Attic Greek

“ No writer, indeed, has been more pre-eminent in that simple, clear, precise, elegant diction that is the peculiar glory of Attic literature, the brilliant yet concise quality of which the authors of no other Greek city were quite able to attain. He shows, each in its due turn, vigour and suppleness of language, he exercises a sure and spontaneous choice of correct terms, the proper combination of harmonious phrases, he goes straight to his object, he aims well and hits hard, even when he seems to be merely grazing the surface. ”

“ He is often indelicate in his allusions; he is as ready with town slang and the cant of the shop as with the most elegant phrase. But Attic salt seasons the whole, and none ever handled the versatile Greek tongue more deftly. In his command of language, he is equalled only by Plato, who felt the comic poet’s power when he said that in the soul of Aristophanes the Graces sought an imperishable shrine. Amid all his humor and buffoonery sparkles genius of the highest order. His aim seems to have been to elevate his art. ”

“ Alexandria, however, for her town affairs, and subject to the divine{v1-402} overlordship of Pharaoh, had a constitution of the Greek city type. And the language of the court and administration was Attic Greek. Greek became so much the general language of educated people in Egypt that the Jewish community there found it necessary to translate their Bible into the Greek language; many men of their own people being no longer able to understand Hebrew, Attic Greek for some centuries before and after Christ was the language of all educated men from the Adriatic to the Persian Gulf. ”

“ Adamantios Korais fought the fight, 100 years before this attempt was made, and he distinctly and clearly made [Pg 140] it understood that the Attic Greek language has been, it is and must be the safeguard of all that is beautiful in the Greek history. ”

“ Evolution of the Attic State
We need not allow ourselves to be detained by the obscure and conflicting legends which centre round the birth of the Attic nation. Coulanges [42] refers to the traditions concerning local kings of Attica before the time of Cecrops. Pausanias refers to a kind of religious amalgamation which was doubtless the concomitant of political synoekism: ‘Sacred to Athene,’ he says, ‘is all the rest’ [43] of Athens and similarly all Attica; although they worship different gods in different townships, none the less do they honour Athene generally. ”

“ We ought, in truth, rather to conclude that Attic comedy was an almost inexhaustible mine of information on Attic life in general, and that illustrations, infinitely various, of the manners, feelings, prejudices, literature, and ways of thinking of the ancient Greeks might have been as liberally granted to us as the culinary details which amused the mind of Athenæus. ”

“ One of the most curious phases of Greek civilisation which has thus perished for us, and regarding which, as we may fancy, we should have made better use of that old traveller's facilities, is the early Attic deme-life—its picturesque, intensely localised variety, in the hollow or on the spur of mountain or sea-shore; and with it many a relic of primitive religion, many an early growth of art parallel to what Vasari records of artistic beginnings in the smaller cities of Italy. ”

“ Each had given great works to Athens, and was yet to give more. An age of vivid energy had found the poetry most congenial to it in the noblest type of tragedy, and this, in turn, fed the Greek desire to know character through deed and word. In the hands of Euripides tragedy further became the vehicle of dialectical subtleties and the dramatic mirror of public debate. At the same time Attic oratory was being prepared by two currents of influence which converged on Athens—the practical culture of Ionia, represented by the Sophists, and the Sicilian art of rhetoric [30] . ”

“ The cult of Dionysos has penetrated the leading communities and most of the byways of Greece; and nearly everywhere he has been partially tamed and the Mænads either suppressed or disciplined to the more sober purposes of civic worship. {88} But the two most striking phenomena in the spiritual history of the sixth century were, first, the rise and expansion of Ionic philosophy and physical speculation, and, secondly, the development of a new form of literature that came to be known as the Attic Drama. And both must be reckoned with among the forces affecting the life of the popular religion. ”

“ With Aristotle, not a born Athenian but long resident in Athens, the κοινή may be said to have begun. Some characteristics of Attic foreigners found it hard to acquire—its subtle use of particles and its accent. Hence in Hellenistic Greek particles are comparatively rare. According to Cicero, Theophrastus, who came from as near Attica as Eretria in Euboea, was easily detected by a market-woman as no Athenian after he had lived thirty years in Athens. ”

“ We take these things as we find them; just as we must make the best of a snub nose, or a set of bad teeth in an otherwise pretty face. So also we must even attune our ears to the Itacism of the Greeks; otherwise we shall assuredly sin against a notable characteristic of the language, much more intimately connected with the genius of that singular people, than many a clipper of new Greek grammars and filcher of notes to old Attic plays imagines. What says Quinctilian? ”

“ It was a great step in advance when, long before the dawn of Greek history, these tiny communities were united with Athens. The inhabitants of the Attic towns and villages gave up their separate governments and became members of the one city-state of Athens. Henceforth a man was a Athenian citizen, no matter in what part of Attica he lived.
OPPRESSIVE RULE OF THE NOBLES At an earlier period, perhaps, than elsewhere in Greece, monarchy at Athens disappeared before the rising power of the nobles. The rule of the nobility bore harshly on the common people. ”

“ Another Greek, Simeon Kabasilas of Arta, informed Kraus that of all the seventy odd dialects of Greece the Attic of that day was the worst. The Greek and “Ishmaelite,” or Turkish, populations lived, he wrote, in separate quarters of the town, which contained “12,000 male inhabitants [682] .” We learn too, from a [378] short account of Athens discovered in the National Library at Paris in 1862, and composed in Greek in the sixteenth century [683] , that the Tower of the Winds was then a tekkeh of dervishes, and the mosque in the Parthenon was called Ismaïdi. ”

