GREEK LANGUAGE 



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GREEK LANGUAGE 



and lampoon. With the Greeks no 

 mood was ever at a loss for means 

 of expression. The typical ex- 

 perience of Greece has at least 

 taught us a few principles ; such 

 as, that great lyric and great ora- 

 tory do not belong to the same age 

 (since they are alternative modes) ; 

 and that in times of great scientific 

 discovery poetry will be mainly 

 decorative. 



The Growth of Prose 



What marks the definite triumph 

 of the Ionian in the competition 

 for intellectual headship and 

 spokesmanship of Greece, is the 

 institution of prose. Poetry had 

 attained to a very high range of 

 facility, and had successfully dis- 

 charged the functions of pleading 

 and arguing besides its peculiar 

 birthright of expressing mood, 

 impulse, and the pride of life, while 

 as yet nobody ventured the idea 

 that language could be artistically 

 beautiful and yet released from 

 metre ; release from a discipline or 

 a constraint is how the Greek con- 

 ceived this momentous revolution, 

 the development of prose. 



The discoverers of the Iambic 

 had given to versified thought the 

 lightest, easiest, most unaffected 

 uniform that it could wear until the 

 stern convention of artistic dignity 

 was broken. But there came a mo- 

 ment when thought rebelled. It 

 was as though some Chinese decree 

 which ordained dancing as the only 

 ceremonial mode of progression, 

 were abrogated in favour of walk- 

 ing. The motive was the scientific 

 curiosity which characterises the 

 Ionian mind : it was Ionian phil- 

 osophers and historians who made 

 a new intellectual instrument out of 

 unmetrical language, a medium 

 hitherto reserved at best for annals, 

 registers, etc., which might form 

 the materials of history, and for 

 the informal sayings and conversa- 

 tions of sages who professed no 

 systematic theory. 



Prose does not appear until the 

 6th century B.C., a round hundred 

 years after Archilochus ; and it 

 does not impose itself at once as 

 necessary in philosophy. Xeno- 

 phanes (born c. 580), and long 

 after him, Parmenides (c. 520) and 

 Empedocles (c. 484), wrote in 

 verse. But all the historians, from 

 Cadmus and Pherecydes onward, 

 used the new medium. 



During the greatest period (the 

 5th century B.C.), as is usual at high 

 pouits of civilization, we find Greek 

 poetry and prose closely approxi- 

 mating. The reconciling force was 

 rhetoric, i.e. the study of style. 

 The systematic analysis of language 

 was begun in Sicily by Corax and 

 Teisias ; but the first great masters 



of self-conscious prose are Gorgias, 

 Thrasymachus, Antiphon, and the 

 other Sophists. They developed 

 the effectiveness of language for 

 argument and appeal by principles 

 which are of fundamental validity. 

 Earliest professors of dialectic 

 and literature, under their influ- 

 ence the dividing line between 

 prose and verse was narrowed down 

 to actual metre ; prose even as- 

 sumed the emotional rhythm ; and 

 verse (dramatic) was refined away 

 from the pomp of Aeschylus to the 

 discreet pliancy of Sophocles ; and 

 this approximation continued as 

 long and in so far as poetry con- 

 tinued to be a form of action at all, 

 i.e. concerned with proving or per- 

 suading. A great prose writer like 

 Thucydides has a poetical imagina- 

 tion ; a great poet like Euripides 

 has a scientific intellect. 



But a century later and the two 

 diverge again : poetry, now made 

 wholly to please, " dresses up " 

 without regard to common usage. 

 Prose, devoted to science, in the 

 hands of Aristotle's school, be- 

 comes almost as exact and disim- 

 passioned an instrument as algebra. 

 Indeed, there is no modern science 

 which might not conveniently use 

 Greek as a language, adequate to 

 all its requirements in facility and 

 accuracy. From the 4th century 

 B.C. onward prose prevails : no 

 books that deeply changed any- 

 body's mind were written in verse 

 henceforth. 



