Reading Greek

Carl Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sun Dec 22 12:08:04 EST 2002


> Dear Glendon:
> 
> Plato's dialogue's *are* online, and are worth every second.  I don't think
> there's a more elegant and yet naturally flowing Attic Greek you'll read
> anywhere.  If you're going to start anywhere with Plato, I might recommend
> Plato's *Apology*. All the same I'd certainly be interested to hear other
> people's suggestions.  Here's a place where you can access them in Greek and
> in a parallel English translation, should you need one.  You might read a
> section through in English first and then try ploughing through the Greek
> without the English.

I would agree fundamentally with this; more often than not, the Apology
has been the starting-point for second-year courses in Greek that I taught
over the years. The one caveat about the Apology is that it's got a lot of
colloquial idiomatic stuff in it that replicates the mannerisms of
Socrates as Plato remembered them (or chose to represent them)--so you do
need a good commentary to help with those since you don't find those
colloquialisms very readily in a lexicon (e.g. OLIGOU EMAUTOU EPELAQOMHN,
or something like that: I'm thinking of the OLIGOU in the genitive in an
adverbial sense, "almost.") A very short dialogue that is about as easy as
you can get in Plato is the "Ion," one of the early "aporetic" dialogues
in which Socrates takes on a Homeric rhapsode and shows him that his
mastery of the Homeric text doesn't make him knowledgeable about all
matters that Homeric poetry embraces. A bit more difficult--but not so
very much--is the "Euthyphro," wherein Socrates confronts a young man who
is a little too cocky in his assurance that he knows what piety is and
that he is being pious in the course of action in which he is currently
engaged (prosecuting his father for murder). These are good pieces to chew
on in terms of relatively easy classical Greek that are at the same time
fun to read and provide a lot of food for thought as well.

Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu



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