acknowledge that any alternative view might have an iota of justification." In fact Psycharis regarded any opposition as a personal attack; on one occasion his combative nature even led him to challenge Hatzidakis to a duel. He was also determined to claim sole credit for founding the demoticist movement. Retrospectively summing up his own career in 1919, he declared that "Psycharis is to demoticism what Marx is to socialism". In My Journey itself he claimed to be the first person ever to write in demotic prose, ignoring the Ionian writers from Manousos and Konemenos onwards; "... in his desire to be totally original he failed to give due credit to the work of the post-Solomos writers from the Ionian Islands, whom he no doubt felt to be rivals." (Mackridge 2009 pp. 224–5) This may be connected with his exclusion of any Ionian influence from his version of demotic. Psycharis divided the world into allies and enemies, with nothing in between, and he could be very dismissive and patronizing about anyone other than his closest allies. "Even the Romaic language doesn't possess words to express how much I'm disgusted by Romiosyni " who he felt were insufficiently enthusiastic about his programme. As for the literary establishment: "Papadiamantis. Never heard of him. Who is he and what has he written?" At the time, Papadiamantis was widely considered to be Greece's leading fiction writer. These attitudes inevitably drove away people who might have been allies, and divided the demoticist forces. They also provoked additional opposition. Overall, Psycharis might be considered something of a double-edged weapon for the demoticist cause. "While My Journey was perhaps what was needed to awaken Greek intellectual leaders from their torpor, Psycharis' persistence in his uncompromising attitude towards the specific language variety he proposed, as well as to the language question in general, provoked an extreme reaction that delayed the resolution of the Katharevousa-demotic conflict for several decades." This extreme reaction took some time to develop, however, and only gathered real strength after the turn of the century. For the first few years, buoyed by a sense of optimism in the country as a whole, the debate was good-humoured and constructive. Psycharis' followers: Eftaliotis and Pallis Psycharis did more than cause a stir among established writers. His energy and charisma also recruited dedicated new followers from outside the literary establishment, particularly among the Greek diaspora—men who, like himself, lived