Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/48

24 dancing-grounds, and the rising places of the Sun"—these words in Epic Greek seem alive; they call up not precisely the look or sound, but the exact emotional impression of morning and wind and sea. The expressions for human feeling are almost more magical: the anger of "what though his hands be as fire, and his spirit as burning iron"; or the steadfastness of "Bear, O my heart, thou hast borne yet a harder thing."

There is thus no disparagement to the Epic dialect in saying that, as it stands, it is no language, but a mixture of linguistically-incongruous forms, late, early, and primæval.

There are first the Atticisms. Forms like, can only have come into the poems on Attic soil, and scarcely much before the year 500 At least, the fragments of Solon's Laws have, on the whole, a more archaic look. But for the purposes of history we must distinguish. There are first the removable Atticisms. A number of lines which begin with will not scan until we restore the Ionic form. That is, they are good Ionic lines, and the Attic form is only a mistake of the Attic copyist. But there are also fixed Atticisms—lines which scan as they stand, and refuse to scan if turned into Ionic; these are in the strict sense late lines; they were composed on Attic soil after Athens had taken possession of the epos.

Again, there are 'false forms' by the hundred—attempts at a compromise made by an Athenian reciter or scribe between a strange Ionic form and his own natural Attic, when the latter would not suit the metre. The Ionic for 'seeing' was, the Attic —three syllables instead of four; our texts give the false —i.e. they have tortured the Attic form into four