KORÄES, DIAMANTES, or, as he himself used to write his name in French, DIAMANT CORAY, the greatest philologist of modern Greece, and one of the best Greek scholars of his age, was born at Smyrna, April 27, 1748. At a wretched school in his native town, where, as he himself says, the birch and the cane were the only things much in vogue, he picked up a little Greek, French, and Italian. His father, himself a merchant, intended him for commerce, and in 1772 sent him to Amsterdam, to establish there a
branch of his own business. He remained in Holland for six years. On his return home, at the end of that period, he was shocked at the general prostration of Greece and the Greeks under the misgovernment of the Turks. He determined to leave his country, and, in 1782, fixing upon Montpellier in France as his residence, he plunged into the study of medicine. Immediately after graduation in 1788 he repaired to Paris, where he watched with intense interest the progress of the revolution, and dared to hope that his own enslaved country might also be roused to assert its ancient freedom. The design of his writings during many years was to kindle the torch of freedom in Greece itself. To do this three things were needed: to teach the Greeks their own political condition, and bring it under the notice of the other nations; to revive the thoughts and language of their own ancient classics; and to improve the common speech, by purging it of the solecisms which had crept into it in the course of ages. In his own person he united the three functions of political writer, editor of the old Greek classics, and legislator of the modern Greek tongue. The first work by which he made himself widely known was his edition of the Characters of Theophrastus, with a translation into French by himself, and some valuable notes and discussions. The work was dedicated to the free Greeks of the Ionian Sea, and the expense of it was defrayed by a rich Greek merchant of Leghorn. The next of his Greek-French works was his edition of Hippocrates' essay on Climate, Water, and Locality, which work was immediately translated into German and Spanish, and to which, in 1810, the Institute of France awarded the prize of 5000 francs. In 1802 Coray published a translation into modern Greek of Beccaria's treatise Dei Delitti e delle Pene (On Crimes and Punishments), which he dedicated to the newly constituted republic of the seven Ionian Islands. He followed it up next year with his Mémoire sur l'état actuel de la Civilisation dans la Grèce, which he published both in French and modern Greek. His aim in doing so was to familiarize the Europeans of the west with the social and moral condition of Greece, and to point out to the Greeks the true means of raising themselves in the scale of nations by a sound system of education. At the instance of Napoleon, Coray undertook, along with Laporte du Theil and Gosselin, a new translation of Strabo's Geography. To this important work Coray contributed the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth books, and the great body of the appended notes. About this time he contributed important matter, in the form of annotations to Levesque's Thucydides, to Larcher's Herodotus, and to Schweighäuser's Athenaus. In 1804 he conceived the idea of a "Hellenic Library," which should embrace those Greek classics whose works were adapted to the actual condition of the country. The first two volumes contained the complete works of Isocrates. The next six volumes were devoted to Plutarch; and these were followed by Strabo in four volumes. The Strabo of this "Library" contains the best text of that author that has yet been given to the world. During these latter years Coray contributed largely to the columns of the Logios Hermes (Scientific Mercury), a Greek journal founded and published at Vienna by Anthimus Gazi. In 1821 the Greek revolution broke out, to the great surprise and even alarm of Coray, who thought the movement premature, and had not looked for it till thirty years later. However, he hailed the dawn of his country's freedom by publishing an edition of Aristotle's Politics, and, in the following year, the Nicomachean Ethics of the same author. His remaining contributions to the Bibliotheca Hellenica were the Memorabilia of Xenophon, the Gorgias of Plato, and the speech of the orator Lycurgus Against Leocrates. Nine less elaborate volumes, which he called Parerga, were afterwards added to the Bibliotheca by way of supple-
Kordofan. ment. His subsequent works were editions of the first four books of the Iliad, of the Asteia of Hierocles, and of the Pastoral Letters of St Paul, and three volumes of Atakta, or Miscellanies. He died at Paris, April 6, 1833, having nearly completed his eighty-fifth year, and having lived long enough to see the independence of his country established and secured on a proper basis.
As a scholar Coray rendered essential service to the literature of ancient Greece, both by giving a powerful impulse to the study of it, and by the large number of happy restorations which he made in the corrupt texts of all the authors edited by him. It has been objected to him, not without reason, that he relied too much on his faculty of critical restoration, and sometimes ignored extant manuscripts of undoubted authenticity. He rendered a no less signal service to the modern Greek, by fixing the rules of orthography and construction. One set of writers, whom he called "the macaronic," with Neophytus Doukas at their head, wished to revive the classic forms. To the great mass of the people their works written on this principle were a sealed book. On the other side, Cathartzi, Christopoulos, and their faction, wrote the modern Greek exactly as it was spoken, and thus prevented it from attaining any literary perfection. Coray took a middle course. He banished all foreign, and especially all Turkish words, and substituted for them words drawn from the literary language, to which he gave modern terminations or forms. The syntax he reconstructed as nearly as possible on the classic model, steering clear of the foreign idioms which had gradually crept in, and avoiding at the same time the affectation of a too severe purism. Time has consolidated Coray's system, and, with some trifling modifications, it is now in general use in Greece.