256 GREEK LANGUAGE JN THE BYZANTINE PERIOD
these tended to confer on the language as handed down to
them by a long chain of writers, always scholars and often
saints as well, an almost sacred character, and produced
from time to time revivals of classical style, when the written
language was in the natural course of events showing signs
of yielding to the pressure of the vernacular and following
the new developments of the spoken Greek. Hence it is that
later authors often write more classically than their pre-
decessors : Photius in the ninth century is more classical than
Theophanes in the eighth; Psellus in the eleventh and
Eustathius of Thessalonica in the twelfth than the Emperor
Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth.1 Such a revival
was indeed very marked in the period of the Comneni, and
Anna Comnena conspicuously uses a purer style than some
of the earlier writers. These backward movements present
us with the extraordinary result that in point of classical
correctness there is not very much to choose between, say,
Procopius, writing at the beginning of our period, and
Critobulus, recording the conquests of the Turks and the
end of the Greek Empire in the fifteenth century. The same
tendency towards an artificial purism, again with the same
patriotic motive behind it, was very apparent in the literary
movement associated with the regained freedom of Greece
in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Orthodox
Church with its long, complicated, and much-loved liturgies
and services disposed people in the same direction. Member-
ship of the Church was a mark of nationality, and it is due
to the use of the liturgical language that a great many words
not used in ordinary speech are for all that perfectly intelli-
gible to almost any Greek.2
Psellus was the great literary figure of the eleventh
century. He uses the purest written Byzantine style, which
he himself calls the koine, a Greek which is in the direct line
of ascent from the 'purifying speech* of the present day. This
Greek may be briefly described as being as classical as the
writer could make it.3 In accidence Psellus keeps in the
1 So Hatzidakis in Zeitschrift fur wrgleichende Sprachforschung, vol. xxxi, p. 108.
2 See Hatzidakis's pamphlet Ilepl rfjs evorjjros -rijs 'EMujviKfjs DuZaoys ('Eirenjpls
rov *E6viKov IlavemonjfjAovy Athens, 1909), p. 141. '
3 Here I follow £mile Renauld, Etude de la langue et du style de Michel Pselhs
(Paris, 1920).