ADAMANTIOS KORAES, AND HIS REFORMATION OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE. 59 



of whose love of books lay in his love of country, Koraes could not but look on this 

 double form of two mutually repellent streams of culture as a national misfortune of a 

 grave description ; if the nation was destined to start again before the world as a 

 political unity, and as the bearer of a proud intellectual inheritance, it could do so only 

 through the medium of a form of speech which united all classes in common sympathies 

 and common tendencies. The highest class must be taught to condescend to the lowest, 

 and the lowest to mount up to the highest, and make a harmony together, as musical 

 notes do when cunningly handled in the scale. Of course this could only be done in the 

 way of compromise ; a compromise in which, while the aristocratic element should forego 

 all affectation of obsolete classical forms, the democratic element should willingly submit 

 to the discipline of throwing off the more rank corruptions which had attached to it 

 through the long neglect of centuries. Such a compromise was a matter that required a 

 delicate touch, a refined taste, and a nice discrimination which only a man of accurate 

 learning and large popular sympathies could command ; and no individual man, however 

 great, could have achieved it, had he not been supported by the natural instincts and the 

 patriotic impulses of the people of whom he stood forth as the spokesman. Opposition, 

 of course, from extreme men of both parties, the representatives of the aristocratic few and 

 the apostles of the democratic many, could not but ensue ; and, in the hands of Doucas 

 Kodridas and others, the yXwaa-acov (rjrtjfxa, the battle of the tongues, was carried on for 

 some years with a violence scarcely intelligible now. The great argument from accom- 

 plished fact has prevailed ; and the reformed Greek style, in the main that of Koraes, has 

 asserted for itself a currency in literature, in the periodical press, in the national parlia- 

 ment, and in the national colleges and schools, more wide and more complete than the 

 poor Chiote scholar in his most hopeful moments could have dreamed. 



In order to give the purely classical scholar an exact idea of the nature of the 

 philological compromise thus so happily brought about, I will take the autobiography of 

 Koraes, written at Paris in December 1829, and published in the volume of which the 

 title is given below ;* and in the first ten pages — with about 33 lines in a page — I find 

 only twenty-two peculiarities of style that distinctly differentiate the modern Greek, under 

 the manipulation of Koraes, from the Greek of the classical age ; and these differences are, 

 in the great majority of cases, so slightly varied from the ancient style, that any intelligent 

 reader of Attic could master them in ten minutes. How slight this departure is from 

 the classical norm will be best understood from a specimen or two of the vulgar unreformed 

 dialect, as our great scholar found it current in his youthful days. Let us take first the 

 Erotocritus, a love novel in the Cretan dialect, by a Venetian Greek called Cornaro, 

 published at Venice in the year 1756, a work which at one time enjoyed an immense 

 popularity. Now, in the first eight lines of this " Homer of the vulgar philology," as 

 Koraes calls it, I find as many departures from the classical type as in the whole ten 

 pages of Koraes. Again, to take a type of the vulgar Greek less extreme than the Cretan 

 confessedly is, in a translation of the Arabian Nights, published at Venice in 1792, 1 find 



* ' ATra.i/fa<7ftx oeuTiQon iirta-cokuv A3 u.p. ctvriov Ko^otsj " ly ABvivxt;, 1841. 



