Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/29

Rh of the Greeks led them to a happy mixture of the consonant and vowel sounds, by which strength has been reconciled with softness, and harmony with strongly marked peculiarities; while the language has, at the same time, in its multifarious dialects, preserved a variety of sound and character, which fit it for the most discordant kinds of poetical and prose composition.

§ 4. We must not pass over one important characteristic of the Greek language, which is closely connected with the early condition of the Greek nation, and which may be considered as, in some degree, prefiguring the subsequent character of its civilisation. In order to convey an adequate idea of our meaning, we will ask any person who is acquainted with Greek, to recal to his mind the toils and fatigue which he underwent in mastering the forms of the language, and the difficulty which he found to impress them on his memory; when his mind, vainly attempting to discover a reason for such anomalies, was almost in despair at finding that so large a number of verbs derive their tenses from the most various roots; that one verb uses only the first, another only the second, aorist, and that even the individual persons of the aorist are sometimes compounded of the forms of the first and second aorists respectively; and that many verbs and substantives have retained only single or a few forms, which have been left standing by themselves, like the remains of a past age. The convulsions and catastrophes of which we see so many traces around us in the frame-work of the world have not been confined to external nature alone. The structure of languages also has evidently, in ages prior to the existence of any literature, suffered some violent shocks, which may, perhaps, have received their impulse from migrations or internal discord; and the elements of the language, having been thrown in confusion together, were afterwards re-arranged, and combined into a new whole. Above all is this true of the Greek language, which bears strong marks of having originally formed part of a great and regular plan, and of having been reconstructed on a new system from the fragments of the former edifice. The same is doubtless also the cause of the great variety of dialects which existed both anions the Greeks and the neighbouring nations;—a variety, of which mention is made at so early a date as the Homeric poems. As the country inhabited by the Greeks is intersected to a remarkable degree by mountains and sea, and thus was unfitted by Nature to serve as the habitation of a uniform population, collected in large states, like the plains of the Euphrates and Ganges; and as, for this reason, the Greek people was divided into a number of separate tribes, some of which attract our attention in the early fabulous age, others in the later historical period; so likewise the Greek language was divided, to an unexampled extent, into various dialects, which differed from each other according to the