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Introduction to Attic Greek
This thorough presentation of Attic Greek assumes that college students learning the language deserve, from the beginning, full exposure to all the grammar and morphology that they will encounter in actual texts. Each of the forty-two chapters is a self-contained instructional unit, with challenging exercises carefully tailored to reflect the vocabulary and grammar learned to date. The units gradually build up the student's knowledge of declensions, tenses, and constructions by alternating emphasis on morphology and syntax. Readings become progressively more complex and, in the second half of the book, are largely based on actual texts and include unadapted passages from Xenophon, Lysias, Plato, Aristophanes, and Thucydides. Logically organized and remarkably lucid, Introduction to Attic Greek provides students with a strong grounding in the essentials of Greek grammar as well as a substantial body of vocabulary, enabling students to read, on completion of the course, a continuous text with commentary and dictionary.
Included are a concise introduction to the history of the Greek language, a composite list of verbs with principal parts, an appendix of all paradigms, Greek-English and English-Greek glossaries, and a detailed index. The book is also a useful reference work for more advanced students who discover that gaps in their knowledge of basic Greek grammar prevent accurate reading of texts.
Included are a concise introduction to the history of the Greek language, a composite list of verbs with principal parts, an appendix of all paradigms, Greek-English and English-Greek glossaries, and a detailed index. The book is also a useful reference work for more advanced students who discover that gaps in their knowledge of basic Greek grammar prevent accurate reading of texts.
435 pages, Paperback
First published February 17, 1993
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November 19, 2012
This review is for Peter.
This is both a review and a few brief comments on how I’d suggest learning Greek if you don’t have a teacher.
Please note, if you’re planning on learning the dastardly duo of Latin and Greek, I’d highly recommend learning Latin first as it’s by far the easier language. For a few comments about learning Latin, please see my review of Wheelock's Latin, 6e, which is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
It should also be noted that this text teaches ancient Greek. You’ll pretty much be able to read modern Greek after completing this text, but if your only interest is in modern Greek your time would probably be better served with a text specifically designed for that.
First, I’d like to go through the specific things which will probably be challenging about learning Greek.
If you’ve never learned a foreign language before, ancient Greek might be a rather difficult language to start off with. The height of Greek literature occurred at a point when the language was still working out its isolated-language complexities, meaning there are a lot of forms and idiosyncratic rules to learn.
The mere fact that Greek uses a different script than English can seem like a brick wall if you’ve only read Italic-text languages before. Being presented with something that looks like: “ἀεὶ μέν, ὦ παῖ Λαρτίου, δέδορκά σε/πεῖράν τιν᾽ ἐχθρῶν ἁρπάσαι θηρώμενον” (first two lines of the Ajax FTW) and being expected to read it can seem like an insurmountable barrier. As it turns out, however, Greek script is very easy to learn to read; it’s an alphabet just like English and is a very good starting point for learning a non-Italic language.
Greek was not a cohesive language at the time of the great Greek writers. So a person can’t just learn “Ancient Greek”: you have to learn all the dialects. Mastronarde teaches the version of Greek spoken in Athens (hence, Attic), and knowing this dialect will allow you to read most of the big writers. However, at some point you’ll probably also need to learn Doric, Ionic, and Homeric (and Lacedaimonian and Aeolic, by some counts) Greek as well. Once you know one dialect, learning the others can be accomplished without too much hassle by reading works written in those dialects with commentary, and learning the differences as they crop up. However, Homeric Greek (the Greek used by Homer), might require particular effort, as it’s the most different of the Greeks.
Greek is a highly inflected language. If you’ve never studied a highly inflected language before, I’d very much recommend studying how these sorts of languages work before touching a Greek text, as things can get confusing (and frustrating) fast if you have no idea what an aorist or optative is and the text introduces the concept in two sentences before moving on to specifics.
If you’re interested in learning Greek in order to read the New Testament, this text will certainly get you to that point, but New Testament Greek is a lot easier than classical Greek. You’ll only have to be peripherally aware of most of the more complicated stuff in this text. (As a general rule of thumb, the later a work was written, the easier it’ll be to read.) Unfortunately, if there’s a decent New Testament Greek text out there which would be preferable to this text, I’m not aware of it.
