PHILOLOGICAL GENIUS OF THE MODERN GREEK LANGUAGE. 25 
venient and so flexible as the infinitive certainly is, should have given place to 
the lumbering form of a conjunction with the subjunctive or indicative mood. 
But so it is; for even the Greeks in their best days said ofda @s or 6, instead 
of the less circuitous infinitive or participle ; and the Romans who, for a special 
class of cases well-known to schoolboys, had prescribed the accusative before 
the infinitive as the only form, before the time of St Augustine began pretty 
generally to say, Scio quod Petrus est vir doctus, or even guia, which is the 
mother of the French que and the Italian che. Whence the habit now so charac- 
teristic of modern Greek took its rise of using va (for iva), with the subjunctive 
instead of the old infinitive, it seems useless to inquire. I have sometimes 
thought it might be by a contagion caught from the Roman syntax ; but the 
relation of the two languages was of such a kind as to create a current of con- 
tagion from Greek upon Latin syntax (as indeed we see in Tacitus), rather 
than the reverse. I shall say, therefore, it was only a change of fashion ; 
certain it is that the partiality for wa with the subjunctive mood, appears 
already largely developed in the New Testament in cases where a classical ear 
feels the want of the familiar infinitive. But custom, which exercises a despotic 
authority in such matters, soon reconciles us to the change ; which indeed, 
when considered apart from the habit of the ear, is anything but an important 
one, and quite in harmony with the commonest grammatical phenomena, both 
in ancient and modern languages. When I say in English, for instance, Jt zs 
too bad that you should do so and so, 1 am merely using the modern Greek 
syntax of dewov va ra To.wdTa Kdpys for the classical dewdv 76 7a TovavTa oéye 
mpatrev ; and the apparently more awkward syntax, dia 76 va tpayOdou ravta, 
for 7paxOjvar tavTa, is again only the English on account of the fact that, and 
the Latin propterea quod. There is only one other amputation in the Greek 
classical verb which must be mentioned, for it is certainly the most grievous 
of all; I mean the loss of the future and the pluperfect, with the substitution 
therefor of the auxiliary verbs, #é\w or @d, and €ya. Now, it is no doubt true 
that the particle dv, so familiar in the classical dialect, and xe in Homer, could 
have been nothing in their origin but auxiliary verbs; and so 0a may plead a 
classical precedent. True also it is that the verb éyw is not unfrequently in 
the tragic writers joined with the past participle in a way that has some analogy 
to the function of an auxiliary verb; but it is in reality very different ; and as 
there is nothing in modern Greek that so offends the polite ear of the elegant 
scholar as the presence of these auxiliary verbs, it is matter of congratulation 
that the best modern writers know so rarely and so dexterously to use them, 
that the offence is practically reduced to a minimum, and with some writers 
appears to cease altogether. There is another characteristic of Neo-Hellenic 
prose closely allied to such essentially modern syntactic combinations ; I mean 
the use of such modern turns of speech as Baddow eis wpaéw, to put into execu- 
VOL. XXVII. PART I. G 
