[Footnote 1:  For example:  Tsimova and Panitsa in the Tainaron peninsula (Maina); Tsoupana and Khrysapha in Lakonia; Dhimitzana, Karytena, and Andhritsena in the centre of Peloponnesos, and Vostitsa on its north coast; Dobrena and Kaprena in Boiotia; Vonitza on the Gulf of Arta; Kardhitsa in the Thessalian plain.]

With the coming of the Slavs darkness descends like a curtain upon Greek history.  We catch glimpses of Arab hosts ranging across Anatolia at will and gazing at Slavonic hordes across the narrow Bosphorus.  But always the Imperial fleet patrols the waters between, and always the triple defences of Constantinople defy the assailant.  Then after about two centuries the floods subside, the gloom disperses, and the Greek world emerges into view once more.  But the spectacle before us is unfamiliar, and most of the old landmarks have been swept away.

By the middle of the ninth century A.D., the Imperial Government had reduced the Peloponnesos to order again, and found itself in the presence of three peoples.  The greater part of the land was occupied by ’Romaioi’—­ normal, loyal, Christian subjects of the empire—­but in the hilly country between Eurotas, Taygetos, and the sea, two Slavonic tribes still maintained themselves in defiant savagery and worshipped their Slavonic gods, while beyond them the peninsula of Tainaron, now known as Maina, sheltered communities which still clung to the pagan name of Hellene and knew no other gods but Zeus, Athena, and Apollo.  Hellene and Slav need not concern us.  They were a vanishing minority, and the Imperial Government was more successful in obliterating their individuality than in making them contribute to its exchequer.  The future lay with the Romaioi.

The speech of these Romaioi was not the speech of Rome.  ‘Romaika,’ as it is still called popularly in the country-side, is a development of the ‘koine’ or ‘current’ dialect of Ancient Greek, in which the Septuagint and the New Testament are written.  The vogue of these books after the triumph of Christianity and the oncoming of the Dark Age, when they were the sole intellectual sustenance of the people, gave the idiom in which they were composed an exclusive prevalence.  Except in Tzakonia—­the iron-bound coast between Cape Malea and Nauplia Bay—­all other dialects of Ancient Greek became extinct, and the varieties of the modern language are all differentiations of the ‘koine’, along geographical lines which in no way correspond with those which divided Doric from Ionian.  Yet though Romaic is descended from the ‘koine’, it is almost as far removed from it as modern Italian is from the language of St. Augustine or Cicero.  Ancient Greek possessed a pitch-accent only, which allowed the quantitative values of syllables to be measured against one another, and even to form the basis of a metrical system.  In Romaic the pitch-accent has transformed itself into a stress-accent almost as violent as the English, which has destroyed all quantitative relation between accented and unaccented syllables, often wearing away the latter altogether at the termination of words, and always impoverishing their vowel sounds.  In the ninth century A.D. this new enunciation was giving rise to a new poetical technique founded upon accent and rhyme, which first essayed itself in folk-songs and ballads,[1] and has since experimented in the same variety of forms as English poetry.