Greek might be a difficult language to learn without a teacher. Besides the fact that it’s a grammatically complex language, the pronunciation is quite hard to convey through a text (and if you fudge the pronunciation of theta at the beginning, it'll stick). Beyond that, Greek is a tonal language, meaning the pitch at which the syllables of a word are pronounced affects the meaning of the word. This is all but impossible for native English-speakers to do properly, and even scholars generally blithely ignore the tones when reading out loud, as it’s very difficult for English-speakers to convey emotion while speaking tonally. However, it’s an integral part of the language and is something that should be learned, even if it’s not put into practice much.
Yes, mu is a bilabial nasal and theta is an aspirated voiceless dental plosive, as Mastronarde instructs, but that doesn’t help most people much with their pronunciation.
All this is not to say it’s impossible to learn Greek without a teacher. Far from it: aside from pronunciation, all of these difficulties are completely surmountable. And pronunciation can be learnt if you can find competently-read recordings of Greek, or can just get ahold of a professor for a day or two. When learning Greek you just have to work very carefully, to make sure every aspect of the language is learnt well: Greek is one of those languages where even minor gaps in your knowledge will come back to bite you when you get to reading.
Alright, enough chit-chat. Now to discussing this particular text for learning Greek.
I consider Mastronarde to be the best text for learning Greek. He’s not head-and-shoulders above the competition the way Wheelock is for Latin texts, but he’s very good. However, Mastronarde does some things in structuring this text which I think were mistakes. I’ll be mentioning these things so you won’t be blindsided by them if you’re a newbie to language-learning.
Mastronarde definitely knows his stuff. I know someone who knew Mastronarde once upon a time, and they say the man probably dreamed in Greek.
The man’s so profoundly good at his subject, though, that sometimes he forgets us chickens are barely following along by the skin of our teeth. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Accentuation, we encounter this sentence: “The general principle of Greek accentuation is that the contonation may be followed by no more than one mora before the end of the word (or phrase pronounced as one word unit).” This is a sentence to make brave men cry. (“If that’s the general principle I don’t think I can stand finding out what the specifics are...”) Never fear! You’ll survive! You’re going to run into several such Holy ---- sentences throughout this text. If you follow the advice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and DON’T PANIC (and are a little obsessive about figuring these things out, once the shock has worn off), you’ll be alright.
In inflected languages, nouns change their form depending on how they fit in a sentence. These systems of changes are called declensions, and memorizing them is a big part of learning the language. The easier inflected languages, like German, have just one declension, and a lot of people consider that plenty hard enough. Latin has five declensions. Greek, ladies and gentlemen, has forty-nine declensions.
Except, not really. A lot of these declensions are variations on a theme and should be learned in groups.
However, this is not how Mastronarde does it. He presents every declension individually. So by the time you get to the end of this book, you’ve memorized (or tried to memorize) 49 separate charts of forms, many of which are very similar to each other, and you don’t know up from down anymore.
This is the first major flaw (in my opinion) of this text. I would advise you to not memorize these charts as Mastronarde presents them to you. Instead, flip to the back of the text (something which people all too often forget to do when they first get a text), where you’ll find all the declensions laid out for you (Appendix Three: Paradigms). You’ll then find the declensions which are similar to each other set up in groups. I would highly suggest memorizing the declensions in these units, one chart per set of declensions, rather than memorizing them individually. That’s still fifteen declensions, give or take, but 15 is a heck of a lot better than 49, and some of them are unusual enough that specific words can just be memorized as irregular forms, and you don’t have to memorize a whole new system.
If you’ve already learned Latin, your goal with Greek shouldn’t be to be able to rattle off the declensions (the way it probably was in Latin). Your goal should be to memorize and assimilate the variations within each declension, so that the changes words take start to seem natural, and it becomes easier to recognize changes as indicative of a certain system of declension.
Similar to the way the changes nouns take is called a declension, the changes verbs take are called conjugations. In my opinion Mastronarde has two problems in the way he presents Greek conjugations: they spill into a million different variations on a theme, similar to the declensions, and he does not teach the principal parts from the beginning. I’ll address both these problems one at a time.
First off, all the different forms. Though in the text proper there are a million different charts and not much of a system presented for learning them, as is the case with the declensions, once again, however, Mastronarde's also categorized these different types of verbs into more usable groups in the back of the book (Appendix Two: Verb List). I would highly recommend memorizing these endings, even before you know what they mean, so that you can develop a usable mental system for the Greek verbs.
