Rhodes, or Cyprus. As to vulgarisms and local and slang terms, which abound in every district and large town, they cannot with any degree of propriety be classed with dialectic peculiarities. Their existence is usually ephemeral, and as a general thing they are of little value to the philologist. A few centuries ago, a Greek by the name of Kabhásilas asserted that the number of dialects into which the popular Greek was subdivided was over seventy. Now, if by dialects he meant anything, he must have meant patois; and if so, he ought to have added many more; for the illiterate of almost every village have their peculiar barbarisms. If it be asked why he selected seventy as the round number, we may answer that Kabhásilas, in common with all the ignorant of the East, was a believer in the marvellous properties of certain numbers, of which seventy is one. For, in the first place, it is the product of the sacred number seven and of the perfect number ten; the perfection of the latter emanating from the mystical fact that it is contained in the quaternary, the source of inexhaustible nature, as the Pythagoreans express it. Secondly, this number appears more than once in the Bible. Thus, we have threescore and ten palm-trees in the desert of Sinai, and seventy disciples. Thirdly, the Old Testament was translated by seventy interpreters (the celebrated Septua gint), every one of whom was inspired during the laborious process of translating, and often mistranslating, Hebrew into Greek. It is true that, according to the legend, the version was the work of seventy-two learned Jews, each tribe having furnished six accomplished scholars; but as seventy-two is not remarkably mystical, it was thought proper by the regulators of religious opinion to reduce it to seventy. Further, the ignorant believe that Saint Luke the Evangelist painted seventy wonder-working pictures of the Virgin, one of which is now in the principal church of Tenos, and another in Bologna. And if any one doubts whether Luke was a painter, the priest informs him that Saint John of Damascus, one of the great fathers of the Church, distinctly states that the Evangelist painted the picture of the Virgin, and sent it as a present to his friend Theophilus.* And if he could paint one, he might have painted seventy. * JOANNES DAMASCENUS, I, p. 618 D Вλénе μoi kai tòv evayyedɩotηv kai ἀπόστολον Λουκᾶν· οὐχὶ τῆς παναχράντου καὶ ἀειπαρθένου Μαρίας τὴν τιμίαν εἰκόνα ἀνιστόρησε καὶ πρὸς Θεόφιλον ἔπεμψε ; On the eastern shores of Peloponnesus there is a small district called Tzakonia, or Tzakoniá (in three syllables). It is contained in the ancient Cynuria, which lay between Argolis and Laconia. The language spoken by the inhabitants of this region is unintelligible to those whose mother tongue is the Romaic. To the philologist it is nothing more than a very barbarous Romaic. In the common language of the Greeks, the corruptions or changes are in a great measure systematic, and it is very easy for the critical scholar to trace them to their mediæval and ancient sources. But the dialect of Tzakoniá is apparently a jargon, in the usual acceptation of the term. It is broken Greek. Many of its roots, indeed, are traceable to the Greek, but its inflections usually deviate from the Greek