normal means of communication in government administration and trade, but it was not used
everywhere in the same way. The language of the Alexandrian waterfront or Syrian bazaars was very
different from anything known to Aeschylus or Thucydides. One has only to pick up St Mark's Gospel to
see that; he writes the demotic language of the streets. Pronunciation too varied in different regions.
Lucian of Samosata was strongly conscious of his tell-tale accent; anyone could deduce he came from
Syria. The educational system prescribed certain texts as pre-eminently suitable for educational
purposes. The main corpus of classical Greek literature familiar to us today is the selection made by
some anonymous schoolmasters, perhaps at Alexandria or Pergamum or Athens in the third century B.C.
The vast amount that is lost to us is what they omitted from their selection as unfitted for ordinary level
work. The tension between poetry and philosophy, which surfaces in Plato's Republic and to which
Plutarch devoted a tract, long continued into the Roman period.
The supreme model in poetry always remained Homer. Even in eleventh-century Byzantium, according
to the express testimony of Michael of Ephesus, schoolboys learnt each day between thirty and fifty
lines of Homer by heart. An elementary school course normally included the first book of the Iliad and
one play each of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, with a few bits of Pindar and Theocritus
thrown in. Byzantine schoolmasters of the twelfth century are found still debating the question keenly
discussed a millennium earlier (for instance, by Dio Chrysostom) whether the superhuman elements in
Homer's poetry required disbelief in the historicity of Odysseus and even of the Trojan War-a debate
which Origen in 248 invokes as analogous to the debate about the miraculous element in the gospel
narrative. A Homeric allusion always added a touch of class to the prose of any Byzantine author other
than the most radically world-rejecting monk. In the fifth century Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria,
who wrote a Life of the contemporary pillar saint Simeon Stylites, also composed urbane letters
decorated with Homeric echoes to officers of the imperial consistory. Michael Psellos tells in his
Chronicle how when the Emperor Constantine IX first introduced his mistress at court, one courtier
quoted just two words from the Trojan elders' awe at the beauty of Helen. Everyone got the allusion
except the lady, whose inferior education was revealed by the need to explain the highly sophisticated
reference to her.
High style in the Byzantine world was necessarily marked by a self-conscious archaism. The demotic
usages of the streets and farmyards were not appropriate for anyone with pretensions to be read in polite
society. But the presence of the demotic element exerted a mounting pressure. Early in the seventh
century a Cilician monk named John Moschos, intimate confidant of Sophronius the sophist, author of
Anacreontica, and then first patriarch of Jerusalem under the Arab occupation, compiled an anthology of
unusual, sometimes macabre stories about monastic heroes, entitled Leimonarion, the spiritual
'Meadow'. The work is fascinating not only for its folklore elements (one story reappears in the
Thousand and One Nights), but also for the colloquial diction and syntax. Words and phrases
characteristic of modern demotic Greek can go back a long way: nero for cold water appears in the
apophthegms of the Desert Fathers of the fourth century. The eleventh-century epic Digenes Akritas
('the Borderer') used popular idioms, and regularly said na for hina. Beneath the surface veneer of high
Byzantine style there was a popular speech uninfluenced by upper-class archaizing. Gradually poets and
then prose writers came to have the confidence to use the demotic idiom.