Ancient and Modern Greek

THE progress of civilization may be compared to the ancient torch-race. The nations have succeeded one another like the runners. As one sinks exhausted, another grasps the torch and carries it forward. The light brightens and pales, but never quite goes out. The chief interest of the student of history must always be centred on these successive leaders. We wish to know not merely the tale of their brief triumph. It is at least as important to understand their earlier training, and to see how they were fitted for that high honor. Did their very greatness contain within itself the seeds of quick decay, or is their decline due to outward and accidental causes? Can we imitate what was best in their attainment, and yet avoid the rocks on which they made shipwreck ?

But the exhausted runners regain the lead no more. When once their chief part is played, their subsequent story is of subordinate interest. Some types of men vanish suddenly, some decay slowly, others are cast in new moulds; but the former glory never returns.

To the Greek we owe far more than to any other of the long line who have handed down the sacred fire. Received by him from the Orient, it grew infinitely brighter and more precious before it passed from his slowly relaxing hand. Yet even for the Greek the supreme hour of destiny struck but once.

We are eager to know more of the beautiful childhood of the Hellenic race. We are permitted to see, like a landscape revealed by a flash of lightning, the picture of the Homeric age. Then, after centuries of impenetrable darkness, Herodotos unrolls before us the varied scenes of Hellenic life in his day, and something like connected history begins. But as for the long story of their wanderings from the far Aryan home, we can at best only guess it out vaguely from the bits of ethnic history left imbedded and preserved in language, like straws in amber. Where and when they first reached the blue Ægean, which was to be the amphitheatre of their exploits ; whence they received the first impulse to artistic creation ; out of what happy mixture of races, under what combination of sun and sea and air, the Ionian type arose, with its love of beauty, its delight in life, its reverent fearlessness even toward the divine beings ; how it happened that the Greek, first of mankind, cast off the fetichistic dread of the blind forces of nature, — all this we can never hope to know. It is not strange that students, in their eager quest for historic fact, have attempted to analyze those loveliest creations of the Hellenic imagination, the myths ; though they may as well attempt to analyze the sunshine and golden haze that still cling unchanged about the capes and islands of the Archipelago, —the sunshine and haze from which the lovely shapes of Kalypso and Leukothea and Thetis sprang, and out of which they still rise for him who brings thither an Hellenic imagination.

But why is our interest in the beginnings of Hellenic history so intense ? Why are the inscriptions of Egypt and Babylonia scrutinized so eagerly for the slightest hint of the earlier life of the children of Ion? What gives the highest value to myth and legend, and even to the great tale of Troy itself? Simply this : that these were the first fruits of that race which culminated in the Athens of Perikles, and produced there the poets, orators, architects, and sculptors who are still among our noblest teachers.

All the highest powers of the Greek race found free scope and development in the city of Perikles. Yet even as the roots of that greatness lay deep in the past, so its fruits were largely gathered in the next generations. We are slow to admit that Praxiteles, or Plato, or Demosthenes, merely marks a period of decline ; but certainly before the fourth century closes the highest mission of the Greek is done. Henceforth the eyes of the noblest Hellenes themselves are turned in proud regret backward toward the more glorious past. The Greek long continues to play a part in the drama of history, but only the tale from the struggle with the Persian to the last stand against Philip, from Aischylos to Demosthenes, is our κτημɑ ϵς ɑϵι, — the one priceless heritage of humanity. With Chaironeia the age of heroes is closed. The rest of the tale is merely one leaf in the vast record of human life.

Above all other men, more even than the Venetian or the Tuscan, the Athenian was an artist, a shaper. The commonest materials could take only forms of delicate symmetry under his hands. Outward nature gains fresh meaning when seen through his eyes. Above all, the life of man rounds into a complete drama, — a thing of beauty, its own sufficient excuse for being.

What is true of all else which the Athenians shaped — their architecture, their sculpture, their tragedy—is peculiarly true of their language. It is the most delicate, harmonious, artistic form of expression that ever lived on the lips of men. When we talk of the study of Greek, we mean, first and chiefly, the dialect and literature of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C.