The second problem in Mastronarde’s approach to verbs is the principal parts. Principal parts are particular forms of a verb, which you memorize for every new verb you learn. Latin, for example, has four principal parts, which are often learned as: I love today, to love, I loved yesterday, and having been loved all my life. Or, to be less poetical about it: the present, the infinitive, the past, and the neuter perfect participle (technically the accusative supine, but who’s counting). In any inflected language, these forms are essential to learn in order to be able to conjugate a verb.
Greek has six principal parts: the present, the future, the aorist, the perfect, the perfect middle, and the aorist passive. You need all these forms (of every single verb you learn) to be able to construct the other verbal forms, such as the future and pluperfect. However, this is a little intimidating at first, and Mastronarde only presents the principal parts as he introduces those forms of the verb. So, you aren’t expected to memorize the aorist principal part of verbs until you’ve been taught how to conjugate the aorist.
In my opinion this is a mistaken approach. Less intimidating, yes, but principal parts are essential to learning the language. You don’t want to slog through an entire text and be raring to finally read an actual book in this friggin’ language you’ve worked so hard to learn, only to be told in Appendix 2, oh, by the way, there are 1,296 forms (no exaggeration) you need to memorize before you can reasonably expect to read anything. Whoopsie.
If you don’t learn the principal parts when you learn the word itself, you’re never going to learn them, and if you don’t learn them you’ll never really be able to read Greek, and if you can’t read Greek then I’d like to know what’s the point of going to all this effort.
So I would very much recommend that, from the very first verb Mastronarde give you as a vocabulary word, you flip to the back and memorize all six principal parts for that word, even if you have no idea how those forms are used yet.
Alright, so let’s say you’ve worked through this entire text. You’ve learned to read the Greek script and pronounce it, even though it’s a tonal language, and you’ve learned all the grammar and vocabulary, even though it was really hard and sometimes confusing, and you’re not climbing the walls yet. You've accomplished something major, and you have a right to feel chuffed with yourself.
Now what?
Now we get to the reason why we didn’t turn tail and run, even at the Holy ---- sentences.
The literature.
There's a lot of truly amazing stuff written in Greek. There are the three great playwrights: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. There are the three great historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. There are the nine lyric poets. There are the great (and not-so-great) philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle. And of course, there’s Homer, who is reason enough to learn this language all by himself.
Greek doesn’t transfer very well into English. It’s too different, and for the masters of this language (Euripides, I’m looking at you) their artistry is too subtle and beautiful for even a fraction of it to be able to transfer into a different language. The only solution is to learn Greek and read them in their original.
Not to mention, Greek is a gorgeous language. I’ve seen people (I’ve been one of them myself) who didn’t know a word of this language, in tears when someone read it out loud, because it’s so beautiful. There are few languages on earth that are comparable to Greek in lyricism and capacity to express emotion.
Learning to read Greek literature, however, is a process as much as getting through Mastronarde was a process. You can’t close Mastronarde and immediately plunge into Homer (dialects, dialects!).
There are some very nice anthologies of Greek literature designed for people who are just starting reading long passages of Greek, replete with vocabulary help and commentary. I’d recommend starting off with at least one or two of these once you finish Mastronarde.
The one I’d suggest starting with is Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary. This is published in two editions, an older one where the text and commentary are separated into two different volumes, and a more recent edition in a single volume. Either is fine. The passages become more difficult (and the font becomes smaller) as you progress through the collection, and it’s a good starting point for being fleetingly introduced to most of the major writers without getting thrown into the deep end.
Then I’d recommend A Greek Anthology, which has similar vocabulary help and commentary, but with more difficult selections. This is a good collection to get a brief taste of the different Greek dialects.
There are many other Greek anthologies which you can continue on with if you feel more comfortable with that, but I feel at this stage you’ll have had enough practice to start reading complete texts.
Plato is an excellent starting point for Greek prose. I think the Bryn Mawr Greek Commentaries are quite good, and I’d recommend Plato's Symposium to begin with.
Then, oh yes, finally time for the playwrights! The typical order of introduction is Sophocles, then Euripides, then Aeschylus. For Sophocles I’d recommend starting either with Ajax (the first two lines of which I quoted earlier) or the Theban plays. For Euripides, I’d recommend the Bacchae.
