Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/51

Rh Æolic stands and the Ionic cannot, in the later parts the Ionic stands and the Æolic cannot. And further, where the two dialects denote the same thing by entirely different words, the Æolic word tends to stand in its native form; e.g, 'people,' keeps its , because the Ionic word was. For a 'temple' the Ionic stands everywhere, but that is just because temples are a late development; the oldest worship was at altars in the open air.

There are many exceptions to these rules. Dr. Fick of Göttingen, who has translated all the 'older parts' of Homer back to a supposed original Æolic, leaving what will not transcribe as either late or spurious, has found himself obliged to be inconsistent in his method; when F occurs without a F he sometimes counts it as evidence of lateness, sometimes alters it into. In the same way a contraction like may represent an Æolic  from, or may be a staring Atticism. When we see further that, besides the Ionisms which refuse to move, there are numbers of Æolisms which need never have been kept for any reason of metre, the conclusion is that the Ionising of the poems is not the result of a deliberate act on the part of a particular Ionic bard—Fick gives it boldly to Kynæthus of Chios—but part of that gradual semi-conscious modernising and re-forming to which all saga-poetry is subject. The same process can be traced in the various dialectic versions of the Nibelungenlied and the Chanson de Roland. A good instance of it occurs in the English ballad of Sir Degrevant, where the hero 'Agravain' has not only had a D put before his name, but sometimes rhymes with 'retenaunce' or 'chaunce' and sometimes