Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/50

26 Ionic and Attic Greek, both medially (as in our Norwich, Berwick) and initially (as in who, and the Lancashire 'ooman). It survived, however, in Doric inscriptions, and in such of the Æolic as were not under Ionian influence, till the fifth and sometimes the fourth century. It is called in antiquity the 'Æolic letter.' Now there are 3354 places in the poems which insist on the restoration of this Vau—i.e. the lines will not scan without it; 617 places, on the other hand, where in ancient Æolic it ought to stand, but is metrically inadmissible. That is, through the great mass of the poems the habit and tradition of the Æolic pronunciation is preserved; in a small part the Ionic asserts itself.

These facts have been the subject of hot controversy; but the only effective way to minimise their importance is to argue that we have no remains of Æolic of the seventh century, and that the apparent Æolisms may be merely 'old Greek' forms dating from a period before the scattered townships on the coast of Asia massed themselves into groups under the names of Iônes and Aioleis—an historical hypothesis which leads to difficulties.

It is not disputed that the 'Æolic' element is the older. Philology and history testify to it, and weight must be allowed to the curious fact, that to turn the poems into Æolic produces the rhymes and assonances characteristic of primitive poetry in numbers far too large to be the result of accident. And it holds as a general rule that when the Æolic and Ionic forms are metrically indifferent—i.e. when the line scans equally well with either—the Ionic is put; when they are not indifferent, then in the oldest parts of the poems the