type. In short, it is not a regularly developed modern Greek patois. And the question is, when and under what circumstances it came into being. In investigating the affinities of a language, one of the first requisites is to examine its pronouns, pronominal adjectives, pronominal adverbs, numerals, case-endings, and personal endings (which are in reality fragmentary pronouns). These elements constitute its essential characteristics. And when a language loses them, it loses, as it were, its consciousness. If we apply this rule to the language of Tzakoniá, it will be found that many or most of these characteristics are so different from those of the Romaic, and their resemblance to the corresponding words in Greek is so general, that they may be referred to more than one of the Indo-European languages. Thus, its word for èy is è ooú, which has the elements of the ecclesiastical Slavic a. For ou it has KLOû (in two syllables), and for rí, TŜés, which does not differ from the Slavic tshεσό. Some scholars fancy they discover Doricisms and Ionicisms in this dialect; and by a natural process of reasoning they infer that the Tzakoniots are a remnant of the ancient Cynurians, an aboriginal people, whom Herodotus was inclined to regard as Doricized Ionians, that is, Ionians who in the course of time adopted the manners, customs, laws, *The villages in which this dialect is spoken are the following: Kaσráνιτζα, ἡ Σίτενα, τὸ Πραστόν, τὸ Λενίδι, τὸ Μελανόν, τὸ Δερόν, τὰ Καλύβια τοῦ ἁγίου ̓Ανδρέου, τὰ Κουνούπια. The original forms of Σίτενα, Πραστόν, and Λενίδι are Προάστειον, Λεωνίδας, and ὁ Σίτανas, all found in PHRANTZES, p. 159. and dialect of the Dorians.* Now whenever a classical scholar goes to Greece to find Dorjans and Ionians, it is ten to one but that he succeeds in finding Dorians and Ionians. He selects such words and phrases and facts as are agreeable to his hypothesis, and takes no notice of those which contradict it. He lays much stress upon coincidences, but disregards differences. He overlooks the fact that the genuine Romaic contains infinitely more Doricisms than the jargon of Tzakoniá. If the modern Tzakoniots were the descendants of the Doricized Ionians of Herodotus, we should naturally expect to find a great similarity between their language and that now used in Crete, Melos, Thera, Carpathus, Rhodes, and other Doric islands. What was, then, the origin of this dialect? Before we attempt to answer the question, it will be necessary to ascertain what foreign races migrated to Greece after it became a Roman province. Of all the barbarians that overran Greece previously to the ninth century, the Slavs alone are represented by the Byzantine historians as having permanently settled in Greece. They began to come in contact with the Greeks in the early part of the sixth century. And for nearly two hundred years after they crossed the Danube they, conjointly with other barbarians, did little else than devastate Illyria, Thrace, and Greece. Soon after the terrible plague which, in the * HEROD. 8, 73 Οἰκέει δὲ τὴν Πελοπόννησον ἔθνεα ἑπτά. Τούτων δὲ τὰ μὲν δύο αὐτόχθονα ἐόντα κατὰ χώραν ἵδρυται νῦν τῇ καὶ τὸ πάλαι οἴκεον, ̓Αρκάδες τε καὶ Κυνούριοι ..... Οἱ δὲ Κυνούριοι αὐτόχθονες ἐόντες δοκέουσι μοῦνοι εἶναι Ιωνες, ἐκδεδωρίευνται δὲ ὑπό τε ̓Αργείων ἀρχόμενοι καὶ τοῦ χρόνου, εόντες Ορ νεῆται καὶ περίοικοι. THUC. 5, 41 Τῆς Κυνουρίας γῆς . . . . νέμονται δ ̓ αὐτὴν Λακεδαιμόνιοι. STRAB. 