the New Testament, not quite so familiar perhaps in its style as that of Mr. Pallis, had been prepared shortly before by a learned lady at the instance of the Queen of Greece, who had found that many of the inmates of the gaols and hospitals which she visited were almost destitute of Christian knowledge, and were incapable of understanding the Greek of the New Testament. This translation had been revised by a learned Commission, and had been commended by the Metropolitan, Procopius. The excitement rose to such a height that nothing but a general excommunication of all modern Greek translations of the New Testament would satisfy the public. This demand not being granted, an indignation meeting, attended by more than 30,000 people, was held around the columns of Olympian Jupiter, and the feeling of the crowd was voiced by a student, who declared that during the centuries of Turkish oppression no such deadly injury had been inflicted on the nation with the sword as that which had now been perpetrated with the pen. The meeting was followed by riots in the streets, in which a collision took place between the crowd and the military, attended with serious and in some cases fatal results. Before the night was over, the Chief of the Police and the Commander of the Garrison had resigned their posts; a similar step had to be taken even by the Archbishop, who was conducted to the King’s palace in the middle of the night by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Instruction; and within a few days the Ministry itself had to relinquish office.

The whole occurrence was a striking proof of the passionate pride that is latent in the Greek character in any matter that affects its reputation and self-esteem. Although the question came to assume a semi-religious, semi-political aspect, the real offence lay in the fact that the language used in the translation was the vulgar tongue, which the University authorities desired to suppress, so far as its use for literary purposes was concerned. If the translation had been allowed to get a footing at home or in school it would have acquired a place in the affections of the people. To avoid this danger the ecclesiastical authorities issued an edict forbidding the use of all translations or any departure from the original text—and this notwithstanding the fact that there were thousands of the members of their Church who could derive little or no benefit from the New Testament without the help of a translation. It is easy to understand, from the feelings with which many devout people in this country received the changes made on the English Revised Version about thirty years ago, that the Greeks would be very sensitive to any alteration on the New Testament, which had been the cherished symbol of their nationality under the dominion of the Turk. But in this case there was no alteration of the sense; and no one was compelled to use the translation unless he pleased, nor was there any attempt to supersede the reading of the original text in church. No doubt the language of Mr. Pallis’ translation was sometimes of a very homely character. But to talk of its being a “profanation of the Gospel”

was quite a misrepresentation, and seems almost ridiculous in view of the fact—which the discovery of Egyptian papyri has been bringing home to us of late—that the language of the New Testament was, at the time it was written, the language in every-day use among the masses of the people for whom it was intended, which the learned men of the day would have disdained to employ for literary purposes. No such outcry was raised in this country when a Scots translation of the Psalms was issued by the late Dr. P. H. Waddell, though it might have been more reasonably objected to as serving no practical purpose. But there was no jealousy of the Scots dialect on the part of the Church or the educated classes—hence it was simply regarded as a literary curiosity.

Equally groundless was the notion that the issue of translations was part of a scheme to which the Queen (a Russian princess) was supposed to be accessory, for the purpose of playing into the hands of the Russians in Macedonia, by leading the Greek population to surrender their birthright as the lawful heirs of the New Testament. To understand this suspicion we must remember that the Greeks had long prided themselves on the fact that they and they alone could read the very words of the New Testament in their own tongue, and they were afraid that they would forfeit this distinction and be reduced to a level with their Slavonic neighbours, if the need for a translation were admitted.[9]

However inconsistent it may seem, this attachment to the Greek of the New Testament is only another phase of the same pride of ancestry that is seen in the straining after classical Greek.[10] The desire to pose before the world as the descendants of the nation which produced Homer and Æschylus and Pericles and Plato and Demosthenes has led them to sacrifice in some measure the real interests of the nation to the glamour of a remote and glorious past. Just as they have been ashamed of some mediæval monuments which reminded them of humiliating epochs in their history, so they have tried to get rid of words and forms which bore the stamp of foreign ascendency. But such affectation cannot alter facts, and is bad for the morale of a nation. The pride of birth, when carried to excess, may hurt the character of a people no less than of an individual, and foster a theatrical and pretentious spirit. It is easy to see that in the education of the young it cannot be favourable to vigour or spontaneity of thought if the pupil is denied the use of the words to which he has been accustomed from his earliest years. With such a discord between experience and expression, it is no wonder that the Greek people have produced so little native literature during the last two thousand years, and that they are so largely dependent at the present time on foreign authorship, especially Russian, English, and French. The loss sustained in almost all the practical departments of the national life, both sacred and secular, is alleged to be scarcely less serious. It can hardly be otherwise, indeed, if the language employed in public documents is only partially or with difficulty understood by a large proportion of the people for whom it is intended. Moreover, it cannot be good for the nation to be divided, intellectually speaking, into two more or less antagonistic camps, corresponding roughly to the educated and the uneducated.

Of recent years there have been signs of a strong reaction. Largely owing to the ability and zeal of Professor Psichari, a son-in-law of the late M. Renan, the Atticising tendency is not nearly so prevalent as it was twenty years ago, and a considerable native literature is now making its appearance not only in poetry (in which it has always been strong) but also in novels, dramas, journals, newspapers, and even in the publication of grammars. This literature is no longer confined, as it used to be, with few exceptions, to the Ionian Islands (where Salomos of Zanté and Valaoritis of Leucas sang) and Crete (where Cornaro, of Venetian extraction, produced his great epic Erotokritos, which procured for him the title of the “Homer of the People”). Even Constantinople is beginning to breathe the new spirit; and there is reason to hope that a compromise between the two extremes may yet be effected, by which the nation may realise its essential unity amid diversity, remaining true to its illustrious ancestry, without ignoring or suppressing the other elements—Roman, Byzantine, Turkish—which have contributed to its development. Its scholars are beginning to see that the idea of classical Greek ever becoming a universal language for men of culture is a vain dream, and that a nation’s speech, like its life, must undergo continual modification. Such modification, though it may appear to the pedant to be corruption, is evolution to the philosopher and man of sense. The history of the Russian and Czech languages, which have adapted themselves to literary purposes with such success during the last two hundred years, encourages the hope that the language now spoken by the common people of Greece may go through a similar process of development, borrowing from the ancient Greek what it requires in order to meet the needs of science and philosophy, while holding its ground as the essential basis of the national speech.[11]

Akin to this controversy is the question as to the proper pronunciation of Greek. So different is the pronunciation now current among the Greeks from that which is in vogue in this country that, even without any difference in vocabulary or grammar, a Western scholar trained in the Erasmian system would find the greatest difficulty in understanding or making himself

understood by a modern Greek, who allows the accentuation to supersede the vowel-quantity and reduces the diphthong to a simple sound. How different, for example, Peloponnēsos sounds when it is pronounced Pelopónnĭssos, or ta-nephē (τἁ νἑφη) when pronounced ta-néphī. The difference is still more marked when you hear a modern Greek read Homer, for he seems to do away with the metre altogether. Till lately the Greeks were inclined to smile at our rendering of the quantities. But recently they have been learning from one who is perhaps their highest authority on such questions (G. Chatzidakis) that ancient inscriptions and transcriptions show that their living language has not stood still in the matter of pronunciation any more than in other respects. It does not follow from this, however, that the Erasmian pronunciation, though older and more correct as to quantity than is now current among the Greeks, is in all respects the same as would have been heard in the streets of Athens in the days of Socrates.

Index

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Z