286 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON THE 



Having thus proved, by what may surely seem sufficiently strong arguments, 

 that accents mean nothing in Greek, which they do not equally mean in Eng- 

 lish, or Latin, or Italian, there remains only to take a bird's-eye view of the 

 somewhat remarkable literature of this subject, from the revival of letters 

 down to the present hour. Such a review will at once be the best justification 

 of the principles above set forth, and will place vividly before the reader the 

 partial and inadequate points of view from which the opposing doctrines have 

 taken their rise. 



Now, in tracing the stream of confusion which this matter exhibits to its 

 fountain head, it is most natural that we should, in the first place, turn to 

 Erasmus, both because he was the most prominent scholar of European reputa- 

 tion in the eventful age to which he belonged, and because it is quite certain that 

 before his time no learned man ever dreamt or could have dreamt of disown- 

 ing the pronunciation of the Greek language, which Europe had received as a 

 common legacy from the Constantinopolitan Greeks. The early scholars, indeed, 

 were occupied with matters of far more serious import than the exact accen- 

 tuation and quantification of syllables. They read the Greek books for the 

 information they contained : Herodotus for history, Strabo for geography, 

 Thucydides for political wisdom, Plato for philosophy, Aristotle for science. 

 So long as this appetite for the stores of Hellenic thought and knowledge was 

 the one thing needful, no man had either leisure or desire to put curious ques- 

 tions to himself with regard to the auricular luxury of a just orthoepy. 

 But the time' must come when this matter also would be examined : Homer 

 and Sophocles could not be read in their mother tongue by men who used 

 their ears as well as their eyes, without provoking questions as to the best 

 method of bringing out the full music of that most musical of human languages 

 which it was the happy fortune of these great poets to employ. If Greek was 

 the language of the gods, there seemed a manifest impiety in allowing it to be 

 enunciated by a confused, degraded, and irrational elocution. And, if such 

 questions were to be raised, Erasmus was precisely the man, who, from his fine 

 genius, cultivated taste, and broad human sympathies, was best fitted to raise 

 them. Accordingly, in the famous dialogue, " Be recta Latini, Grcecique 

 sermonis pronuntiatione," published at Basle in the year 1528, the whole subject is 

 brought under review ; and the text of his discourse is in the broadest terms, that 

 " nunc totafere pronuntiatio depravata est tarn apud Grcecos, quam apud Latinos " 

 and this is proved in a very exhaustive style in an argument extending to above 

 two hundred pages. The powers of the different letters are critically discussed, 

 and the relation of accent and quantity illustrated both by learned rules and 

 by living examples. With regard to the vowel sounds, which is the first point 

 handled, he had an easy task to prove that the slender sound the characteris- 

 tic of the Byzantine Greeks could not have been the original sound of so 



