I’m interested in the use of Ancient Greek after the medieval period, specially outside of Greece. So far I know John Milton was good enough with Greek to compose with it, there’s an encomium for Elizabeth I in Greek, and Czech author Jan Kresadlo wrote an entire space-epic in Homeric style (the ‘Astronautilia’ - sounds absolutely wild). Aside from that I’ve been having a hard time because every combination of related words brings up stuff about learning Greek in the Renaissance or the Enlightenment in the Balkans. Does anybody know of anything close to the literature on “Neo-Latin”?
Interesting question. Greeks of course went on speaking and writing Greek, but humanism developed in the West, in Italy and elsewhere in Western Europe, and its language, the lingua franca of the educated, was Latin, and eventually neo-Latin, the language of renaissance theology, law, medicine, art, and the humanities in general as well as science, until displaced by the various vernaculars. So I don’t think there ever was such a thing as neo-Greek, unless you count recherché compositions such as Milton’s, who like other Englishmen of the time learnt Latin and ancient Greek at school and at Cambridge.