LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 73 write classical Latin quantitative verse that might occasionally pass for the work of a Lucan or even an Ovid, they merely succeeded in killing a vernacular poetry in Latin fancy dress without ever coming within sight of their ulterior objective of installing a resuscitated literature in the classical Latin and Greek idiom and vein in the place of a long since securely established vernacular poetry in the unaffected medium of the vulgar tongue. The Humanists' revival of the art of writing quantitative Latin and Greek verse in a correct Hellenic style was followed, not by an eclipse of a native Western literature that was flying its own proper colours unabashed, but by a fresh outburst of it in a blaze which effec- tively took the shine out of the Humanists' frigid academic exercises. The Discomfiture of an Orthodox Christian Greek Vernacular Literature by an Hellenic Ghost The spontaneously generated native literature in the vulgar tongue which came to this fine flower in a Western World had its counterparts in a Greek Orthodox Christendom and in the Chinese main body of a Far Eastern Society; but here the seed fell among the thorns of the resuscitated language and literature of an antecedent civilization,1 'and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it'.2 The Modern Greek language resembled Latin and Latin's Romance offspring, and differed, like them, from Ancient Greek, in being accen- tual and not quantitative, and it duly found for itself a congenial form of accentual versification—the so-called 'Metropolitan3 Metre'—which was as alien in its technique from the Ancient Greek quantitative verse of a Homer or a Theognis as the contemporary accentual verse of Western Christendom was from the Latin quantitative verse of Homer's imitator Virgil or Theognis' imitator Ovid, As we have seen in another context,4 this Modern Greek accentual verse provided the literary vehicle for a tenth-century epic poem celebrating the exploits of the Greek borderers in an East Anatolian no-man's-land beyond the Antitauran frontier of the {Abbasid Caliphate; and this Byzantine Greek Epic of Basil Dige"nis (Dhiydnis) Akritas was thus, on both the literary and the social plane,5 a true counterpart of the Chanson de Roland. Yet, whereas an eleventh- century Chanson de Roland was able to become the parent of a vernacular literature, in all the living languages of the Western World,6 which was still bearing fruit nine hundred years later, the tenth-century Byzantine Greek Epic was cheated out of its manifest destiny through being sterilized by the triumph of a Greek Orthodox Christian renaissance of the Ancient Greek language and literature;7 and, though the living Modern Greek language and its native accentual style of versification were emboldened, thereafter, to reassert themselves by the example of a Medieval Western vernacular literature which made its influence felt * The successive vicissitudes in the history of an Orthodox Christian Greek literature, from its emergence during a post-Hellenic cultural interregnum down to the twentieth century, can be studied in the life in Trypa"nis, C. A.: medieval and Modern Greek Poetry, An Anthology (Oxford 1951, Clarendon Press). a Luke viii. 7. Cp. Matt. xiii. 7. a i.e. Constantinopolitan (Graece: