The Cruise of the Branwen

THE OLYMPIC GAMES hotel that night and for the rest of our stay; but I preferred to go back with the owner and sleep on the yacht, which lay close to the friendly bulwarks of the English second cruiser squadron, anchored off Phalerum. Athens was sadly over– crowded, and the extraordinary mixture of foreigners present made me heartily sympathise with the classical authors who called them all " barbarians." Modern Greek we found entirely beyond us. Even the syllables of Euripides with a French accent appeared to be unintelligible to the native. At last we discovered that the accent, or syllabic stress, in nearly every word was wholly different from that familiar to us through the classics, and that even the quantity of the vowels had altered, long syllables becoming short, and vice versa. Such words as -LEgma or Phalerum are difficult to swallow when you hear them first. The acting of <Edipus 'I yrannus under these conditions in the Stadium inflicted tortures which Sophocles can never have imagined possible on the most distant posterity of his " barbarian " ad– mirers. It seemed curious that one might have understood him better in the famous Chalkpit Theatre at Bradfield, or on the stage of the O.U.D.S. at Oxford. This was not because, being Englishmen, an English pronunciation of the Greek was more familiar to us. It was because the Sophocles of the Athenian stadium had been deliberately put into modern Greek: '' ,caT' EµµeTpov µ€Ta<f,pacnv ArrEAOY BAAXOY ,, 60