258 GREEK LANGUAGE IN THE BYZANTINE PERIOD
stream of time, she announces herself proudly as * nurtured
and born in the purple, not without my full share of letters,
for I carried to its highest point the art of writing Greek,
nor did I neglect the study of rhetoric : I read with care the
system of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato, and fortified
my mind with the c/uadrivium of sciences.* The ideals of
the writer of a traditional style could hardly be put more
clearly.

At the very end of the Empire we find the same ideals:
Critobulus writes in the same purist style, and his opening
words set the key to his book as a whole.1 Just as Thucydides
the Athenian announced himself as the author of his history,
so nearly two thousandyears later Critobulus of Imbros begins
his book with the words : 'Critobulus the Islander, who traces his
origin to the men of 'Imbros ', wrote this history., judging it not right
that matters so great and marvellous, happening in our own time,
should remain unheard, but that he should write them down, and
so hand them on to the generations which will follow us'

But all the world does not go to school. No doubt the
level of education in Byzantium was high, nor was there any
lack of successors to the pedantic Ulpian, the orator of Tyre,
who would never sit down to a meal without first making
sure that every word on the bill of fare was to be found
(KCITOU) in the classical authors, for which he earned the
nickname Keitoukeitos, a man who asked always 'Is the
word classical or not?' (/cewm; ov /cetrcu;)2 We may be sure
too that pains were not spared to keep the language spoken
at the imperial Court and in official circles at least very much
nearer to the classical norm than the Greek of the streets
and of the market-place.3 But at the same time no efforts
can keep a spoken language entirely stable. Beneath the
language of the written tradition the conversational idiom of
everyday life was continually developing fresh forms, and

1 Published in Carl Miiller's Fragmenta historicorum graecorum, vol. v (Paris,
1873). The prologue (p. 54) runs in the original: KpiTojSouAos- o vyjaL^^ratrp^Tartav
'IpfSptttrrtiv, ryv £uyypa^v rrjvBf |uveVpa^e, SiKOi^cras ^ Trpay/iara ovra) /zeyaAa KCU
6avfia(TTa. €<£* VUL&V yeyovora juetvat avTJKovara, aAAd £wyypaifidij.€vo5 TrapaSowai rats

" , K.T.A.

2 Athenaeus, Book I, ch. i. In the Loeb edition, vol. i, p. 6, line 5.
3 Evidence for the purity of the Greek spoken by the much secluded ladies of
the Byzandne aristocracy is to be found in a letter of 1451 from Filelfo to Sforza.
The passage is on p. 183 of the 1478 edition of Filelfo's letters.