This might be the point where it’s time to graduate to Loebs (or, the Green Books). Loeb editions have the Greek text on one side, and a translation in English on the facing page, as well as a minimal apparatus criticus. Loebs are a good way of transitioning from relying on the vocabulary help and commentary of an editor to reading independently, as you can refer to the translation when you encounter sticky spots. Here’s an example of a Loeb: Sophocles 1: Ajax/Electra/Oedipus Tyrannus
At this point you’ll definitely need a dictionary, if you don’t have one already. The Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary is a passable Greek-to-English dictionary and an above-average English-to-Greek dictionary, and I’d recommend it if you’d find that application useful. The be-all and end-all of Greek dictionaries is Liddell and Scott’s A Greek-English Lexicon: With a Revised Supplement, 1996. There’s also a mini-version: A Lexicon: Abridged From Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. The mini-lexicon is probably all you need at this point, and it’s certainly a lot more maneuverable than its 2,500-page brethren, which you practically need a winch to open.
You might also find a reference for Greek culture and names desirable at this point. I’d recommend The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s: 2 Volumes as a good reference work.
This is probably the point where it’s time to learn the dialects. I’ll go through them one at a time and mention the authors I think are the best route to learning the dialect well.
Ionic Greek is probably best learned through Herodotus or Lucian.
Pindar is probably the best choice for learning Doric Greek. Theocritus would be a good choice as well. You could also learn with Bacchylides, but his work is rather fragmented and it might get confusing.
Homeric Greek is learned (surprise surprise) by reading Homer. There are a lot of good commentaries on his work, and it’s not that difficult to get used to his style (perhaps comparable to Shakespeare), but it is an important additional stage of learning Greek and should be consciously undertaken, so you don’t wind up with an incomplete understanding of Homeric Greek.
Not everyone feels it’s necessary to learn Aeolic Greek. The reason to learn this dialect is to read Sappho and Alcaeus. I’d recommend the Loeb Greek Lyric, Volume I: Sappho and Alcaeus.
The Spartans were not very big in the writing department. Learning Lacedaimonian Greek is not usually something that has to be taken up as a specific endeavor.
And those are the dialects. At some point you’ll probably want to move up from the Green Books to the Blue Books: the Oxford Classical Texts, or OCTs. These are the standard texts of both Greek and Latin writers (though the Latin ones are green). Each one has an obsessively thorough apparatus criticus (and if you’ve dedicated this much time to learning Greek, obsessively thorough if probably exactly what you’re looking for at this point), as well as a list of sigla and an introduction by the editor, written in Latin (because it’s just going too far to expect someone to write in ancient Greek). Here's an example of a Blue Book: Iliad, Vol. 1.
Homer will probably be the last station you stop at in learning Greek. After that, you’re free as a bird. You’ll be able to read anyone you take a fancy to, with as much of a casual or scholarly bent as you wish.
For reading Greek for leisure, Project Perseus has an excellent collection of texts. It’s here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/c...
And that’s all I have to say about that. Good luck!
This is both a review and a few brief comments on how I’d suggest learning Greek if you don’t have a teacher.
Please note, if you’re planning on learning the dastardly duo of Latin and Greek, I’d highly recommend learning Latin first as it’s by far the easier language. For a few comments about learning Latin, please see my review of Wheelock's Latin, 6e, which is here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
It should also be noted that this text teaches ancient Greek. You’ll pretty much be able to read modern Greek after completing this text, but if your only interest is in modern Greek your time would probably be better served with a text specifically designed for that.
First, I’d like to go through the specific things which will probably be challenging about learning Greek.
If you’ve never learned a foreign language before, ancient Greek might be a rather difficult language to start off with. The height of Greek literature occurred at a point when the language was still working out its isolated-language complexities, meaning there are a lot of forms and idiosyncratic rules to learn.
The mere fact that Greek uses a different script than English can seem like a brick wall if you’ve only read Italic-text languages before. Being presented with something that looks like: “ἀεὶ μέν, ὦ παῖ Λαρτίου, δέδορκά σε/πεῖράν τιν᾽ ἐχθρῶν ἁρπάσαι θηρώμενον” (first two lines of the Ajax FTW) and being expected to read it can seem like an insurmountable barrier. As it turns out, however, Greek script is very easy to learn to read; it’s an alphabet just like English and is a very good starting point for learning a non-Italic language.
