PHILOLOGICAL GENIUS OF THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 2 
various influences, topographical, and commercial, and social, and political, 
to shake the language of the great mass of the illiterate masses loose from all 
precedent, and to favour the growth of a corrupt and hybrid dialect, which, 
with the aid of favourable circumstances, might in due season shape itself, like 
the barbarous Latin of the middle ages, into a new language. Of this we have 
happily the most distinct and clear evidence in the two short poems of the 
monk THEODORE PTOCHOPRODROMUS, written in the popular dialect, and ad- 
dressed to the Emperor MANveEt, who came to the throne in the year 1145. 
These poems are composed, not only, like the Annals of CoNSTANTINE MANASSES, 
who wrote about the same period, with a total disregard of the old classical 
rhythmical laws, but with a phraseology, and in a style so corrupt and so hybrid, 
that, even after the lights thrown on the work by Du Cancz, Korags, and other 
scholars, not a few passages still remain obscure, and would be much more 
so were it not that the Latin, which forms one of the chief corrupting elements, 
is a language with which the readers of Byzantine Greek are generally familiar, 
Proposition VI.—We must not suppose, however, from the fact of THEODORE, 
or any other stray writer of the Byzantine period, having taken it into his head 
to write a book or two of verses in the corrupt popular dialect, that this dialect 
had at that time asserted for itself a place, and received a certain recognition in 
the world of books. Quite the contrary. In those dreary days, there arose 
no popular genius to stamp the popular dialect with a certain character of 
limited classicality ; but even had the Byzantines of those times had strength 
to produce a Burns, the traditional Greek of the court, the Church, and all 
educated intellects, was too strong to allow a mere lyrical variety, fostered in 
the hotbed of barbarism and corruption, to claim for itself more than a very 
little corner m a very large vineyard. The consequence was, that while the 
lower stratum of the spoken language was ripening from day to day into the 
well-marked form of a new dialect, or even a new language, it does not appear 
to have advanced a single step out of its ignored position as a literary organ, 
from the time of THEODORE down to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks 
in 1453. Byzantine Greek was classical Greek from beginning to end, with 
only such insignificant changes as altered circumstances, combined with the 
law of its original genius, naturally produced. 
Proposition VII.—By the fall of the last Pataonocus, the bond of amity 
which held the motley provinces of the Byzantine Empire together was broken ; 
one of the two strong external links that connected the degraded present with 
the glorious past was snapped ; and with the ruin of the Greek Empire, if the 
example of the Western Empire was to be a precedent, the death of the Greek 
language might naturally be expected to follow. But this result did not follow, 
