[170] Roger Pocock’s Horses is a good and readable book on these questions.
[171] This is a little misleading. I may quote from C. D. Buch, Introduction to the Study of Greek Dialects (a) “The great majority of the dialects play no rôle whatever in literature” (p. 14); (b) “In the course of literary development the dialects” (in a mixed and artificial form, e.g. the “epic” dialect) “came to be characteristic of certain classes of literature; and their rôle once established, the choice usually depended upon this factor, rather than upon the native dialect of the author.” (p. 12.) Speaking generally, each class of literature preserved the dialect of the region where it was first cultivated.
The following work is a most illuminating one on this subject: A. Meillet, Aperçu d’une Histoire de la Langue Grecque (Paris, 1913).—H. L. J.
[172] Vowels were less necessary for the expression of a Semitic language. In the early Semitic alphabets only A, I, and U were provided with symbols, but for such a language as Greek, in which many of the inflectional endings are vowels, a variety of vowel signs was indispensable.
[173] See Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth, Bury’s History of Greece, and Barker’s Greek Political Theory.
[174] “For them the state did not exist.” This needs qualification. Cephalus, at whose house the conversation of Plato’s Republic is placed, was a resident alien. He was a wealthy man in the best society, and taken as a type of the “happy man.” His son, Lysias, was a leading orator. Even in the matter of the slaves: the Old Oligarch, in the “Constitution of Athens,” complains that the Athenian slaves had no distinctive dress or manners, and so a gentleman could not even push one of them! In the Republic itself there is a description of the Democratic State, in which the slaves push you off the pavement. Moreover, even during the Peloponnesian War, there was no persecution of aliens and no expulsion of aliens from Athens. They were evidently a loyal and contented class. True, in time of food shortage, the claims of everybody to true citizenship were scrutinized more and more closely; but that was unavoidable.—G. M.
[175] I do not agree with “hereditary barristers” or “fee-hunting.” The Athenian dicasts were not barristers, but judges: they sat in panels (sometimes a panel of some hundreds) and judged. They had to be paid for attendance as judges (don’t we pay jurymen?) because it took them away from their work as potters, dyers, and stone-masons. Pay was a genuine and good democratic institution; it was just what made possible the ordinary citizen’s co-operation in the life of the state, and stopped its business from being the perquisite of the rich. I feel strongly that the text is unjust to Athens.—E. B.
See Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth, and Barker’s Greek Political Theory, pp. 29-30.
[176] From ostrakon, a tile; the voter wrote the name on a tile or shell.
[177] 776 B.C. is the year of the First Olympiad, a valuable starting-point in Greek chronology.