Abstract

As a student at Cambridge forty years ago I received a good training in the language and literature of classical Greece, and had the good fortune to study paleography under the late E. H. Minns. For all this I am deeply grateful. But I had no training in Byzantine Greek. It was only later, and more or less by accident, that I discovered Byzantine and Modern Greek. It is not my intention to discuss the wider aspects of this question now, but to appeal, on the basis of some passages in the Oresteia, for a new approach to textual criticism, or rather for the renewal of an old approach.