[B-Greek] Is Thucydides helpful reading material?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Oct 19 19:21:10 EDT 2006
On Oct 19, 2006, at 5:20 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote:
> Assuming one wanted to make some rapid headway in Attic would
> Thucydides be helpful reading material? I have been looking over the
> opening lines of Thucydides History and wondering if this would be
> something worth reading. Is Thucydides representative of Attic prose
> syntax?
>
> I am not too concerned about the difference between Thucydides and
> the NT greek which I assume would be substantial.
I've read the four answers (Spinti, Ernest, Shumaker, Campbell) to
this query that have come in since it was posted. I'd concur that
Thucydides is perhaps the most difficult Attic prose one can read; we
used to class the hardest Attic writers as Thucydides and Aeschylus
-- and although Pindar isn't Attic, he belongs in that category also.
On the other hand, Thucydides isn't uniformly difficult; he is
difficult especially in those sections that are generally agreed to
be the most significant: the speeches -- the sequence of four
speeches that triggered the Peloponnesian War, the three speeches of
Pericleas (including the celebrated Epitaphios), the debate over what
to do with the rebels in Mitylene, and the Melian Dialogue. Then too
there's the account of the revolution on Corcyra which has always
seemed to me to be a sort of "Platonic form" of political/social
revolution. BUT: the narrative sequences in Thucydides are quite
significantly easier reading,
Elizabeth actually raises more than one question here. To the most
simple of them I'd have to say: NO, T is NOT helpful material for one
wanting to make some rapid headway in Attic (far better would be
Xenophon -- e.g. the Memorabilia of Socrates, or the pseudo-
Xenophontic "Constitution of Athens" more commonly called "The Old
Oligarch" or some speeches of Lysias). One needs to acquire some
vocabulary for Herodotus, but Herodotus is fun and worth while (but
Herodotus isn't Attic but Ionic.
Is Thucydides worth reading? Eminently. It is one of the great
classics of all literature offering an analysis of what makes people
tick politically and socialy in time of war. Ultimately it is worth
reading for its own sake rather than for the sake of learning Greek.
In fact, it would be more nearly true to say it's worth learning
Greek to be able to read Thucydides. I once vowed that I would learn
to read Russian in order to be able to read Dostoyevsky; I never got
that far, but I don't regret reading Thucydides.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad2 at mac.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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