8, 6, 17 Κυνουρία, substantively. † PROCOPIUS, II, p. 397, 18 (A. D. 547) Ὑπὸ τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον Σκλαβηνῶν στράτευμα διαβάντες ποταμὸν Ιστρον Ἰλλυριοὺς ἅπαντας ἄχρι Επιδαμνίων ἔδρασαν ἀνήκεστα ἔργα. 449 (A. D. 550) Ἴστρον δὲ ποταμὸν διαβάντες ἀμφὶ Ναϊσὸν ἦλθον, κ. τ. λ. MENANDER, p. 404, 15 (A. D. 576) "Οτι κεραϊζομένης τῆς Ελλάδος ὑπὸ Σκλαβηνῶν, κ. τ. λ. MALALAS, p. 490, Μηνὶ μαρτίῳ ἰνδικτι ῶνος Ζ' ἐπανέστησαν οἱ Οὖννοι καὶ οἱ Σκλάβοι τῇ Θρᾴκῃ, καὶ πολεμήσαντες πολλοὺς ἀπέκτειναν, καί τινας ἐπραίδευσαν. THEOPHANES, p. 360 (A. D. 551 + 8)· Τῷ δ ̓ αὐτῷ ἔτει ἐπανέστησαν Οὖννοι καὶ Σκλάβοι τῇ Θρᾴκῃ πλήθη πολλά. 532 (A. D. 656 + 8) Οἱ δὲ Σκλαβινοὶ τούτῳ [τῷ ̓Αβδεραχμὰν] προσρυέντες σὺν αὐτῷ ἐν Συρίᾳ κατῆλθον χιλιάδες πέντε, καὶ ᾤκησαν εἰς τὴν ̓Απάμειαν χώραν ἐν κώμῃ Σκευοκοβούλῳ. 559 (A. D. 683 + 8) Τούτῳ τῷ ἔτει Ἰουστινιανὸς ἀπελέξατο ἐκ τῶν μετοικισθέντων ὑπ ̓ αὐτοῦ Σκλάβων καὶ ἐστράτευσε χιλιάδας Δ ́, καὶ middle of the eighth century, visited Southern Italy, Sicily, and Greece, the Slavs established themselves as settlers in the depopulated provinces of continental and peninsular Greece. “Only those escaped death who fled from the infected regions," says Saint Nicephorus the Confessor.* According to Porphyrogenitus, all the rural districts of Greece (ἡ χώρα) were occupied by the Slavs and became barbarous, when Constantine Copronymus the iconoclast was Emperor.† The anonymous epitomizer of Strabo, who must have lived after the eighth century, says, "And now the Slavic Scythians occupy nearly the whole of Epirus, Hellas, Peloponnesus, and Macedonia.” And again, "But now the names Pisatae, and Caucones, and Pylians are not used; for all these regions are inhabited by Scythians"; Scythians ὁπλίσας αὐτοὺς ἐπωνόμασεν αὐτοὺς λαὸν περιούσιον, ἄρχοντά τε αὐτῶν Νέβουλον τοὔνομα. The Kin Σκλάβος, Σκλαβηνός, and the e in Σθλάβος, do not belong to the radical portion of these forms: they were introduced by the Greeks in order to bring them under the analogy of σκληρός, σθένος or rather ἐσθλός. * THEOPHANES, p. 651 (A. D. 738 + 8) Τῷ δ' αὐτῷ ἔτει λοιμώδης θάνατος ἀπὸ Σικελίας καὶ Καλαβρίας ἀρξάμενος, οἷόν τι πῦρ ἐπινεμόμενον ἐπὶ τὴν Μονοβασίαν καὶ Ἑλλάδα καὶ τὰς παρακειμένας νήσους ἦλθεν δι ̓ ὅλης τῆς ΙΔ' ἰνδικτιώνος. 652 Ἡ δὲ αὐτὴ λοιμικὴ νόσος τοῦ βουβῶνος ἀνέδραμεν τῇ πεντεκαιδεκάτῃ ἐπινεμήσει ἐν τῇ βασιλίδι πόλει. NICEPHORUS CONSTANTINOPOLITANUS, p. 70, 11 Καθ' οὓς τόπους τὸ φθοροποιὸν ἐπεφύετο πάθος, ἅπαν ἀνθρώπων γένος ἐπινεμόμενον διέλυέ τε καὶ ἄρδην ἐξηφάνιζε. Διεσώθη δ ̓ ἄν τις θείᾳ πάντως βουλήσει, ὅστις ὡς πορρωτάτω τούτων τῶν χωρῶν ἀπέδρα. Ἐπετείνετο δὲ τὰ τῆς φθορᾶς μάλιστα περὶ τὸ Βυζάντιον. † PORPHYROGENITUS, Them. p. 53 ̓Εσθλαβώθη δὲ πᾶσα ἡ χώρα καὶ γέγονε βάρβαρος, ὅτε ὁ λοιμικὸς θάνατος πᾶσαν ἐβόσκετο τὴν οἰκουμένην, ὁπηνίκα Κωνσταντῖνος ὁ τῆς κοπρίας ἐπώνυμος τὰ σκῆπτρα τῆς τῶν Ρωμαίων διεῖπεν ἀρχῆς. Ωστε τινὰ τῶν ἐκ Πελοποννήσου μέγα φρονοῦντα ἐπὶ τῇ αὐτοῦ εὐγενείᾳ, ἵνα μὴ λέγω δυσγενείᾳ, Εὐφήμιον ἐκεῖνον τὸν περιβόητον γραμματικὸν ἀποσκώψαι εἰς αὐτὸν τουτοὶ τὸ θρυλούμενον ἰαμβεῖον, Γαρασδοειδὴς ὄψις ἐσθλαβωμένη. Ην δὲ οὗτος Νικήτας ὁ κηδεύσας ἐπὶ θυγατρὶ Σοφία Χριστοφόρον τὸν υἱὸν τοῦ καλοῦ Ρωμανοῦ καὶ ἀγαθοῦ βασιλέως. † STRAB. Chrestomath. III, p. 507 Καὶ νῦν δὲ πᾶσαν Ἤπειρον καὶ ̔Ελλάδα σχεδὸν καὶ Πελοπόννησον καὶ Μακεδονίαν Σκύθαι Σκλάβοι νέμονται. 