[B-Greek] accessibility of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius for beginning-intermediate students?
Mark Lightman
lightmanmark at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 14 22:05:52 EST 2007
I'm responding off list because I have not joined b-greek yet. I would HIGHLY recommend that you read Epictetus' Enchireidion in Greek because the vocabulary overlaps quite a bit with the Greek NT. Several words that are rare in the NT occur frequently in Epictetus, so this is a good way to master rare NT words. There are also lots of cognates to NT words. The synax of Epictetus is also fairly easy and similar to the NT. Plus the text is wonderful and does not contradict the Bible (you can be I think a Christian AND a Stoic.) You can get the Enchireidion on line but I would recommend that you get the Loeb Classical Library volume 2 of Epictetus (which includes the Enchireidion and the second half of the Discourses. ) The Discourse are a bit harder. What I do is read the Enchireidion over and over again.
Marcus Aurelius is a different story. While reading him in English is great, I think his Greek is too frustrating. It's fairly hard and not very elegant. Lots of elipses and the vocab is harder than Epictetus. I have tried to take b-Greekers' advise and read widely at least in koine (classical per se, say Plato or the Playwrites I find too hard) and I have found Epictetus to be the easiest and most helpful after the Apostolic Fathers (Holmes has a great new diglot just out.) And of course the LXX. But don't be fooled. Re-reading the Greek NT is still much more helpful in getting your Greek better. You should I think be spending about 80% of your time doing that before you read anything else in Greek.
May God bless you in your efforts in learning this wonderful language.!
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