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The Orthodox Church exercised an important cultural influence over its Romaic adherents. The official language of its scriptures, creeds, and ritual had never ceased to be the Ancient Greek 'koinè' and by keeping the Romaios familiar with this otherwise obsolete tongue it kept him in touch with the unsurpassable literature of his Ancient Greek predecessors.
There were so many of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of absence, I had the courage to resist their demand.
And thus Ennius, in his tragedy of 'Menalippus, uses an admirable expression to designate women of the proper degree of matrimonial comeliness, such as a philosopher would select. He calls this degree stata forma, a rational, mediocre sort of beauty, which is not liable to be either koine or poine.
He calls this degree /stata forma/, a rational, mediocre sort of beauty, which is not liable to be either /koine/ or /poine/. And Favorinus, who was a remarkably sensible man, and came from Provence the male inhabitants of which district have always valued themselves on their knowledge of love and ladies calls this said /stata forma/ the beauty of wives, the uxorial beauty.
As the cultural supremacy of Athens grew, its dialect, the Attic, spread at the expense of the rest, until, in the so-called Hellenistic period following the Macedonian conquest, the Attic dialect, in the vulgarized form known as the "Koine," became the standard speech of all Greece. But this linguistic uniformity did not long continue.
During the two millennia that separate the Greek of to-day from its classical prototype the Koine gradually split up into a number of dialects. Now Greece is as richly diversified in speech as in the time of Homer, though the present local dialects, aside from those of Attica itself, are not the lineal descendants of the old dialects of pre-Alexandrian days.
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