Greek was not a cohesive language at the time of the great Greek writers. So a person can’t just learn “Ancient Greek”: you have to learn all the dialects. Mastronarde teaches the version of Greek spoken in Athens (hence, Attic), and knowing this dialect will allow you to read most of the big writers. However, at some point you’ll probably also need to learn Doric, Ionic, and Homeric (and Lacedaimonian and Aeolic, by some counts) Greek as well. Once you know one dialect, learning the others can be accomplished without too much hassle by reading works written in those dialects with commentary, and learning the differences as they crop up. However, Homeric Greek (the Greek used by Homer), might require particular effort, as it’s the most different of the Greeks.
Greek is a highly inflected language. If you’ve never studied a highly inflected language before, I’d very much recommend studying how these sorts of languages work before touching a Greek text, as things can get confusing (and frustrating) fast if you have no idea what an aorist or optative is and the text introduces the concept in two sentences before moving on to specifics.
If you’re interested in learning Greek in order to read the New Testament, this text will certainly get you to that point, but New Testament Greek is a lot easier than classical Greek. You’ll only have to be peripherally aware of most of the more complicated stuff in this text. (As a general rule of thumb, the later a work was written, the easier it’ll be to read.) Unfortunately, if there’s a decent New Testament Greek text out there which would be preferable to this text, I’m not aware of it.
Greek might be a difficult language to learn without a teacher. Besides the fact that it’s a grammatically complex language, the pronunciation is quite hard to convey through a text (and if you fudge the pronunciation of theta at the beginning, it'll stick). Beyond that, Greek is a tonal language, meaning the pitch at which the syllables of a word are pronounced affects the meaning of the word. This is all but impossible for native English-speakers to do properly, and even scholars generally blithely ignore the tones when reading out loud, as it’s very difficult for English-speakers to convey emotion while speaking tonally. However, it’s an integral part of the language and is something that should be learned, even if it’s not put into practice much.
Yes, mu is a bilabial nasal and theta is an aspirated voiceless dental plosive, as Mastronarde instructs, but that doesn’t help most people much with their pronunciation.
All this is not to say it’s impossible to learn Greek without a teacher. Far from it: aside from pronunciation, all of these difficulties are completely surmountable. And pronunciation can be learnt if you can find competently-read recordings of Greek, or can just get ahold of a professor for a day or two. When learning Greek you just have to work very carefully, to make sure every aspect of the language is learnt well: Greek is one of those languages where even minor gaps in your knowledge will come back to bite you when you get to reading.
Alright, enough chit-chat. Now to discussing this particular text for learning Greek.
I consider Mastronarde to be the best text for learning Greek. He’s not head-and-shoulders above the competition the way Wheelock is for Latin texts, but he’s very good. However, Mastronarde does some things in structuring this text which I think were mistakes. I’ll be mentioning these things so you won’t be blindsided by them if you’re a newbie to language-learning.
Mastronarde definitely knows his stuff. I know someone who knew Mastronarde once upon a time, and they say the man probably dreamed in Greek.
The man’s so profoundly good at his subject, though, that sometimes he forgets us chickens are barely following along by the skin of our teeth. At the beginning of Chapter 2, Accentuation, we encounter this sentence: “The general principle of Greek accentuation is that the contonation may be followed by no more than one mora before the end of the word (or phrase pronounced as one word unit).” This is a sentence to make brave men cry. (“If that’s the general principle I don’t think I can stand finding out what the specifics are...”) Never fear! You’ll survive! You’re going to run into several such Holy ---- sentences throughout this text. If you follow the advice of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and DON’T PANIC (and are a little obsessive about figuring these things out, once the shock has worn off), you’ll be alright.
In inflected languages, nouns change their form depending on how they fit in a sentence. These systems of changes are called declensions, and memorizing them is a big part of learning the language. The easier inflected languages, like German, have just one declension, and a lot of people consider that plenty hard enough. Latin has five declensions. Greek, ladies and gentlemen, has forty-nine declensions.
Except, not really. A lot of these declensions are variations on a theme and should be learned in groups.
However, this is not how Mastronarde does it. He presents every declension individually. So by the time you get to the end of this book, you’ve memorized (or tried to memorize) 49 separate charts of forms, many of which are very similar to each other, and you don’t know up from down anymore.
This is the first major flaw (in my opinion) of this text. I would advise you to not memorize these charts as Mastronarde presents them to you. Instead, flip to the back of the text (something which people all too often forget to do when they first get a text), where you’ll find all the declensions laid out for you (Appendix Three: Paradigms). You’ll then find the declensions which are similar to each other set up in groups. I would highly suggest memorizing the declensions in these units, one chart per set of declensions, rather than memorizing them individually. That’s still fifteen declensions, give or take, but 15 is a heck of a lot better than 49, and some of them are unusual enough that specific words can just be memorized as irregular forms, and you don’t have to memorize a whole new system.
