History of Ancient Greek Literature

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ...enough. He writes an artificial semi-Ionic dialect, £io for fierh, ijv for eciv, irpcurtrm for irpdrrto. The literary tradition explains that. Literature in Greek has always a tendency to shape itself a language of its own. He is overladen with antitheses, he instinctively sees things in pairs; so do Gorgias and Antiphon. He is fond of distinguishing between synonyms; that is the effect of Prodicus. He is always inverting the order of his words, throwing separate details into violent relief, which makes it hard to see the whole chain of thought. This is evidently part of the man's peculiar nature. He does it far more than Antiphon and Gorgias, more even than Sophocles. His own nature, too, is responsible for the crowding of matter and thought that 1 C. LA. 38; 37-TEXT OF THUCYDIDES 191 one feels in reading him--the new idea, the new logical distinction, pressing in before the old one is comfortably disposed of. He is by nature l Semper ins tans sibi' (Quin-tilian). A certain freedom in grammar is common to all Greek, probably to all really thoughtful and vivid, writers: abstract singular nouns with plural verbs, slight anacolutha, intelligible compressions of speech. But what is not explicable in Thucydides is that he should have fallen into the intermittent orgies of ungrammatical and unnatural language, the disconcerting trails of comment and explanation, which occur on every third page. Not explicable if true; but is it true? The answers arise in a storm. "No; our text is utterly corrupt." " It is convicted of gross mistakes by contemporary inscriptions. It is full of glosses. It has been filled with cross-references and explanatory interpolations during its long use as a school-book." " Intentional forgers in late times have been...