With the coming of the Slavs darkness descends like a curtain upon Greek history. We catch glimpses of Arab hosts ranging across Anatolia at will and gazing at Slavonic hordes across the narrow Bosphorus. But always the Imperial fleet patrols the waters between, and always the triple defences of Constantinople defy the assailant. Then after about two centuries the floods subside, the gloom disperses, and the Greek world emerges into view once more. But the spectacle before us is unfamiliar, and most of the old landmarks have been swept away.
By the middle of the ninth century A.D., the Imperial Government had reduced the Peloponnesos to order again, and found itself in the presence of three peoples. The greater part of the land was occupied by ‘Romaioi’—normal, loyal, Christian subjects of the empire—but in the hilly country between Eurotas, Taygetos, and the sea, two Slavonic tribes still maintained themselves in defiant savagery and worshipped their Slavonic gods, while beyond them the peninsula of Tainaron, now known as Maina, sheltered communities which still clung to the pagan name of Hellene and knew no other gods but Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Hellene and Slav need not concern us. They were a vanishing minority, and the Imperial Government was more successful in obliterating their individuality than in making them contribute to its exchequer. The future lay with the Romaioi.
The speech of these Romaioi was not the speech of Rome. ‘Romaikà,’ as it is still called popularly in the country-side, is a development of the ‘koinè’ or ‘current’ dialect of Ancient Greek, in which the Septuagint and the New Testament are written. The vogue of these books after the triumph of Christianity and the oncoming of the Dark Age, when they were the sole intellectual sustenance of the people, gave the idiom in which they were composed an exclusive prevalence. Except in Tzakonia—the iron-bound coast between Cape Malea and Nauplia Bay—all other dialects of Ancient Greek became extinct, and the varieties of the modern language are all differentiations of the ‘koinè’, along geographical lines which in no way correspond with those which divided Doric from Ionian. Yet though Romaic is descended from the ‘koinè’, it is almost as far removed from it as modern Italian is from the language of St. Augustine or Cicero. Ancient Greek possessed a pitch-accent only, which allowed the quantitative values of syllables to be measured against one another, and even to form the basis of a metrical system. In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed itself into a stress-accent almost as violent as the English, which has destroyed all quantitative relation between accented and unaccented syllables, often wearing away the latter altogether at the termination of words, and always impoverishing their vowel sounds. In the ninth century A.D. this new enunciation was giving rise to a new poetical technique founded upon accent and rhyme, which first essayed itself in folk-songs and ballads,[1] and has since experimented in the same variety of forms as English poetry.
[Footnote 1: The earliest products of the modern technique were called ‘city’ verses, because they originated in Constantinople, which has remained ‘the city’ par excellence for the Romaic Greek ever since the Dark Age made it the asylum of his civilization.]
These humble beginnings of a new literature were supplemented by the rudiments of a new art. Any visitor at Athens who looks at the three tiny churches [1] built in this period of first revival, and compares them with the rare pre-Norman churches of England, will find the same promise of vitality in the Greek architecture as in his own. The material—worked blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments, alternating with courses of contemporary brick—produces a completely new aesthetic effect upon the eye; and the structure—a grouping of lesser cupolas round a central dome— is the very antithesis of the ‘upright-and-horizontal’ style which confronts him in ruins upon the Akropolis.
[Footnote 1: The Old Metropolitan, the Kapnikaria, and St. Theodore.]
These first achievements of Romaic architecture speak by implication of the characteristic difference between the Romaios and the Hellene. The linguistic and the aesthetic change were as nothing compared to the change in religion, for while the Hellene had been a pagan, the Romaios was essentially a member of the Christian Church. Yet this new and determining characteristic was already fortified by tradition. The Church triumphant had swiftly perfected its organisation on the model of the Imperial bureaucracy. Every Romaios owed ecclesiastical allegiance, through a hierarchy of bishops and metropolitans, to a supreme patriarch at Constantinople, and in the ninth century this administrative segregation of the imperial from the west-European Church had borne its inevitable fruit in a dogmatic divergence, and ripened into a schism between the Orthodox Christianity of the east on the one hand and the Catholicism of the Latin world on the other.
The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek ‘koinè’ and by keeping the Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors. The vast body of Hellenic literature had perished during the Dark Age, when all the energies of the race were absorbed by the momentary struggle for survival; but about a third of the greatest authors’ greatest works had been preserved, and now that the stress was relieved, the wreckage of the remainder was sedulously garnered in anthologies, abridgements, and encyclopaedias. The rising monasteries offered a safe harbourage both for these compilations and for such originals as survived unimpaired, and in their libraries they were henceforth studied, cherished, and above all recopied with more or less systematic care.
The Orthodox Church was thus a potent link between past and present, but the most direct link of all was the political survival of the Empire. Here, too, many landmarks had been swept away. The marvellous system of Roman Law had proved too subtle and complex for a world in the throes of dissolution. Within a century of its final codification by Justinian’s commissioners) it had begun to fall into disuse, and was now replaced by more summary legislation, which was as deeply imbued with Mosaic principles as the literary language with the Hebraisms of the New Testament, and bristled with barbarous applications of the Lex Talionis. The administrative organization instituted by Augustus and elaborated by Diocletian had likewise disappeared, and the army-corps districts were the only territorial units that outlasted the Dark Age. Yet the tradition of order lived on. The army itself preserved Roman discipline and technique to a remarkable degree, and the military districts were already becoming the basis for a reconstituted civil government. The wealth of Latin technicalities incorporated in the Greek style of ninth-century officialdom witnesses to this continuity with the past and to the consequent political superiority of the Romaic Empire over contemporary western Europe.
Within the Imperial frontiers the Romaic race was offered an apparently secure field for its future development. In the Balkan peninsula the Slav had been expelled or assimilated to the south of a line stretching from Avlona to Salonika. East of Salonika the empire still controlled little more in Europe than the ports of the littoral, and a military highway linking them with each other and with Constantinople. But beyond the Bosphorus the frontier included the whole body of Anatolia as far as Taurus and Euphrates, and here was the centre of gravity both of the Romaic state and of the Romaic nation.