If you’ve already learned Latin, your goal with Greek shouldn’t be to be able to rattle off the declensions (the way it probably was in Latin). Your goal should be to memorize and assimilate the variations within each declension, so that the changes words take start to seem natural, and it becomes easier to recognize changes as indicative of a certain system of declension.
Similar to the way the changes nouns take is called a declension, the changes verbs take are called conjugations. In my opinion Mastronarde has two problems in the way he presents Greek conjugations: they spill into a million different variations on a theme, similar to the declensions, and he does not teach the principal parts from the beginning. I’ll address both these problems one at a time.
First off, all the different forms. Though in the text proper there are a million different charts and not much of a system presented for learning them, as is the case with the declensions, once again, however, Mastronarde's also categorized these different types of verbs into more usable groups in the back of the book (Appendix Two: Verb List). I would highly recommend memorizing these endings, even before you know what they mean, so that you can develop a usable mental system for the Greek verbs.
The second problem in Mastronarde’s approach to verbs is the principal parts. Principal parts are particular forms of a verb, which you memorize for every new verb you learn. Latin, for example, has four principal parts, which are often learned as: I love today, to love, I loved yesterday, and having been loved all my life. Or, to be less poetical about it: the present, the infinitive, the past, and the neuter perfect participle (technically the accusative supine, but who’s counting). In any inflected language, these forms are essential to learn in order to be able to conjugate a verb.
Greek has six principal parts: the present, the future, the aorist, the perfect, the perfect middle, and the aorist passive. You need all these forms (of every single verb you learn) to be able to construct the other verbal forms, such as the future and pluperfect. However, this is a little intimidating at first, and Mastronarde only presents the principal parts as he introduces those forms of the verb. So, you aren’t expected to memorize the aorist principal part of verbs until you’ve been taught how to conjugate the aorist.
In my opinion this is a mistaken approach. Less intimidating, yes, but principal parts are essential to learning the language. You don’t want to slog through an entire text and be raring to finally read an actual book in this friggin’ language you’ve worked so hard to learn, only to be told in Appendix 2, oh, by the way, there are 1,296 forms (no exaggeration) you need to memorize before you can reasonably expect to read anything. Whoopsie.
If you don’t learn the principal parts when you learn the word itself, you’re never going to learn them, and if you don’t learn them you’ll never really be able to read Greek, and if you can’t read Greek then I’d like to know what’s the point of going to all this effort.
So I would very much recommend that, from the very first verb Mastronarde give you as a vocabulary word, you flip to the back and memorize all six principal parts for that word, even if you have no idea how those forms are used yet.
Alright, so let’s say you’ve worked through this entire text. You’ve learned to read the Greek script and pronounce it, even though it’s a tonal language, and you’ve learned all the grammar and vocabulary, even though it was really hard and sometimes confusing, and you’re not climbing the walls yet. You've accomplished something major, and you have a right to feel chuffed with yourself.
Now what?
Now we get to the reason why we didn’t turn tail and run, even at the Holy ---- sentences.
The literature.
There's a lot of truly amazing stuff written in Greek. There are the three great playwrights: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. There are the three great historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon. There are the nine lyric poets. There are the great (and not-so-great) philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle. And of course, there’s Homer, who is reason enough to learn this language all by himself.
Greek doesn’t transfer very well into English. It’s too different, and for the masters of this language (Euripides, I’m looking at you) their artistry is too subtle and beautiful for even a fraction of it to be able to transfer into a different language. The only solution is to learn Greek and read them in their original.
Not to mention, Greek is a gorgeous language. I’ve seen people (I’ve been one of them myself) who didn’t know a word of this language, in tears when someone read it out loud, because it’s so beautiful. There are few languages on earth that are comparable to Greek in lyricism and capacity to express emotion.
Learning to read Greek literature, however, is a process as much as getting through Mastronarde was a process. You can’t close Mastronarde and immediately plunge into Homer (dialects, dialects!).
There are some very nice anthologies of Greek literature designed for people who are just starting reading long passages of Greek, replete with vocabulary help and commentary. I’d recommend starting off with at least one or two of these once you finish Mastronarde.
