Like millions of other Italians who went through the Classical Lyceum (high school), I learned ancient Greek for five years, from the ages of 14 to 19. When I left the Lyceum, I continued studying ancient Greek at the University and at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. Today my job is to edit Greek texts of the late Antiquity (4
th-6
th centuries CE).
It is by working on these texts that I was able to observe the veracity of what I was taught at the Lyceum: Greek culture is the root, the source and the origin of the entire Western civilization. But a culture is essentially the language in which it is expressed. Greek culture is ancient Greek. A language cannot be dissociated from its writing system. Writing is not an external envelope that can be modified or altered in an arbitrary way by external intervention, although it can evolve, be modified, and absorb new elements. The Greek graphical system, which uses three different accents and two breathings, reflects, by its complexity, the linguistic structure of the Greek language; it reveals etymology, reminds us of the melodic accentuation which most European languages have lost. To disclaim this system means to disclaim richness, the splendor of the language. Abnegation through reform—which is an act of power—is the rape and degeneration of language. But that is not the worst. The worst is the fact of having broken the natural and essential link connecting modern and ancient Greek, with the consequence of having turned modern Greek into a minority, isolated, marginal language, a kind of dialect. In the same way as Italian cannot exist without jealously keeping its links to Latin, modern Greek is doomed to disappear if it forgets its origins. The more it moves further away and becomes different from ancient Greek, the poorer it gets and lowers itself from the rank of a language of culture and civilization to that of a communication language of a restricted community.
We must never forget a capital event in the history of Europe: if the West has managed to retrieve all the works of Greek culture, this has become possible mostly thanks to the exiled Greeks who, when Constantinople was conquered by the Turcs in 1453, emigrated to Western Europe. A large number of these people who were forced to leave their fatherland were scholars and calligraphers; they tought Western scholars how to read and copy the great works of Greek literature and philosophy. It is thanks to them that Western Europe was able to discover, copy, read, print, and spread all this tremendous heritage, without which European culture would simply not exist. This transmission of knowledge became possible because the writing system was unique, because copiers of the 15th and 16th century used the same script as those of the first Byzantine Rennaissance. You cannot copy a script you do not use yourself. To break the continuity of this graphical tradition means to forget that it is thanks to it that Greeks were able to save and to transmit, under all kinds of conditions, their cultural heritage.
That is why the problem of the polytonic system is much more than an affair of internal Greek politics; it concerns all those who know that without the Greek language in its classical form, no culture, no civilization, and no accomplishment of the mind is conceivable in Europe. (Translated by Y.H.)