DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.4593#0185
THE SHRINES OF ATTICA 163
in Athens your impressions cannot be kept so dis-
tinct. You are not visiting a mass of inert ruins.
The new Athens, with its horse cars, steam trams,
electric lights, clean white buildings and spacious
squares, is so incisively modern and progressive that
there is no doubt that you are living in your own day.
The curious thing is that though the nineteenth cen-
tury is alive, the centuries which have preceded it do
not seem to be dead. The past and the present
interchange their emphasis and are moving together
in the same procession of events.
This chronological tangle comes not from dead
stones, but from live people. Much of the double
impression on your consciousness is made through
the language and through your education in regard
to it. You have been taught that this old language
was dead and buried, but here arc living people
talking it as if it were just as much alive as your
own. The newsboys are hawking papers through
the streets. That is a familiar modern experience,
but the names 'A/cpoTroXK, "Aarv, K.cupo{ are curi-
ously ancient, and when you buy them and under-
take to get the news of the day you find yourself
in a morass of Homeric, Xenophontine, Hellenistic,
mediaeval or later Greek words. The older the
style, the better you understand it. Here is a vocab-
ulary, the growth of centuries. It is not a fusion of
old words in a modern crucible; it is not philological
junk. The old words have not lost their vitality of
form or meaning; they are simply put together in a
different way. Even when clipped and elided, you
find the old roots. Like the gardener's bulbs, they
arc constantly bursting into new bloom. Noth-
in Athens your impressions cannot be kept so dis-
tinct. You are not visiting a mass of inert ruins.
The new Athens, with its horse cars, steam trams,
electric lights, clean white buildings and spacious
squares, is so incisively modern and progressive that
there is no doubt that you are living in your own day.
The curious thing is that though the nineteenth cen-
tury is alive, the centuries which have preceded it do
not seem to be dead. The past and the present
interchange their emphasis and are moving together
in the same procession of events.
This chronological tangle comes not from dead
stones, but from live people. Much of the double
impression on your consciousness is made through
the language and through your education in regard
to it. You have been taught that this old language
was dead and buried, but here arc living people
talking it as if it were just as much alive as your
own. The newsboys are hawking papers through
the streets. That is a familiar modern experience,
but the names 'A/cpoTroXK, "Aarv, K.cupo{ are curi-
ously ancient, and when you buy them and under-
take to get the news of the day you find yourself
in a morass of Homeric, Xenophontine, Hellenistic,
mediaeval or later Greek words. The older the
style, the better you understand it. Here is a vocab-
ulary, the growth of centuries. It is not a fusion of
old words in a modern crucible; it is not philological
junk. The old words have not lost their vitality of
form or meaning; they are simply put together in a
different way. Even when clipped and elided, you
find the old roots. Like the gardener's bulbs, they
arc constantly bursting into new bloom. Noth-