As long as men escape from the turmoil of the workaday world, and strive to live the intellectual and contemplative life at all, there will always be some who will reverence what is noble and beautiful in the far-away past. As Socrates says, “ The treasures of the wise of old, which they have left recorded in their scrolls, my friends and I unroll and con together, culling whatever good we find, and counting it a great gain, if thereby we grow dear one to another.” Perhaps it will not matter so much, after all, if the throng of callow striplings sent up every year to the university shall no longer have made Xenophon’s romance of the March to the Sea a corpus vile for painful grammatical dissection. It will be just as true as before that an earnest student of language, or of literature, must always find in Attic Greek the very crown and glory, the very heart and soul, of his desire. The true lovers of Greek will hardly be fewer or less earnest. To take a fair parallel case, there are some to whom the great Tuscans are the closest of friends. And how many of those who say to Dante, “Tu sei lo mio maestro e il mio autore ! ” would wish to hear the Italian tongue (or even the Commedia itself!) taught in every girls’ boarding-school, after the same fashion as French is now treated there ? Perhaps those who can love the grim Tuscan will be sure to find their way to him ; neither he nor Aischylos is within the reach of school-children.

In the endless array of later writers, from Aristotle on, there is no longer anything peculiarly beautiful or noble in the mere form of expression. The life and color have suddenly faded out of words. The syntax is growing stiff and artificial. And the reason is not far to seek. Attic was so strong because it was alive. Its literary forms had their roots deep and firm in the spoken language of the day. We hear at least the echo of that living dialect of the Athenian streets in the lighter Platonic dialogues, in Aristophanes’ iambics, in Xenophon’s recollections of his master’s conversations, in pleas like the first oration of Lysias, which is put into the mouth of a simple peasant. It could not be an ignoble nor a stagnant dialect, any more than Elizabethan English could be ; for in it the thoughts and aspirations of a free, enlightened, ambitious people were hourly striking out for themselves fresh and fit forms of expression. It was in this same living dialect, refined and ennobled but living still, that even Oidipous and Antigone appealed straight to the hearts of all Athens.

But the very greatness of Attic helped to check all vigorous growth thereafter. As the life of Hellas became more and more ignoble, its dialects inevitably shared in the general decline. They were by no means incapable of cultivation, as the example of Theokritos sufficiently proves. But the writers chose instead to ape the Attic masters. In thus becoming the universal literary model, Attic became conventional and artificial ; that is, dead ! Any one who has occasion to read much Greek of, say, the second century A. D. must feel that most of it is as artificial, and not half so clever, as the Attic of Professor Jebb. Even at its best, in Lucian, we have simply a laborious, scholarly patchwork, made up by studying ancient authors. Of course Pausanias the traveler, for example, could read a whole library of classics now lost; and besides his avowed quotations, he overflows with precious material drawn from them. But his own Greek, as Greek, is poor, clumsy stuff. He cannot handle it easily enough to make himself intelligible; not because he is dull or ignorant, but because he is trying to compose in a dead language.

There is no need to continue further on a line of argument which no Philhellene enjoys following. Even in Byzantine Greek there is a ghastly likeness to Greek. A mummy is horribly human still. A race that, sinking lower and lower with the centuries, became the slaves of the Roman, the Venetian, and at last of the Ottoman, could not but drag its language down with it into that utter degradation.

Nevertheless, the existence of the Greek race and language on the shores and islands of the Levant has been an unbroken one down to our own time. This of itself, to men of mixed blood and recent national origin like ourselves, is a strange and stirring thought. The Ægean was a Greek lake thirty centuries ago. It is essentially a Greek lake to-day. The Hellenic race amalgamated readily with many of the races with which it came in contact; but eventually they were all assimilated, and the resulting type was Hellenic still. It is not to be denied that Phₓnician, Carian, Macedonian, Roman, Slavic, Venetian blood flows in the veins of the Ægean islanders : but they are all Greeks, nevertheless.

This is also true of the language. Though it has of course borrowed words, the substructure and frame have remained Hellenic. The changes have been many and radical. It has reached an advanced stage of disintegration and decay, but those changes, that decay, have come almost wholly from within. Nor has the consciousness of a nobler past ever been wholly ground out of the people. Even in the bitterest degradation of Turkish slavery the Rayahs have at least held firm to the Orthodox Greek Church; and in the monasteries and among the higher clergy some faint sparks of classical culture still lingered. All this did not, indeed, keep the various dialects of the Levant from sinking to their natural level. They became — some of them still are — the rude, meagre patois which the serfs of the Ottoman would naturally employ ; but they were not driven out, nor radically affected, by the language of their conquerors. When the effort to educate the Romaic Rayahs and revive a national spirit began, under Koraës’ lead, a hundred years ago, the natural way to fashion a uniform language was to return to somewhat older forms, — or, perhaps more truly, to teach the people the written language of the more cultivated. This effort to push their language backward has indeed been carried to a ridiculous and unnatural extent in more recent times, as we shall see. Even at the beginning, the golden opportunity to introduce a simple phonetic spelling should have been seized. The so-called diphthongs, the three accents, and other pedantic lumber should have been thrown overboard once for all. But in itself the movement of Koraës was not only patriotic, it was natural and necessary.