The one I’d suggest starting with is Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary. This is published in two editions, an older one where the text and commentary are separated into two different volumes, and a more recent edition in a single volume. Either is fine. The passages become more difficult (and the font becomes smaller) as you progress through the collection, and it’s a good starting point for being fleetingly introduced to most of the major writers without getting thrown into the deep end.
Then I’d recommend A Greek Anthology, which has similar vocabulary help and commentary, but with more difficult selections. This is a good collection to get a brief taste of the different Greek dialects.
There are many other Greek anthologies which you can continue on with if you feel more comfortable with that, but I feel at this stage you’ll have had enough practice to start reading complete texts.
Plato is an excellent starting point for Greek prose. I think the Bryn Mawr Greek Commentaries are quite good, and I’d recommend Plato's Symposium to begin with.
Then, oh yes, finally time for the playwrights! The typical order of introduction is Sophocles, then Euripides, then Aeschylus. For Sophocles I’d recommend starting either with Ajax (the first two lines of which I quoted earlier) or the Theban plays. For Euripides, I’d recommend the Bacchae.
This might be the point where it’s time to graduate to Loebs (or, the Green Books). Loeb editions have the Greek text on one side, and a translation in English on the facing page, as well as a minimal apparatus criticus. Loebs are a good way of transitioning from relying on the vocabulary help and commentary of an editor to reading independently, as you can refer to the translation when you encounter sticky spots. Here’s an example of a Loeb: Sophocles 1: Ajax/Electra/Oedipus Tyrannus
At this point you’ll definitely need a dictionary, if you don’t have one already. The Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary is a passable Greek-to-English dictionary and an above-average English-to-Greek dictionary, and I’d recommend it if you’d find that application useful. The be-all and end-all of Greek dictionaries is Liddell and Scott’s A Greek-English Lexicon: With a Revised Supplement, 1996. There’s also a mini-version: A Lexicon: Abridged From Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon. The mini-lexicon is probably all you need at this point, and it’s certainly a lot more maneuverable than its 2,500-page brethren, which you practically need a winch to open.
You might also find a reference for Greek culture and names desirable at this point. I’d recommend The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300-1990s: 2 Volumes as a good reference work.
This is probably the point where it’s time to learn the dialects. I’ll go through them one at a time and mention the authors I think are the best route to learning the dialect well.
Ionic Greek is probably best learned through Herodotus or Lucian.
Pindar is probably the best choice for learning Doric Greek. Theocritus would be a good choice as well. You could also learn with Bacchylides, but his work is rather fragmented and it might get confusing.
Homeric Greek is learned (surprise surprise) by reading Homer. There are a lot of good commentaries on his work, and it’s not that difficult to get used to his style (perhaps comparable to Shakespeare), but it is an important additional stage of learning Greek and should be consciously undertaken, so you don’t wind up with an incomplete understanding of Homeric Greek.
Not everyone feels it’s necessary to learn Aeolic Greek. The reason to learn this dialect is to read Sappho and Alcaeus. I’d recommend the Loeb Greek Lyric, Volume I: Sappho and Alcaeus.
The Spartans were not very big in the writing department. Learning Lacedaimonian Greek is not usually something that has to be taken up as a specific endeavor.
And those are the dialects. At some point you’ll probably want to move up from the Green Books to the Blue Books: the Oxford Classical Texts, or OCTs. These are the standard texts of both Greek and Latin writers (though the Latin ones are green). Each one has an obsessively thorough apparatus criticus (and if you’ve dedicated this much time to learning Greek, obsessively thorough if probably exactly what you’re looking for at this point), as well as a list of sigla and an introduction by the editor, written in Latin (because it’s just going too far to expect someone to write in ancient Greek). Here's an example of a Blue Book: Iliad, Vol. 1.
Homer will probably be the last station you stop at in learning Greek. After that, you’re free as a bird. You’ll be able to read anyone you take a fancy to, with as much of a casual or scholarly bent as you wish.
For reading Greek for leisure, Project Perseus has an excellent collection of texts. It’s here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/c...
And that’s all I have to say about that. Good luck!
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December 20, 2022I know now why the kids in The Secret History all went mad.
