Byron’s Greek
In Prof. Albert H. Smyth’s “Life of Bayard Taylor” occurs this sentence: “At the Piræus Taylor saw Mrs. Black, ‘The Maid of Athens,’ to whom Byron sang in impossible and ungrammatical Greek.”
The allusion is evidently to the concluding line of the stanzas,
Ζωή μου σᾶς ἀγαπῶ, which means simply, “My life, I love thee.”
Ought not Professor Smyth to have stayed his pen from this unnecessary impeachment of Byron’s knowledge of Greek, when he remembered that the poet had lived on familiar terms with Greeks long before he went to fight and die for the independence of their famous land? The line given above is colloquial modern Greek, exactly suited to the character of the poem, and was not intended for ancient classic Greek.