Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/150

 of laws and literature, Latin and Greek of a more or less classical cast are the requisite equipment of every one who aims at civil or military employment in any governmental department, 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.

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.'']
 * [Footnote: Specimens crop up occasionally, particularly in Jn. Malala, also in Theophanes,