The speech of these Romaioi was not the speech of Rome. ‘Romaikà,’ as it is still called popularly in the country-side, is a development of the ‘koinè’ 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 ‘koinè’, along geographical lines which in no way correspond with those which divided Doric from Ionian. Yet though Romaic is descended from the ‘koinè’, 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. [Footnote 1: The earliest products of the modern technique were called ‘city’ verses, because they originated in Constantinople, which has remained ‘the city’ _par excellence_ for the Romaic Greek ever since the Dark Age made it the asylum of his civilization.] These humble beginnings of a new literature were supplemented by the rudiments of a new art. Any visitor at Athens who looks at the three tiny churches [1] built in this period of first revival, and compares them with the rare pre-Norman churches of England, will find the same promise of vitality in the Greek architecture as in his own. The material—worked blocks of marble pillaged from ancient monuments, alternating with courses of contemporary brick—produces a completely new aesthetic effect upon the eye; and the structure—a grouping of lesser cupolas round a central dome— is the very antithesis of the ‘upright-and-horizontal’ style which confronts him in ruins upon the Akropolis. [Footnote 1: The Old Metropolitan, the Kapnikaria, and St. Theodore.]