519 Νίμ δὲ οὐδὲ ὄνομά ἐστι Πισατῶν καὶ Καυκώνων καὶ Πυλίων· ἅπαντα γὰρ ταῦτα Σκύθαι νέμονται. In the first of these passages, Σκλάβοι may be a gloss. in the Byzantine writers meaning simply Northern Barbarians. But although they did not enter Greece as conquerors, they disdained to consider themselves as subjects of the Byzantine Emperor. They enjoyed their national independence, and were a source of trouble to the government at Constantinople. In the ninth century, the Emperor Basil, according to his son, Leo the Wise or the Philosopher, succeeded in thoroughly subjugating, Romanizing, Christianizing, and Grecizing the Slavs in his dominion. Their soldiers, being trained after the Roman system of tactics, were of essential service to the Græco-Romans. Their own princes, of course, had lost their power over them.† * THEOPHANES, p. 663 (A. D. 750 + 8) Τούτῳ τῷ ἔτει Κωνσταντῖνος τὰς κατὰ Μακεδονίαν Σκλαβινίας ήχμαλώτευσεν, καὶ τοὺς λοιποὺς ὑποχειρίους ἐποίησε. 707 (A. D. 775 + 8) Τούτῳ τῷ ἔτει εἰρηνεύσασα Εἰρήνη μετὰ τῶν ̓Αράβων καὶ ἄδειαν εὑροῦσα ἀποστέλλει Σταυράκιον τὸν πατρίκιον καὶ λογοθέτην τοῦ ὀξέος δρόμου μετὰ δυνάμεως πολλῆς κατὰ τῶν Σκλαβίνων ἐθνῶν. Καὶ κατελθὼν ἐπὶ Θεσσαλονίκην καὶ ̔Ελλάδα ὑπέταξε πάντας καὶ ὑποφόρους ἐποίησε τῇ βασιλείᾳ. Εἰσῆλθεν δὲ καὶ ἐν Πελοποννήσῳ καὶ πολλὴν αἰχμαλωσίαν καὶ λάφυρα ἤγαγεν τῇ τῶν Ρωμαίων βασιλείᾳ. PORPHYROGENITUS, Cer. p. 634, 11 Χρὴ εἰδέναι ὅπως ἐδέξατο Μιχαὴλ ὁ βασιλεὺς Σκλάβους τοὺς ἀτακτήσαντας ἐν χώρᾳ τῇ Σουβδελιτίᾳ καὶ ἀνελθόντας εἰς τὰ ὄρη καὶ πάλιν καταφυγόντας τῇ αὐτοκρατορικῇ καὶ ὑψηλῇ βασιλείᾳ. . . . . Καὶ εὐθέως εἰσήχθησαν ἕτεροι Σκλάβοι Θεσσαλονίκης ἀρχοντίας, κ. τ. λ. Adm. p. 217 (A. D. 802 – 811) Νικηφόρος τὰ τῶν Ρωμαίων σκῆπτρα ἐκράτει, καὶ οὗτοι ἐν τῷ θέματι ὄντες τῆς Πελοποννήσου ἀπόστασιν ἐννοήσαντες πρῶτον μὲν τὰς τῶν γειτόνων οἰκίας τῶν Γραικῶν ἐξεπόρθουν καὶ εἰς ἁρπαγὴν ἐτίθεντο μεθ ̓ ἑαυτῶν ἔχοντες καὶ ̓Αφρικοὺς καὶ Σαρακηνούς. 221 Καὶ πάντας μὲν τοὺς Σκλάβους καὶ λοιποὺς ἀνυποτάκτους τοῦ θέματος Πελοποννήσου ὑπέταξε [Θεόκτιστος] καὶ ἐχειρώσατο. Μόνοι δὲ οἱ Ἐζερῖται καὶ οἱ Μιληγγοὶ κατελείφθησαν ὑπὸ τὴν Λακεδαιμονίαν καὶ τὸ Ἕλος, κ. τ. λ. .... † Leo, Tactic. 18, 100 Καὶ τὰ Σκλαβικὰ δὲ ἔθνη ὁμοδίαιτά τε ἦσαν καὶ ὁμότροπα ἀλλήλοις καὶ ἐλεύθερα, μηδαμῶς δουλοῦσθαι ἡ ἄρχεσθαι πειθόμενα, καὶ μάλιστα ὅτ[ε] πέραν τοῦ Δανουβίου κατῴκουν ἐν τῇ ἰδίᾳ χώρα. "Οθεν καὶ ἐνταῦθα περαιωθέντα καὶ οἱονεὶ βιασθέντα δέξασθαι τὴν δουλείαν οὐχ ἑτέρῳ ἡδέως πείθεσθαι ἤθελον, ἀλλὰ τρόπον τινὰ ἑαυτῶν. Κρεῖττον γὰρ ἡγοῦντο ἀπὸ τοῦ ἄρχοντος τῆς ἑαυτῶν φυλῆς φθείρεσθαι, ἢ τοῖς Ρωμαϊκοῖς δουλεύειν καὶ ὑποκλίνεσθαι νόμοις. Οἱ δὲ τοῦ σωτηρίου βαπτίσματος τὸν [φωτισμὸν ?] καταδεξάμενοι ἄχρι τῶν ἡμετέρων χρόνων, τοῦτο ὅσον κατ ̓ αὐτοὺς εἰς ἀρχαίας ἐλευθερίας συνήθειαν διατηροῦνται. The text is corrupt here. 18, 102 Ταῦτα οὖν ὁ ἡμέτερος πατὴρ καὶ Ρωμαίων αὐτοκράτωρ Βασίλειος τῶν ἀρχαίων ἐθνῶν [read ἐθῶν] ἔπεισε μεταστῆναι, καὶ γραικώσας καὶ ἄρχουσι κατὰ τὸν Ρωμαϊκὸν τύπον ὑποτάξας καὶ βαπτίσματι τιμήσας, τῆς δὲ δουλείας ἠλευθέρωσε τῶν ἑαυτῶν ἀρχόντων καὶ στρατεύεσθαι κατὰ |