of laws and literature, Latin and Greek of a more or less classical cast[1] are the requisite equipment of every one who aims at civil or military employment in any governmental department,[2] or who even pretends to recognition as a person of average culture. In the pride of original supremacy we may perceive that citizens of Latin lineage despise the feeble Greeks who forfeited nationality and independence, whilst the latter, pluming themselves on their inheritance of the harmonious tongue in which are enshrined all the masterpieces of poetry and philosophy, contemn the uninspired genius of the Romans, whose efforts to create a literature never soared above imitation and plagiarism.[3]
- [Footnote: Specimens crop up occasionally, particularly in Jn. Malala, also in Theophanes,
i, p. 283 (De Boor). See Krumbacher, op. cit., p. 770, et seq. The cultured Greeks, however, even to the end of the Empire, always held fast to the language of literary Hellas in her prime; see Filelfo, loc. cit.]
- ↑ It is worthy of remark that assumption of the aspirate was in the
period of best Latinity a vulgar fault decried by Romans of refined
speech:
Chommoda dicebat, si quando commoda vellet
Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias. . . .
Ionios fluctus, post quam illuc Arrius isset,
Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.
Catullus, lxxxii. - ↑ Jn. Lydus, De Magistr., iii, 27, 68.
- ↑ In the absence of full contemporary evidence for a complete picture of Byzantine life at the point of time dealt with, it has often been necessary to have recourse to writers both of earlier and later date; an exigency, however, almost confined to Chrysostom and Constantine Porphyrogennetus. In taking this liberty I have exercised great caution so as to avoid anachronisms; and if such exist I may fairly hope them to be of a kind which will not easily be detected. I have always tried to obtain some presumptive proof in previous or subsequent periods that the scene as represented may be shifted backwards and forwards through the centuries without marring its truth as a picture of the times. In these unprogressive ages, wherever civilization was maintained, it often had practically the same aspect even for thousands of years.
