I have decided to try and learn Ancient Greek

I think my brain works best with a "two steps forward, one step back" approach.

Not that I'm anywhere near ready for it yet, but is there a good first actual text? (In the sense of L'Etranger having been a great first novel to have read in French.)

I feel fairly certain that I'm getting the pronunciation all wrong, especial w/r/t tones.

Adam: Get a self-instruction book and start plugging away. Or take a class, I guess.

Why are Greek and Latin classes always taught at, like, 7:30 am?

Plato, oddly enough, is a good text to start out on. The philosophical arguments don't tend to make much sense when you translate them, but the sentence structure and vocabulary are about as basic as you're likely to get. Xenophon's pretty straightforward, too, and Aesop. Also Homer, but that involves learning a few basics of the difference between Homeric and Attic Greek and picking a bit of one of the two epics you think will hold your attention and, well, all that. But Homer has the joy of being able to coast through epithets and stock lines. There are textbooks you can buy which have simplified versions of different texts -- well, I know we have them in the UK, at least, and isn't mail order a great thing? -- there's some geared towards GCSE students with really useful notes on how you get the sentences to work at the back.

All my Ancient Greek anecdotes tend to revolve around "and then they stripped? and chopped wood? what the fuck?" and the joys of scatological Aristophanes, so they're pretty uninteresting unless you're, well, me.

But, yeah, it is worth it - it's a great language, even if a bitch at times. Just avoid the Thucydides and everything will be fine.

xpost oh, god, I'd forgotten Dikaiopolis.

You'd be amazed at how much homoerotic subtext you can get from "Akhilleus studied Hektor's beautiful body up and down, looking for the place where his spear might most easily pierce it" (or words to that effect). Wait, did I say subtext? I meant text. It sort of gets to the point where you find the word 'thongs' and go "whee! thongs!" and then discover they're being looped inside the fleshy part where someone's ankle and foot meet, this hole bored between the tendons, and I don't care if he's dead, that's still... ow.

They designed the GCSE course so there'd be something for everyone in each section they chose - one part romantic devotion (Crito for Socrates, Akhilleus for Patroclus, Odysseus for himself), one part heroic grandstanding, one part someone Being Really Cunning, one part gore. Except the bits of gore can be *really* well-written, lots of onomatopoeia and with a teacher taking unnatural relish in discussing how exactly a burning piece of wood sizzles in someone's eye and what sort of sound would it make. With a class who mostly have hangovers. Wheeee.

Anyway I'm totally more into the homoeroticism than the gore. I do like onomatopoeia, though.

Anyway I'm totally more into the homoeroticism than the gore. First thought: That's what I said about the Punisher!
Second thought (crafting the joke): That's what I said about Freddy Vs. Jason!

Concur that Plato's as good a place as any to start. I myself am really not much on Greek, I was bad at it & it gave me little of the joy that Latin did though it does have its charms. Never got good enough at it to read Sophocles, who apparently writes in a manner that requires its own separate course of study. (As do a number of signifigant Greeks - not just a stylistic but a grammatical matter here.), though the few verses of Philoctetes we translated in Intermediate Greek were thrilling. Latin, on the other hand, will afford you the savage joy of Seneca inside of two years.

It has the greatest literature ever, and one day you will be able to read it in its original language.

Handily, one of the most interesting writers (Xenophon) also has a really easy writing style, ideal for relative beginners. Look forward to exciting descriptions of armies marching through modern Turkey, their desire to return home to Greece, being forever threatened with being thwarted by hostile tribesmen, extreme weather, and big Persian women.

And sadly I am all about staying up late and sleeping in. (Then again I guess it was 5:30am or something when you posted that? You rock star, you.)

Though I'd be curious what the particular joys of Latin are, especially if they're lacking in Greek.