The wonderful awakening of intelligence which began then has continued to the present day, gathering strength steadily, as the grasp of the Turk relaxes and the Christian islanders multiply and grow prosperous : and always their strongest desire is to get rid of their provincial patois and master a dialect intelligible to all, — the dialeet of free Greece.

Our first acquaintance with living Greeks was in Mitylene, where they greatly outnumber the Turks and are exceptionally prosperous. We were filled with wonder that, despite the heavy and vexatious taxes levied on them by the Turks, they could support their local church, hospital, and other organized charities, and still devote so much money and energy to the education of their children. Among the Rayahs of Mitylene are many educated gentlemen. Their gymnasium is thoroughly organized, and apparently carried on by competent scholarly teachers. What we saw there is to be seen in all the larger islands where Greeks are numerous and prosperous. Afterward, in the interior of Lesbos, in cities of the mainland like Pergamon, and especially in little villages of the Troad, we came to know a much humbler and a more ignorant class of Rayahs. But everywhere there was the same craving for knowledge. A ragged, grizzly old fellow, almost a beggar, who had spent a number of hours in guiding us to the ruins of “ Chigri,” refused to accept money, but begged us, when we reached Athens, to send him a book from which his little boy could learn “ the good Greek.” The dialects which these Rayahs are so eager to abandon are of course debased and meagre ; they are overloaded with Turkish and Italian words ; but so far as we could get to understand them the bulk of the roots seemed still of recognizable Hellenic origin.

The little kingdom of Greece, and especially the University of Athens, is naturally enough the heart of this growing intellectual life. Thither hundreds of the young islanders flock to complete their education. This current to and from Athens is of course utilized also as a means of political agitation, and throughout the Ægean the insular Greeks look forward to the day which shall unite them to the subjects of King George. In this truly national movement there is much hope for the future. Like the other Christian races who are or have been for centuries held captive by the Turkish army of occupation in Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, the Greeks are organizing to fill the place of their captors, when their rule shall be allowed to break down. Even the jealousy of the great powers cannot forever prop the fallen strength nor prolong the slow death of the sick man of Europe; and whenever the day long expected shall come, it will be well if the Rayah races are enlightened, united, and courageous enough to hold firmly as freemen the lands they have so long dwelt in as slaves. Perhaps even the wildest dream of Greek national pride may yet be realized, and Constantinople, the bone of contention of the European powers, become the capital of a confederacy of the Christian races once subject to Ottoman tyranny : and of that league the Greeks may yet prove themselves worthy to hold the hegemony.

Unhappily, this young national life has not been allowed to develop naturally. A good deal of the mischief has been done by the sentimental Philhellenes. Much of Byron’s poetry is an example of what we mean. They insist upon seeing in the uprising in the Morea and the foundation of Otho’s little kingdom a miraculous resurrection of the “ glorious Greeks of old.” This sentimental fancy has actually invaded the diplomatic world, and has been persistently advanced (and no less seriously combated) as the ground of Greece’s claim to freedom and protection from her old masters.

Now to the modern Greek himself this feeling is utterly unnatural, and indeed hardly intelligible. Slave or free, lie is a true son of the Rayahs. His tastes, his aspirations, his faults, his beliefs, his language, are theirs. He hates the Turk with a perfect hatred, and longs to be lord where he has cringed and cowered so long. His Homer is the ballads of the Klephts (the brigands who from the fifteenth century on took to the mountains and defied the Ottoman, who was absolute lord of the coast and plain). He is attached to the organization and ritual of the Orthodox Greek Church, because it was the one bond of national union through the bitter past, and is still the strongest tie between enslaved and free Greece today. But the Hellenic past beyond that is infinitely more remote and unreal to him than it is to ourselves. Indeed, there is something pitiful in our earnest seeking, with Byron at the van, for the heirs of our Greeks in the Orient of to-day. We ourselves of the Occident are their heirs in the only possible sense. On Keats and Shelley and Byron himself the mantle of Anakreon and Simonides falls.

