Peter Clenott

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... lecture ii Introduction Of Greek Into England The year 322 B.C., the year in which Aristotle and Demosthenes died, may be said to mark the time at which the great original work of Greece had been done. Much valuable and memorable work had still to be produced--the best poetry of the Alexandrian School, the history of Polybius, the biographies of Plutarch, the dialogues of Lucian, the treatise attributed to Longinus, and this would bring us to the middle of the third century A.d.--but all the great original work had been completed by B.C. 322. The Old Literature may be said to have terminated when Justinian closed the schools of pagan philosophy in A.D. 529. Between that event and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 stretched a long dreary period filled by ecclesiastical homilies and dissertations, compilations and commentaries and criticisms on the Old Classics, and wretched poems written in what were called mxot iroXvriKot or verses framed according to rhythm and not quantity, and side by side with these, histories and poems modelled on the style of the Old Classics: a literature represented in a word by the later Byzantine historians and poets. You may read about them in the Dissertation in Berington's ' Literary History of the Middle Ages, ' in Donaldson's continuation of Muller's 'History of Greek Literature, ' and in the pages of Gibbon. After 1453 the language, long wretchedly corrupted, passed entirely into Romaic, and the Romaic Literature has of course gone on in unbroken continuity to the present day. The three principal causes that disseminated Greek were: --1. The conquests of Alexander the Great and the breaking up of his empire into various principalities, the three chief kingdoms being Macedonia, Asia, Egypt.