“ Of the literature produced by the Greeks in the fifth century B.C., we possess about a twentieth part; of that produced in the seventh, sixth, fourth, and third, not nearly so large a proportion. All that has reached us has passed a severe and far from discriminating ordeal. It has secured its life by never going out of fashion for long at a time; by appealing steadily to the book-trade throughout a number of successive epochs of taste—fourth-century Greece, pre-Christian Alexandria, Augustan Rome, the great Hellenic revival of the Antonines, the narrower Attic revival of the later sophists. ”

“ The Greek language must have attained great excellence at a very early period, for it existed in its essential perfection in the time of Homer. It was, also, early divided into dialects, as spoken by the various Hellenic tribes that inhabited different parts of the country. The principal of these found in written composition are the Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, and Attic, of which the Aeolic, the most ancient, was spoken north of the Isthmus, in the Aeolic colonies of Asia Minor, and in the northern islands of the Aegean Sea. ”

“ In Attica itself the dialect was less uniform than elsewhere even in the 5th century B.C., because Athens was a centre of empire, literature and commerce. Like every other language which is not under the dominion of the schoolmaster, it borrowed the names of foreign objects which it imported from foreign lands, not only from those of Greek-speaking peoples, but also from Egypt, Persia, Lydia, Phoenicia, Thrace and elsewhere. ”

“ Allow for this, and placing some adult in a station expressing the distance of the Athenian stage, then judge by his appearance if the delicate pencilling of Grecian features could have told at the Grecian distance. But even if it could, then I say that this circumstantiality would have been hostile to the general tendencies (as already indicated) of the Grecian drama. The sweeping movement of the Attic tragedy ought not to admit of interruption from distinct human features; the expression of an eye, the loveliness of a smile, ought to be lost amongst effects so colossal. ”

“ Above all it revealed the strength and power of the Athenians to themselves, and in the half-century following the most wonderful political, literary, and artistic development the world had ever known ensued, and the highest products of Greek civilization were attained. Attica had braved everything for the common cause of Greece, even to leaving Athens to be burned by the invader, and for the next fifty years she held the position of political as well as cultural preëminence among the Greek City-States. ”

“ The ruins of Athens were then far less imperfect than they are at present, and he examined them with the eye of a learned antiquary; but extensive as was his learning, he does not seem to have possessed that sort of reading which would have enabled him thoroughly to enjoy a tour through Greece. It is for those who have entered deeply into the private history, literature, and philosophy of the Greeks that Attica has real charms. ”

“ The orators whose fragments time has been unable to destroy are however sufficient, if not to satiate our thirst of admiration, at least to show, by the grandeur of their proportions, how great and glorious Attic eloquence, when entire, must have been. More than any other department of literature it is the growth of patience and toil. A man may be born with the instincts of eloquence,—fancy, constitutional fire, vehemence,—but unless these instincts be broken in and trained by consummate art, nature will in vain have bestowed her gifts. These truths were early understood at Athens. ”

“ Far more than other Greeks, the people of Attica were imaginative, original, versatile, adaptable, progressive, endowed with rare mental ability, keenly sensitive to beauty in nature and art, and possessed of a wonderful sense of proportion and a capacity for moderation in all things. Only on such an assumption can we account for their marvelous achievements in art, philosophy, literature, and science at this very early period in the development of the civilization of the world. ”

“ In default of such an idea a man's career is manquée; he is not an intellectual. After discounting ambition, we have left still another cause for distrusting the labors of the German professors. This distrust arises from a peep into the social surroundings of the caste. Here is a great authority on the open-air life of the Greeks: he knows all about Hellenic sport. Here is another who understands the brilliant social life of Attica: he has written the best book upon Athenian conversation and the market-place. Here is still a third: he has reconstructed Greek religion: at last we know! ”

“ If we trusted ourselves to decide by types of face, we should say that the present inhabitants of Athens were of Northern origin, and that their relation to the Greeks was no stronger than that of Englishmen to the ancient Britons. That the people who now inhabit Attica and the Peloponnesus are descendants of the Greeks whom the Romans conquered, I suppose no one can successfully claim; that they are all from the Slavonians, who so long held and almost exclusively occupied the Greek mainland, it is equally difficult to prove. ”

“ Athena is as much a part of Attica as gray Hymettus or white-crowned Pentelicus; and the very fact that comedians, like Aristophanes, make good-natured fun of the divinities indicates that “they are members of the family.”
Thirdly, notice that this religion is one mainly of outward reverence and ceremony. There is no “Athenian church”; nobody has drawn up an “Attic creed”—“I believe in Athena, the City Warder, and in Demeter, the Earth Mother, and in Zeus, the King of Heaven, etc.” ”

“ This mixed origin of the population is believed to be one secret of the versatile yet well- balanced character which distinguished the Attic people above all other branches of the Hellenic family. It is not the absolutely pure, but the mixed races, like the English people, that have made the largest contributions to civilization.
THE SITE OF ATHENS.—Four or five miles from the sea, a flat-topped rock, about one thousand feet in length and half as many in width, rises with abrupt cliffs, one hundred and fifty feet above the level of the plains of Attica. ”

“ Here whatever germs of culture were introduced from foreign parts gained new life, the Ionian study of countries and peoples became history as soon as Herodotus came into touch with Athens; the Peloponnesian dithyrambus grew into tragedy at Athens, the farce of Megara into Attic comedy; here the philosophy of Ionia and Magna Græcia met to supplement each other’s defects and prepare the way for the development of Attic philosophy; even sophistry was nowhere turned to such account as at Athens. ”

“ The Greeks of the present day, though they may not lay claim to, or boast of all the attributes of the Greeks of antiquity, must certainly be allowed to possess that quality for which the latter were ever so celebrated, namely, cunning and wariness: for although no modern Greek can be said to have any resemblance to Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus, or Nestor, in point of courage, strength, fidelity, or wisdom, he may nevertheless boast of being a close copier of the equally renowned chief of Ithaca. ”