GREEK LANGUAGE IN THE BYZANTINE PERIOD 253
This disappearance of the old dialects worked towards a
certain uniformity in the language, but before it could be
complete — and how far the old dialects may have lingered
in out-of-the-way places, no one can say — the changes which
were leading to the formation of modern Greek were well on
their way, and with them came the entirely fresh dialect
divisions which mark the new language. To assign dates is
not easy, but Hatzidakis shows reasons for believing that
these processes belong to the long period between Alexander
the Great and the reign of Justinian in the sixth century a.d.,
and that in any case the modern language was in its main
features formed long before the tenth century.1 The
changes involved were naturally carried out more rapidly in
some places than in others, and of this we have very strong
evidence in the conservative character of some of the con-
temporary spoken dialects.2 These dialectic differences
throw, as we shall see presently, much light on the character
of the spoken language of Byzantine times.
But the victory of the koine and its progeny was not at
first complete. To men with a scholarly or antiquarian turn
of mind it seemed an inelegant declension from the ancient
standards of literature: hence began the atticizing school,
represented most typically by Lucian, and all through the
Byzantine period writers were imbued with this same purist
spirit, though their standard was no longer Attic but the
koine itself. And as this was also the language of the Church,
fixed and liturgical, it was possible to check the processes of
linguistic change to a really very remarkable degree. This
standardizing of Greek was not without its good effects, but
it inevitably produced a certain deadness, as learning and
literature became the close preserve of trained scholars rather
than a field open to all comers. A crabbed obscurity was
admired, and writers forgot the truth embodied in the dictum
1	Mcaaicovtica kqj. vca 'EJiXyvLKo. (Athens, BipXtodtftci) MapacrA^, 1905), vol. i, pp. 406,
480.
2	Notably in the dialects of Asia Minor — I speak of the time before the cata-
strophe of 1923 — Cyprus, south Italy, and certain oases, such as Chios, Rhodes,
and Thrace: for which see Psaltis in A^iKoyp^Kw 'Apxetov (published by the
National Dictionary now being compiled in Athens), vol. v, p. 258. For a summary
account of the dialects, see *The Dialects of Modern Greece1, in the Trans, of the
Philological Society, 1940.