But the nineteenth-century Greek has at least this much of the blood of Odysseus and Themistokles in his veins : he is never slow to see his own advantage, and use the foibles of other men for securing it. Too weak, even if brave enough, to carve out a future for himself with the sword, perceiving clearly that only the capricious good-will of the powers can make him strong, he is quite ready, for that good end, to pose as the living representative of the Athenian of Perikles’ day. (Indeed, the removal of the capital to Athens is hardly defensible on any other than this sentimental ground.) The whole play is largely a farce in his eyes. The enthusiastic Philhellene is a benevolent madman to him, but a madman whom it is worth while to humor. He has learned that the Occidental pilgrim will welcome a fine old classical Greek word as enthusiastically as a rare old coin, and is quite ready to pay full value for both. If you ask an Athenian the Greek equivalent for an English word, he holds it his patriotic duty to give you the very best, that is to say, the very oldest word he knows ; and he makes himself and you believe that if it is not now the expression in ordinary use it ought to be, it soon will be, and any way every intelligent Greek would understand it perfectly. Even the shepherd boy on the Arcadian hills is catching the trick, and if you ask the name for his donkey he answers, “ Well, we say gathouráki, but the good word is onos ! ”

Of course we do not mean to say that the revival of classical and archæological studies in modern Greece has no higher motive than this. There is much real love of study there, and ancient Greek is as naturally the centre and backbone of all philology for them, is as absolutely essential to the comprehension of their vernacular, as Latin is for the Italians. Moreover, the actor always identifies himself more or less with his rôle. They themselves have come almost to believe that after all they can offer us a pretty good revival, if not survival, of the character, the manners, and particularly of the language of Periklean Athens.

The effect of all this on their language is peculiarly disastrous. The educated and half-educated Athenians, and especially the newspaper writers, are engaged in a frantic attempt to back their unwilling vernacular off toward a supposed classical stage (of which they have no real comprehension), at the rate of about a century every year. Of course the natural result follows. They are pulling their literary language up by the roots. However delightful and intelligible this jargon may be to the sentimental pilgrim to Athene’s shrine or Paul’s pulpit, it is utterly meaningless to the honest native mechanic, tradesman, and sailor. As we have said, this is being done, at least partly, in good faith and earnest. If you ask a fairly educated young Greek about his language, he will talk to you as fluently and almost as sincerely as Dr. Schliemann or Professor Blackie, in about this strain : —

“ You are dreaming in the Occident that the classical Greek language is dead. You should come to us and learn that it is yet living. It has indeed cast off a few antiquated cumbrous forms, — the dual number, the -μι conjugation, the middle voice ; but that has only renewed its vigor. The few Italian and Turkish words which disfigured it have long ago been driven out. You need only spend a few months in acquiring it from living Greeks, and you will then read Xenophon and Herodotos without any drudgery, and will see that our language and classical Attic are essentially identical. All Greek literature will be alive to you as it never was before. Only you must first unlearn your horrible Erasmian pronunciation, and speak Greek as the Greeks do and always have. Surely we know best how to speak our own language ! ”

It is the song of the Sirens ! It promises us the lost youth of the world again !

Our own conviction we shall state frankly. Languages, like almost everything else, are made over from older elements. As fast as words are needed, they are borrowed and adapted, not created. But there are no miraculous survivals in this world. The heroic spirit of free Greece is separated from us by many centuries of slow decay, and finally by three or four of the lowest degradation. If the ancient language had indeed survived to our day, it would be a millstone about the neck of a modern people. But it is not true; for a language can live only upon the lips of those who speak it as the natural expression of their thoughts and aspirations. The spirit of it fled at once when Freedom perished. Slow decay sapped its foundations year by year ever after. From the crumbled materials the degenerate Rayahs easily shaped the dialects that answered to their humble needs.

Out of that fiery furnace of slavery a young national life has come forth. If it is a vigorous and stable existence, if it can develop unfettered by any foreign dictation, whether ancient or modern, German or Hellenic, the Future belongs to it: but “pas de rêves, messieurs,” the Past belongs to the dead. Neither Constantinople, nor greatness in any form, will ever fall to them on sentimental grounds, as the heirs of old Hellas.

And as for their language, it should keep its foundations deep and firm in the living speech of their folk. Let worn-out and meaningless pedantries go. As fast as new words are really needed, let them use the materials of the ancient language as from a quarry, not imagining the stately structure still stands, either intact or slightly out of repair. If then great authors finally arise to shape their living idiom into forms of permanent literary value, their life will have become a part of the intellectual life of mankind.

