GREECE (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) accordingly, it is easy to point out undeniable analogies between ^Eolic Greek and Latin." The Doric dialect was spoken chiefly in north- ern Greece, in the Peloponnesus, in Crete, and in the numerous Doric colonies, especially Sicily and lower Italy. It is essentially the dialect of Pindar and Theocritus. Ionic was spoken chiefly in Asia Minor and Attica, in nu- merous islands, and in the Ionic colonies. It was early developed by poetry, and produced three different but nearly related dialects : the old Ionic or epic dialect, preserved in the poems of Homer and Hesiod ; the new Ionic, chiefly known from the history of Herodotus ; and the Attic dialect, contained in the litera- ture of Athens at the time of her glory. In the Attic dialect three less important distinctions are made, the old, the middle, and the new ; or the two distinctions between the earlier and the later Attic. The old Attic differed but lit- tle from the old Ionic, as the lonians were the original inhabitants of Attica; but through in- tercourse with ^Eolians, Dorians, and other Greek and foreign races, it adopted many non- Ionic words, and produced the middle or ear- lier Attic, as written by Thucydides and the tragedians. The new or later Attic is con- sidered as beginning with Demosthenes and ^Eschines. Through the importance of Athens and the superiority of its literature, the Attic became the chief dialect, and, even after Ath- ens had ceased to be the leading city, remained the language of the educated Greeks. But it soon lost its purity and excellence, and thus from the 3d century B. C. the common Greek dialect (fj KOLVT) di6.feK.ros) was distinguished from it. The conquests of Alexander gave it an enormous territory; but being spoken by Macedonians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Syrians, and other minor nations, it was stripped of many of its original forms, and numerous bar- barisms were added to it. The researches of Curtius tend to show that the Greeks and Ma- cedonians could not understand each other. How far the Macedonian language resembled that of the Illyrians is not positively known. It is apparent, however, that at this time took place a gradual mingling of Greek and Macedo- nian speech, as Plutarch asserts that Greek and not Macedonian was spoken at the courts of Philip and Alexander. The fusion of the two languages produced the so-called Mace- donian dialects, of which the most prominent, being cultivated by learned men, was that of Alexandria. It has been falsely termed the Hellenistic language ; with its Syrian, Hebrew, and Chaldean peculiarities, it was used in the Alexandrian translations of the Old Testa- ment, and subsequently also of the New, whence it has been carried into the works of the fathers of the church ; and it has therefore been proposed to designate it as ecclesiastic Greek. The Greek spoken in Egypt was main- ly a language studied by officials and traders. The dialect has been found inscribed on the stones of Rosetta and of Adule, and on a num- ber of papyri. The Greek of Ethiopia was still more corrupt, and was also principally used in business and for inscriptions. Greek was spoken in Carthage and Mauritania, as well as in Bactria and India. It continued also to be spoken in Gallia Narbonensis and Aquitania, where, starting with the colony of Massilia established by the Phocseans in the 6th century B. C., it had gradually gained territory and become the general language of the insti- tutions of learning. Jlenry Stephens shows, in his Traite de la conformite du langage fran- foys avec le grec (Paris, 1569), that it remained there in use for many centuries after the in- troduction of Christianity. In Sicily, and in parts of Calabria and Apulia, Greek was spo- ken as late as the llth century of our era. Mommsen has shown, in his Unteritaluclie Dialekte (Leipsic, 1850), that it continued to be used by the side of Latin and Arabic, until Italian usurped its place as the literary lan- guage of the country. Greek was thus during the first three centuries of our era a sort of universal language, and everybody who claimed to be educated was obliged to be conversant with it. But the language deviated percepti- bly from the old standard, and the efforts of the purists to check this tendency, by insisting on using ancient Attic forms, had but little success. The transfer of the seat of govern- ment of the Roman empire to Constantinople caused the introduction of many Latinisms, and the crusades that of many Gallicisms and other foreign elements. According to Hallam, arti- ficial Attic Greek was spoken in Constantino- ple, even till its capture by Mohammed II., by the superior ranks of both sexes, with toler- able purity, and at that time had degenerated only among the common people and the in- habitants of the provinces. But the literary documents show a gradual transition from the language of the grammarians to that of the people, which is designated in them as the common and impure language, or the common and simple style, and also as usage. The popu- lar dialect of the 12th century was essentially the same as the Romaic or modern Greek of the present day, and the first writer who can be said to have used it in its entirety was Theodorus Prodromus, nicknamed Ptochopro- domus, a monk who lived in the reign of the emperor Manuel Comnenus. The appellation of Romaic, by which the new dialect was desig- nated, arose from the circumstance that the Greeks had affected the name of 'Pa/ualoi, after the new name of the seat of government (via P^?/), and in distinction from the 'EMf/vef, who were the latest advocates of the language and customs of ancient Greece. But the modern theory of a complete extirpation of the Helle- nic race at this present time is unsupported by the unalloyed speech of the inhabitants of modern Greece. Deffner and other students of modern Greek have shown that it contains formations evidently older than the Attic dia- lect, with which a large class of modern Greek
