But all these different dialects are nothing more than dialects, distinguished as modifications of one and the same language, and exhibiting evidence of certain laws and principles pervading them all. They seem capable of being traced back to a certain ideal mother-language, peculiar in itself and distinguishable from, though cognate with, the Latin; a substantive member of what has been called the Indo-European family of languages. This truth has been brought out, in recent times, by the comparative examination applied to the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, German, and Lithuanian languages, as well as by the more accurate analysis of the Greek language itself to which such studies have given rise, in a manner much more clear than could have been imagined by the ancients themselves.[372] It is needless to dwell upon the importance of this uniformity of language in holding together the race, and in rendering the genius of its most favored members available to the civilization of all. Except in the rarest cases, the divergences of dialect were not such as to prevent every Greek from understanding, and being understood by, every other Greek,—a fact remarkable, when we consider how many of their outlying colonists, not having taken out women in their emigration, intermarried with non-Hellenic wives. And the perfection and popularity of their early epic poems, was here of inestimable value for the diffusion of a common type of language, and for thus keeping together the sympathies of the Hellenic world.[373] The Homeric dialect became the standard followed by all Greek poets for the hexameter, as may be seen particularly from the example of Hesiod,—who adheres to it in the main, though his father was a native of the Æolic Kymê, and he himself resident at Askra, in the Æolic Bœotia,—and the early iambic and elegiac compositions are framed on the same model. Intellectual Greeks in all cities, even the most distant outcasts from the central hearth, became early accustomed to one type of literary speech, and possessors of a common stock of legends, maxims, and metaphors. [372] The work of Albert Giese, Ueber den Æolischen Dialekt (unhappily not finished, on account of the early death of the author,) presents an ingenious specimen of such analysis. [373] See the interesting remarks of Dio Chrysostom on the attachment of the inhabitants of Olbia (or Borysthenes) to the Homeric poems: most of them, he says, could repeat the Iliad by heart, though their dialect was partially barbarized, and the city in a sad state of ruin (Dio Chrysost. Orat. xxxvi. p. 78, Reisk).