

 sponding to certain political epochs. 

 Wares must have a market. The 

 proper audience must exist. Hom- 

 eric epic presupposes an aristo- 

 cracy in whom the tradition of 

 heroic chivalry and patriarchal 

 polity still survives, at an interval 

 sufficient to suffuse historical out- 

 lines with legend. Drama requires 

 much intensity of city life for its 

 atmosphere ; it results from an 

 increasing pressure from prose, i.e. 

 poetry modifies itself into this 

 form in order to keep a hold on the 

 strictly intellectual purposes which 

 prose expressly exists for to prove 

 and to persuade. For tragedy is 

 poetical casuistry. 



Athenian Comedy 



The development of oratory be- 

 longs, of course, to democracy, a 

 condition when men need to go 

 armed in tongue and wit for their 

 safety. The New Comedy of 

 Manners is the entertainment of a 

 cultivated bourgeoisie, living se- 

 curely and serenely in a homo- 

 geneous society : the product of an 

 Athens which has retired from 

 being a great state. Greek genius 

 never invented a more catholic 

 form ; it could be acclimatised 

 anywhere. 



Just when tne literature of inde- 

 pendence had evolved its complete 

 round of manifestations, Mace- 

 donian imperialism provided the 

 royal courts of Seleucia, Perga- 

 mum, and (pre-eminently) Alex- 

 andria, to foster all that range of 

 productions for which democracy 



has no use : the Callimachean and 

 Theocritean schools of verse, the 

 methodic curiosities of science, and 

 the patient pieties of disinterested 

 inquiry, to which mankind owes 

 most of its knowledge of the past. 



At every stage in a history which 

 is motley with local diversities 

 (Hellas, though small in area, 

 having many centres or compart- 

 ments) and violently accidented 

 with revolution (for they were a 

 morally unstable people), the Greek 

 genius rose to the challenge of creat- 

 ing the literary monument proper 

 to that occasion. As their political 

 philosophy traced a necessary 

 cycle of politics from monarchy 

 through aristocracy plutocracy 

 democracy, to autocracy, so did 

 they actually exemplify the nor- 

 mal successions of literature. 

 The Transformation of Homer 



The forms continue duly to 

 ramify and recornbine them- 

 selves till every spark of vitality 

 was worked out, e.g. when epic 

 becomes impossible (because with 

 increasing refinement of detail, no 

 man's imagination can execute the 

 line of beauty on the colossal scale), 

 every element of epic yet persists, 

 but transformed. The emotion of 

 a Homeric battlepiece now vents 

 itself in a chorus or a rhesis of 

 tragedy, i.e. the stock is continued 

 by a cross with lyric in that case, 

 and rhetoric in this. Similarly, the 

 Homeric Aristeia takes new life as 

 the Epinikian ode. Selected out of 

 the general fabric of tradition, 

 those stories in which the law of 

 destiny and retribution is written in 

 letters of blood and fire, are now 

 enhanced to their full significance ; 

 and what has been a few lines of 

 detail in Homer becomes for 

 Aeschylus the Orestean trilogy. 



Here was a certain peculiar 

 quality of events when a super- 

 human power or scheme or law 

 cuts into the quick of human 

 affairs, to stultify pride ; it was 

 latent in the poetical mass. Greek 

 genius elicits it, gives it full relief, 

 appropriates the Dionysiac mum- 

 meries as pulpit or stage to mani- 

 fest it, and names it once for all 

 tragic. The same principle may be 

 traced in other successions ; of the 

 hymn, older than Homer, and now 

 too. exhausted to tempt ambition 

 any more, there yet survives some- 

 thing able by alliance with epini- 

 kian and rhetoric, to give birth 

 first to the patriotic rhetoric of 

 Herodotus' Chronicles, and later to 

 Isocrates' Panegyric. 



Tragedy itaelf has worked out its 

 possibilities with Euripides, but 

 it died only to come to life again in 

 New comedy. Even the peculiar, 

 inimitable Attic product, the Old 

 comedy, left descendants in satire 



