LATEST PHASES OF LITERARY STYLE IN GREECE. 109 



absolute banishment from the current literary style of every trace of foreign infection, 

 such as used to be not uncommon in books some forty or fifty years ago. No man now 

 writes <t7t>jti (from hospitium) for oIkos, <f>afii\ia for oiKoyeveia, or fiairopi for a steamboat ; 

 even a tramway, the most recent of importations from England, is not a Tpa/j.a<s, but 

 iTnro<ri§>ipoSp6fj.os, a horse railway, which you may laugh at as too polysyllabic a word for 

 popular use-; but there it is, showing in the most determined fashion the instinct of the 

 uncorrupted Greek tongue to borrow from nobody, when everybody is found to borrow 

 from it. Taking even those types of the vulgar tongue, most of which do not appear in 

 the current literary style of the day, how insignificant are their divergencies, and not more 

 diverse from the style of Xenophon or the Greek plays, than the style of Xenophon or 

 iEschylus differs from the style of Homer. AeV for ovk, for instance, is merely a natural 

 curtailment for ovSev, — the accented syllable, according to a well-known law, being always 

 retained. Ow for ova-i in the third person plural, present indicative, of verbs, plainly 

 points to an old brotherhood with the Doric ovn and the Latin writ. The preference for 

 verbal forms in v, as in yjivw and Svv<a, is plainly Homeric ; the loss of the infinitive mood 

 and the optative, for which va for 'iva the subjunctive is regularly substituted, will cause 

 neither surprise nor difficulty ; -rod for avrov, and to for avrw, is rather an improvement ; 

 6 o-koios for o? and oamg, borrowed, no doubt, from the il quale of the Italian, has its 

 analogies in the which and the whilk of our old English ; and if els be used for £v, and 

 elvai for earn, and rjro for qv, these are mere grammatical peculiarities not greater than 

 what occur in Pindar, and in the choruses of the Greek drama. Not a few of what 

 certain nice modern scholars would call corruptions are no modern inventions at all, but 

 as old as the foundation of Constantinople, or older ; and such words, if formed accord- 

 ing to the native structure of the language, even though made yesterday, are not 

 corruptions, but expansions and enlargements of the Greek speech. If, for instance, the 

 modern Greek uses eixiropw for Suva/mat, he is as much entitled to do so as the ancients 

 were to use airopu> or ov Svvafxai. But that the lust of innovation is not a fault with 

 which modern Greek can largely be charged, is evident from the style of the New 

 Testament, in which ixeOicrravw takes the place of /xe6l<7Tr]/j.i, and Iva, with the sub- 

 junctive, habitually takes the place of the superseded optative, and not seldom also of 

 the infinitive mood. 



So much for the triumph of what we may call the style of restorative purism in the 

 current Greek language ; but there is a conservative party, and a party represented, as 

 such a party requires to be, under such hostile influences, by men of distinguished 

 literary eminence. And two such men, unquestionably, the party of the x<^°"' a 

 SidXeKTos can boast, Bikelas and Polylas — the one a writer well known to the students of 

 history by his excellent work on Christian Greece (Paisley, 1891), translated by the 

 Marquis of Bute, as also by his Greek versions of some of Shakespeare's best plays ; and 

 the other a Corfiote gentleman, who, besides a translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, has 

 given to the world a translation of Homer's Odyssey into Romaic. To give the 

 classical scholar an idea of the degrees of departure from classical correctness exhibited 



