expressiveness, the aesthetic beauty began to wane, to leave behind them the bare structure, imposing though it still was. Stripped of its finest, most intricate and delicate elements, it received the less sensitive equivalents from the other dialects, as well as new patterns that gave it a new appearance. Attic now became Koine. This change marks the early stages of the long process that turned Attic Greek to Mediaeval and Modern Greek. If only one term were to be used to characterize this evolutionary