Page:Christian Greece and Living Greek.djvu/198

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176 CHRISTIAN GREECE AND LIVING GREEK. ington or of a Napoleon, the great ilea of a re- stored Byzantine empire might perhaps then have been realized. The rising of Wallachia was soon stamped out, and the struggle for inde- pendence became limited to Greece alone. Since then the Byzantine idea was more and more abandoned for the Hellenic idea. The war of independence became an exclusively Greek war, and since the formation of the new Greek kingdom the Greek aspirations have be- come exclusively Hellenic. The centre of Greek thought is in Athens, and in Athens dwells the hope of Greece's future, the hope that Hellen- ism may again be what it has been. In the first of the foregoing chapters an his- torical sketch of the Byzantine empire is given in order to show the most extraordinary mis- representations which have existed until re- cently in regard to this history. In the second chapter another historical sketch exposes the erroneous views which have prevailed in regard to the relation of the Greek of to-day to the Greek of the classical period, at least the Greek of the Attic orators. Chapter III. shows what absurd ideas were in vogue in regard to Greek pronunciation. The fourth chapter gives an ac- count of the misery into which the Greek world