It is well known that Dante began the composition of his poem in Latin. He loved the past as only the scholar and the poet can ; but he had a stirring message to speak to living men, and he saw, reluctantly but clearly, that he must use the words of the present. Done into the language of Virgil, the Commedia would have passed long ago to the same limbo with the epics on which Petrarca built his hopes of immortal fame. Cast in the mould of the lingua volgare, it helped to create in Italy a more vigorous, because a more native, literature than that of Rome, and has vitally influenced poetic forms ever since.

It is fortunate that the loftiest of the poets has thus recorded his perception of the truth, that a great poem can be cast only in the mould of a living language. A man can speak to the afterworld only in his mother-tongue.

The question is often asked us, Is it worth while to learn modern Greek as an introduction to the study of the ancient tongue ? Perhaps the remaining paragraphs of this necessarily rambling essay may be best grouped into an answer to this query.

In the first place, the problem is a double one. Do you mean the “ newspaper Greek,” which is cultivated at Athens for the especial edification of foreigners, or do you mean the living language of the common people throughout the Levant ?

The native teacher in Athens will attempt to teach you a sort of semi-classical lingo, which he himself neither could nor would use to his own servants, his own children, or even to his friends in the public café. He will write verses for the Aιωυ in it, but of an evening with his family he will sing, not them, but the Kλϵϕτικá. He will do his petty best to hold high converse with you in this style.

But we think it perfectly clear that, if the resuscitation of the ancient conversational idiom is worth attempting at all, it should be tried, like Latin, in the Seminar of a German university. Adolf Kirchhoff would laugh grimly at the thought of attempting such an exploit ; and the best native Greek scholars may and do sit humbly at his feet for instruction in classical philology.

That is something which cannot be reiterated too plainly. We have abundant reason to be grateful to the race that upheld the slow-dying Byzantine empire, and so preserved through the Middle Ages the few fragmentary records of the old Greek world which have been transmitted to us. But when the fugitives from the Ottoman conqueror brought to Italy, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the precious manuscripts which they could no longer read appreciatively, their last service to learning was done. Like Pheidippides, they had only breath to pant out their message as they fell dying at our feet. There are Greeks in professorial chairs at Athens who have a goodly share of classical learning, but they acquired it where all must, in Berlin and Leipzig and Bonn. The assumption of some half-educated Greeks that they are the best classical teachers because they were born in the Levant is an audacious bit of conscious charlatanism.

We said the question was a double one, and the other side of it can he discussed in much better humor. Is it well to make one’s self familiar with the colloquial Romaic of ordinary life in the Levant as a preparation for the study of classical Attic ?

Now, however highly we may value the Spanish, French, or Italian language, no one thinks of making any one of them the regular introduction to the study of Latin. The resemblances between mother and daughters must in any case attract the notice of the dullest pupil. But when the time for any comparative linguistic study has arrived, the ancient language, with its complete and tolerably regular structure, must come first. Then the process of phonetic decay through which the Romance languages were formed maybe described and exemplified in such a manner as to lighten materially the labor of acquiring the living languages.

All this is equally true of the Romaic dialects of the Eastern Mediterranean, with the important addition that they have as yet no literary development which should make them worth studying for their own sake. The manner in which they have worked over the materials of the ancient language is very instructive. The parallelism between this process and the growth of the Romance languages out of Latin is often very striking. But after all, this belongs to the science of comparative philology. Delightful and profitable as that science is, it demands special tastes and lifelong devotion. It can hardly be said to enter as an essential study into the scheme even of the higher education. If it be admitted there, it forces upon us first problems much nearer home ; namely, the origin of our own language, and of its half-sisters on both the Teutonic and the Romance side.

The decayed and mutilated forms, the modern syntax, the humbler conceptions and aspirations, of the Romaic dialects make them the worst possible introduction to the language of Plato and Sophokles. We must always begin with the noblest and most highly developed form of the noblest of languages. Our young students should be soaked in Attic, in Xenophon and Lysias and the easier parts of Plato, until the language begins to live again for them, — until they can read, for instance, the opening scene of the Republic aloud for the first time, and feel in it the charm of perfect simplicity and ease and grace. This is Greek at its best: and the best is never too good for the beginner.

As for all the later history, whether of the people or of the language, it belongs almost exclusively to the special student. To the philologist it is a rich field. His clue through all the mazes of his task must always be that wonderful truth, — the existence of the Greek race and language on the shores and islands of the Ægean has been unbroken for thirty centuries ; and if either the student or the Oriental traveler wishes to acquire a living dialect, more than half his labor will be spared if he already has a good knowledge of Greek, and studies Romaic comparatively, just as we master Italian after Latin.

William Cranston Lawton.