The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language <br />after so many centuries of mingling <br />with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners. <br />The only thing surviving from their ancestors <br />was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites, <br />with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths. <br />And it was their habit toward the festival's end <br />to tell each other about their ancient customs <br />and once again to speak Greek names <br />that only few of them still recognized. <br />And so their festival always had a melancholy ending <br />because they remebered that they too were Greeks, <br />they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia; <br />and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become, <br />living and speaking like barbarians, <br />cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.<br /><br />Constantine P. Cavafy<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poseidonians/
