In the Epilogue Christoforou offers an impressionistic essay on encounters with ancient Greek epic in modern Greek lands. In an alternative, personal perspective on the political account provided in Hanink’s chapter, he explores the problematic ownership of the past in Greece and how the central place held by Greek antiquity, and in particular epic, in the construction of western civilisation has created a strange distance between Greeks and the Greek past and its literature. Reflecting on his own experience as a Grecophone classicist, Christoforou shows how the story of Greekness and epic is now played out in the background of Greeks performing their Hellenicity in a world that does not always trust their inheritance.

The chronology of borrowing is investigated; Latin words were being borrowed much earlier than previously thought, with less borrowing in the late antique period than previously argued. Republican-era borrowings(especially in Polybius andinscriptions) are given particular attention. Latin words first (or exclusively) attested in Greek are noted. The survival of the ancient loanwords is examined, first within antiquity, then in the Byzantine period (when some additional Latin words were borrowed), and finally in modern Greek. The borrowing and survival rates of Latin loanwords in Greek are compared with those of Greek loanwords in Latin.

Previous claims of suffix borrowing are investigated, particularly for -arius, -aria, -arium, -ianus, -atum, -atus, -ensis, -tor, -ator, -atio, -ura, -inus, and -ella. Some of these were borrowed, others werenot, and in a few cases Greek speakers had not borrowed a suffix but believed that they had done so. Not all Latinate suffixes found in Byzantine and modern Greek go back to antiquity.