The Koine Dialektos 



But after the loss of Athenian in- 

 dependence there is both a general 

 decline in creative power and also a 

 disestablishment of Attic from its 

 position of dominance. The new 

 capitals form new local centres, of 

 which Alexandria is the chief. To 

 correct this artistic decentraliza- 

 tion, natural necessity evoked a 

 new Lingua Franca, the Koine 

 Dialektos, a federative language, as 

 though English, American, and 

 Pidgin-English were to coalesce 

 nowadays. 



It was cheap Greek, preserving 

 somewhat of the readiness and fru- 

 gality of Attic as an instrument, 

 but more or less discoloured by con- 

 tact with non-Hellenic on the 

 fringes of the Mediterranean world ; 

 Greek written by and for Jews, 

 Egyptians, Syrians, Italians, etc. 

 Undistinguished rather than de- 

 graded, it offered the prose-artist 

 no adequate means of refined crafts- 

 manship. It was a medium out of 

 which hardly anything but religious 

 inspiration could make style. 



Consequently, though serious 

 writers, such as Polybius, Plu- 

 tarch, Marcus Aurelius, used this 

 ordinary Greek as it came to their 



hand, Latinisms, barbarisms, neo- 

 logisms, and all, without nicety, 

 and never found themselves 

 cramped for expression, more con- 

 scious stylists began as early as the 

 1st century A.D. to write a literary 

 Greek, studiously learned from 

 classical models, for their orna- 

 mental purposes. There were 

 several waves of such Atticism, 

 conscious renascences of an obso- 

 lete fashion worked by academic 

 aristocracies ; the most famous is 

 that to which Dion of Prusa(c. A.D. 

 40-117), Lucian (c. A.D. 125-185), 

 a Syrian, and the Philostrati (c. 

 A.D. 150-250) belong. The Atticist 

 renascences, and likewise all the 

 poetry produced after the downfall 

 of Athenian liberty, addressed 

 themselves to learned coteries, not 

 to the general average of an intelli- 

 gent bourgeoisie as before. 



Literature, it has been said, be- 

 came now a chamber concert for 

 virtuosi. Thus there is a regular 

 barrier between, on the one hand, 

 the poetry of Callimachus, Eu- 

 phorion, the Anthology Little 

 Masters, or the prose of Lucian and 

 Alciphron ; and on the other, the 

 New Testament (on its literary 

 side) and the popular propagandism 

 of such sects as Cynicism. 



In the Greek Romances we 

 have a singular phenomenon : an 

 essentially un- Attic, only half Hel- 

 lenic thing, neglected all through 

 the classical period, and finally 

 taken up into polite literature in 

 the period of Atticist renascence. 

 These stories, coming so late as 

 they did, and so evidently creatures 

 begotten in senility, have yet exer- 

 cised a far greater influence on 

 later literatures than any other 

 product of the Greek genius after 

 Plutarch. The poem of Nonnus 

 (Dionysiaca in 48 books), produced 

 more than 1,200 years after Homer 

 in the Homeric!convention of dic- 

 tion, is an extraordinary literary 

 fact. Here, far down the centuries, 

 was a Syrian in Egypt, inditing an 

 epic which is despised only because 

 the past brilliance of Greece ob- 

 scures it. 



Procopius and S. Romanes 



A sort of final spasm takes place 

 in the epoch of Justinian when 

 Procopius in history, and Palladas 

 in epigram, show themselves com- 

 petent still to employ intelligently 

 the literary machineries of 1,000 

 years earlier ; and at the same 

 period the Eastern Church as- 

 tonishes us by breaking out into a 

 Christian lyrism. S. Romanes (b. 

 c. A.D. .500) is an original poet, 

 1,000 years after Pindar ; and 

 from the fountain which he struck 

 out, a stream runs far into the 

 Middle Ages, and by devious 

 channels eventually finds its way 



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