Latin sentence structure is almost infinitely flexible, and I'm not using the word "infinitely" lightly. Greek sentence structure is flexible but doesn't reach the insane level of nuance that Latin does. Also, in late Latin (Apuleius for example; also Petronius though he's not nearly so late) there's a degree of wordplay that's for lack of a better term Joycean. Finally the Romans are just way more interesting to me than the Greeks, with the exception of the Greek tragedians who are my homiez. Something about Roman writing is incredibly daring, impossible to pin down, dizzyingly risky, gloriously obscene - see Catullus's "pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo" for example ("I will assfuck & mouthfuck the both of you") - hard to imagine any poet of the 20th century naming his critics as C. does there & assaulting them so magnificently.

(ie pound goes after amy lowell, cattulus goes after the powerful)

i want to learn latin.
i knew someone who was learning and the first day of class the instructor asked if anyone was planning on working at the vatican, and no one said yes, so he responded, we can drop the spoken portion then

(also do you have a link to an english translation of that poem)
also im reminded of all of the dirty bits in anglo books being untranslated, which made all the public school boys learnt it quicker and more efficently (a sly bit of carrot and stick there)

anyways
YEAAAAAH CHRIS
(i would recommend things, but all i have is churchy shit, and you dont want that noise)

[I was being ironic with "rock star", but still, five hours sleep?!]

All right, you got me with that quote. (And it seems even better with the original word order, though I can't decipher whether "pedicabo" is assfuck or mouthfuck.)

I am, admittedly, not entirely sure why I'm undertaking this -- I can make a few rationalizations, and it's something I've wanted to do for a long time, but -- well, ok, certainly part of it is my frustration with how unreadable all the Greek texts I've tried to read in English were, and my desire to actually read them in the original to get the juice out of them -- that coupled with my relative underexposure to Latin writing plus having already studied some romance languages make Greek more appealing. But you know, life is long and I imagine learning Greek will make Latin easier at some point (this is the first time I've studied a strongly cased language, at least).

can I get a awww yeahhhh

The most vulgar my Latin book got was "tu es caudex", "you are an oaf/blockhead". Though for all I know this could have meant "dickhead".

however the two latin teachers i learnt from did delve into this area though, and got annoyed when we - the official schoolboys - were coy in our attempts to translate: they pretty much took the line Darn1elle does: "Stop fannying around, it means FUCK!"

i couldn't do greek AND music :(

Only 6 people did Greek. Quite a few did Latin though.

http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/cat16.shtml

There was one kid who took Latin who I was friends with. I tried to get him to teach me Hebrew, but it didn't go very far, in part because we weren't actually friends and he was a bit annoying. (But then again, so was I, most likely.)

Mind you, Matt kind of gave up but I think that was more to do with the next 'project' coming along than anything else.

I did Ancient Greek at school, but I missed the lesson when the teacher tested us on the alphabet, so I never learnt it properly (I can get down to the first 6 letters). It made the rest of the year very difficult. So I gave it up after that year..

and it's a good idea to be able to recite all those verbs as well. I could never do that either.

(he was a v.sweet bloke but this remains funny)

yes we had many "biggus dickus" moments in Latin class, where the teacher would steam his way through the naughty bits while we bit our lower lips in a desperate attempt not to laugh. The opposite of Catullus in this regard was Cicero, who had the most laborious, unfunniest jokes.

odi et amo...

I'm glad that the UK folks have woken up and can post to this thread with abandon.

(it wz kind of like, be creative or shut the department for good)

My teacher did have a sporadic temper but nonetheless he was a nice man most of the time and a very intelligent one too. The range of subjects covered was quite astounding, between the history and the translations themselves. I think also though it's a language lovers subject, the whole notion of what the most aesthetically pleasing way to arrange the translated words was.

I'm not sure if there was such an ultimatum in my school but it certainly was a class where I remember lots of genuinely interesting lessons. I guess the whole thing of 11 students or so to one teacher is unusual too.

This thread is making me feel like a scamp for doing no work for my final Latin exam, because it was ten days after all my other exams (and represented the last 3 hours of my entire schooling). I got a C3, tut tut.

the actual room i wz taught in, right up in the roof of the bulding, was however full of genuinely ancient (and dusty) books, plus a brilliant 18th-century wooden lectern on which 10000000000000 inky schoolboys had carved their names

19th C. English lit (post-Austen, pre-Wilde) is just about the boringest thing ever and I blame it for my dropping out of college.

