The twentieth-century tensions between demotic and katharevousa are in part a distant legacy of the
divergence between the self-conscious correctness of the city of Constantinople with its literary elite and
the everyday language of colloquial usage. Even in the second century A.D. the grammarian Phrynichus
was warning aspiring writers against admitting barbarous or uneducated words into their prose. A
number of the usages which he specifically vetoes appear in the New Testament as ordinary
unselfconscious speech. Throughout the history of the language, the conservative preservation of a pure
and more archaizing or classical Greek is connected with the acknowledgement that in the classical age
lie the supreme achievements of all Greek literature, history, and philosophy. To make the demotic
language standard usage is obviously to weaken a link that gives wide access to that classical world,
though at the same time it may prevent contemporary Greeks from thinking that they have inherited with
their mother's milk a capacity to understand Aeschylus or Lycophron. In the continuous development of
the Greek language since antiquity, an elite has always existed which wished to recite Homer and to
write prose in the manner of Thucydides. Such a manner can be achieved only by some degree of
affectation, and sophisticated Byzantine prose of the late-medieval period can be uncommonly difficult
to interpret. It must have been found so at the time. Some neo-Latin writers of the Renaissance offer
obvious parallels.
Philosophy and Religion
The Christian mission in the Graeco-Roman world, initially led by a Christian Jew from Tarsus whose
followers were at times baffled by the profundity and dynamism of his understanding of Christ and the
Church, met with a success sufficient to provoke government persecution and philosophical criticism.
To their persecutors the Christians replied when in co-operative mood that an ethic which demanded
stable family life and honesty in trade deserved encouragement, and that, provided one had no part in
polytheistic cult which they thought honouring evil spirits, one could render to both God and Caesar
whatever was their due. Indeed they recognized a religious obligation to pay taxes. They further claimed
that the intellectual tradition of the classical past was not alien to them. They soon found ways to make it
their own. Stoic ethics required attitudes to slavery or wealth that they found congenial. 'Seneca saepe
noster' ('Seneca is often one of us'), said Tertullian. Platonic metaphysics affirmed divine transcendence,
the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and that virtue is necessary and sufficient for
happiness. In Justin, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, Platonism and Christian thought come to keep
house together.
The marriage went with allegorical or symbolist exegesis of parts of the Pentateuch, already worked out
in detail by the Jew Philo of Alexandria. This principle was soon extended to any part of the
authoritative corpus of biblical writings accepted for reading in church lectionaries (this acceptance
being a criterion of 'canonicity'). How deeply the first Christians pondered the complex relation between
faith and history is apparent in St John's Gospel, where it is a general rule of interpretation that if
anything can have two or more levels of meaning, it does: the history is a sacramental vehicle of
spiritual truth. The Christians were not the first to discern a pattern in history that discloses the nature
and meaning of human existence (Thucydides had already travelled that way); but symbolist writing in
literature has its principal springs in the New Testament.