Home life in Hellas, Greece and the Greeks - eBooks4Greeks.gr

GREEKCHAPTER IXLITERATURE AND JOURNALISMliterature, like the Greek tongue,never wholly perished. Through the Byzantineperiod, when futile polemical treatiseswere relieved by chronicles only less dreary, theplant still lived to flower in the folk-songs ofGreece, the dithyrambs of the Klepht, and thelyric love ditties. Modern Greek letters, however,began with Rigas, who sang of liberty anddied for it in 1798. The poetic tradition wascarried on by the two Ionians, Solomos andValaorites, and their mantle has fallen uponPalamas, whose Hymn to Athena, Iambs andAnapcests, and Songs of my Country would winhim a high place among contemporary Europeanpoets were a knowledge of the idiom in whichthey are written more widely diffused. Amongthe novelists Bikelas would probably be accordedthe palm by his countrymen.His Loukas Lariashas had, perhaps, more readers than any otherwork of fiction in modern Greek. It deals with asubject of which the Greek isnever tired, the rebirthof Greece, although his hero is not a hero inthe conventional sense, but a very human person280