(i actually really like dickens also but i know mileage way varies)

Anyway obv I was using a bit of hyperbole there, this doesn't need to become "POO 19th C. Romantic English Lit". ;-)

also better pictures:

http://lweb.tc.columbia.edu/cs/modelsl/crimson.jpg

ill need to learn latin though, what with the masters of div. and to read the summa theologica in the orginal tounge.

i totally blame andrew lang's YELLOW FAIRY BOOK for shaping my sexuality yes i do

[1]  pedicabo: the verbs are here not to be understood in the literal sense, but only as conveying vague threats, in the gross language of that day; cf. also Intr. 32.

From here.

Is it worthwhile? Well, out of all the things from college I toy with returning, it's not one of them. I'd rather retackle Newton or calculus because that shit just completely flummoxed me back in the day and I can't tolerate knowing that I've been that inept at something.

I might have done that book. there is a bit where some guy says "Flocci non facio", which was translated as "I don't give a hang". Apparently it actually means that.

My teacher did have a sporadic temper but nonetheless he was a nice man most of the time and a very intelligent one too.

did you go to the same school as me? I wonder were the same teachers still in place. Did your teacher have a Groucho Marx moustache?

that's what makes Greek so great.

Did you mean Pat R*gan by any chance? I think he may have had a moustache at one stage. Or possibly Joe Thu*llier?

that's the one.

great thread btw.

The great thing about my school's Latin course was that we got to do not just the 'wow, Lesbia, you're really cool, isn't love great?' love poetry, but also honeyed-Juventus and 'passer, deliciae meae puella' (sparrow, darling of my girl; with whom she plays, who she holds in her lap and with her finger teases to nip... and so on). Still weren't allowed to do the Mentula poems, or pedicabo eos at irrumabo, though. That would have been too fun.

I prefer Latin to Greek - the language makes more sense to me, the literature appeals to me more although all youse loving Virgil are insane - but starting with Greek would be a really cool thing to do. Especially as, after doing Greek, Latin grammar will seem almost easy.

(and where is the love for Tibullus on this thread? and amores-era Ovid? Shocking.)

I like that Alecto the Fury is SO HORRIBLE that even her sisters Tisiphone and Meghaera and her dad Pluto don't like her

But the Dido bit was done and done better in Catullus 64, with Ariadne raging up and down the beach rather than Dido frantic about the newly-building city, in my opinion.

Hipponax to thread to defend the Greeks!

JP? yes indeed. so was the ILXOR's father who taught me Greek.

There's too much stuff about Latin here - go and start your own thread!

I am going to see a performance of "Antigone" on Saturday. It has been translated into English (and given a new title) by Seamus Heaney. I suspect that in this context "translated" means translated from the Penguin Classics version rather than from that of Sophocles.

I learned Latin at school, and always regretted not learning Greek, even though I wanted to, my school didn't offer it. My brother learned Greek and I was jealous.

(I am very disappointed that Latin, Greek and Hebrew are no longer required study at Divinity School. This seems wrong, and I did much complaining to my mum about it.)

Hellenists way territorial up in this piece

But I went to Powell's and looked through their books in Latin section, and of course immediately get frustrated that I'm really not there yet, and have to remind myself that I've only been doing this since JUNE and that it will come, it will come.

this thread makes me happy. i'm in second year and reading plato, though i really want to read drama. i have to relearn latin when i graduate though, i've forgotten ridiculous amounts since high school.

Egyptian is also very interesting to learn: Heiroglyphs Without Mystery or How To Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

Good stuff. Any guide to how different translations compare? So far I've been eding either Penguin paperbacks and the odd Loeb edition (read Virgil's Aeneid). Which publishers put out editions of the classics w/out the repression that i'm reading about here?

When j0hn talked about the 19th century editions I thought back to reading the Dante translation: the 'Inferno' was a bit less wicked than I thought it would be, but maybe that's just me.

There isn't a thread for modern Greek, so I'll post this here. It's interesting to me that Greek sounds like Spanish but doesn't sound like Italian, given that Italy is next to Greece and Spain is way over there.