Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Greek is not a dead language, as any v1s1tor to Greece (or Melbourne, or Boston) may see and hear for himself. But all languages change all the time, and just as a modern English speaker cannot read King Alfred’s English version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, made eleven hundred years ago, unless he has learned ‘Old English’, so a modern Greek-speaker will not make much headway with Plato’s Phaedo, written over two thousand three hundred years ago, unless he has learned ‘Ancient Greek’. Since languages change steadily, not in sudden leaps, the fixing of boundaries between the ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, and ‘modern’ stages of a language must be to some extent arbitrary and conventional. In the case of Greek, the advent of Christianity, with the profound cultural changes which this entailed, is a helpful marker, and by common convention (especially in the English-speaking world) ‘ancient Greek literature’ means the literature which was written in Greek in the pre-Christian centuries, and by non-Christians in the first six centuries of the Christian era.