causes such difficulties for anyone who wishes to use it that it actually discourages writing altogether. Shortly afterwards, in his novel Nikolas Sigalos, he put similar sentiments into the musings of a fictional writer: "The devil! ... Call this a language? Is this writing or translating? What have I been doing all this time? Translating into so-called Katharevousa what I am thinking in the vernacular, in my mother tongue. Katharevousa! ... A monstrosity ... !" Xenopoulos' views carry all the more weight because he was not some easily discouraged amateur; he was later to become one of Greece's most eminent men of letters. The dissatisfaction expressed by Vizyinos, Xenopoulos, and later by Roïdis was a new development in Greek literary life. Thirty years before, the Athenian establishment had been wholly committed to what A. R. Rangavis in 1853 had called "the dignified formation of the Panhellenic language", even if there was some disagreement over how archaic it should be. But these new criticisms did not come from Ionian provincials or demotic poets; they were coming from leading Katharevousa prose writers working in the Athenian establishment itself. Katharevousa was also about to receive more criticism, of a quite different kind, from an even more establishment quarter. The Kontos Controversy of 1882–4 In 1882 the classical philologist Konstantinos Kontos, a professor at the University of Athens, published Linguistic Observations Regarding Modern Greek, a collection of two hundred 'observations' in which he pointed out grammatical errors and semantic sloppiness in the works of other scholars from Voulgaris onwards, including Korais, Doukas and Asopios. Korais himself had intended Katharevousa to be a subset of Ancient Greek, obeying its rules wherever they applied (though in practice some compromise had been necessary); but Kontos demonstrated how even the most learned writers continually broke the most basic rules of Ancient Greek grammar. Kontos asserted that Korais' compromises were no longer necessary, as the language had "advanced" since his time (by which he meant it had become more archaic, as with the gradual restoration of the dative case), and he never used the term Katharevousa. In his eyes, if it was not up to Ancient Greek standards, it was wrong. Yet he gave no analysis of why these errors might be occurring, or any programme for preventing them; he simply presented a list of the mistakes of other writers. Kontos' knowledge of Ancient Greek was unrivalled, and many