Read
August 28, 2024Yanunistan is my favourite satrapy of the greater Persian empire
Currently reading
December 28, 2021I'm surprised at how much I like this Greek text. I really like it, and I'd expected to find it terrible (because the text for the Introductory Latin course at Oxford is the w o r s t thing imaginable, the absolute abomination of desolation . . . so I suspected the one for the Greek course would be equally bad and avoided it till being required to teach with it this term). But 1 term and 23 units of teaching in (and doing all the exercises and readings for myself, too), I think it might just be my favorite introductory Greek text I've encountered. The units are a manageable length, the order of topics is extremely sensible and balanced in difficulty, the vocabulary is given sensibly (like with like, and English derivatives for nearly every word), and the exercises (a mix of Greek-English and English-Greek) are very useful and well-tailored to the concepts taught in the chapter. It makes the JACT pacing feel jerky and off-balanced and Athenaze like drowning in a torrential Italian firehose in comparison. Until and unless a full-immersion Familia Romana style Greek course is developed, I think the best way of learning Greek would be to use this text, paired (in the latter half) with Writing Greek (Anderson) and followed with Eleanor Dickey's glorious prose comp book.
(Warning, though: this is coming from someone whose Greek is really, really mediocre...)
(Warning, though: this is coming from someone whose Greek is really, really mediocre...)
October 6, 2019
A very solid elementary undergrad-level course that—as far as I could tell—does nothing in an unexpected way. The approach is generally more analytic than I think a secondary-school course would be, and Mastronarde is clearly writing for the historical linguistics crowd as well as pure classicists, which is nice. The last couple of chapters are a bit of an unstructured mess, but so is the language.
One of the reasons Mastronarde is so commonly recommended is because it's very easy to find a cheap second-hand copy; if you go that route, you should be aware that most of what you'll find second-hand is the first edition, and that you probably won't be able to find a first-edition answer key for less money than a new second-edition book and answer key combined, if at all. And you do need an answer key—I made my way through the first twenty-five or so chapters (of 42) without one before caving and just getting a second-edition key; the grammar exercises are very doable, but Athenians aren't great at writing coherent sentences when they get going, and as it turns out even the answer key's translations are occasionally impossible to parse.
A second-edition key is fairly usable, though: the second edition moves chapter 35 to chapter 29 (with significant changes) and cleans up the aforementioned unstructured mess, but for the most part it just adds more exercises, leaving in the old ones. You'll have to hunt for long-form texts, which get moved around a lot, but I do think they're all in there.
Or, you know. Plan better than I did.
One of the reasons Mastronarde is so commonly recommended is because it's very easy to find a cheap second-hand copy; if you go that route, you should be aware that most of what you'll find second-hand is the first edition, and that you probably won't be able to find a first-edition answer key for less money than a new second-edition book and answer key combined, if at all. And you do need an answer key—I made my way through the first twenty-five or so chapters (of 42) without one before caving and just getting a second-edition key; the grammar exercises are very doable, but Athenians aren't great at writing coherent sentences when they get going, and as it turns out even the answer key's translations are occasionally impossible to parse.
A second-edition key is fairly usable, though: the second edition moves chapter 35 to chapter 29 (with significant changes) and cleans up the aforementioned unstructured mess, but for the most part it just adds more exercises, leaving in the old ones. You'll have to hunt for long-form texts, which get moved around a lot, but I do think they're all in there.
Or, you know. Plan better than I did.
February 19, 2015
An excellent introductory text, but not for autodidacts unless you're arriving with some prior experience. Explanations of morphology and grammar are lean and precise, and the exercises are demanding. (Unfortunately there is no answer key for the exercises. A separately published answer key is available, but this is another strike for self-learners.) Despite this, it is a very well written and designed textbook, and one of the best introductions to Greek morphology I've run across.
December 30, 2015
This book will be the death of me. Or maybe it's already killed me, and for my life's punishment, I'm doomed to ceaselessly memorize complicated noun declensions and prepositional phrases.
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August 8, 2025This is a superb book for learning ancient Greek if you already know ancient Greek. I taught a summer session of Greek II using this (in the second edition), and I generally found his grammatical explanations and thorough review of morphology helpful. Mastronarde tends to jam nearly all the details of a subject into a chapter or two, which makes it very useful as a reference. (Ease of reference is a subsidiary but important consideration when designing a textbook—the textbook is the reference grammar for a beginning student, and you need to be able to find something if you forget it. I’ve seen inferior textbooks that split morphology and concepts into different chapters such that it’s very difficult to do this).
While I liked the text pretty well, my students found it confusing. This is perhaps inevitable, as these are difficult concepts to explain in writing, but I think the prose could’ve been somewhat clearer at times. Also Mastronarde spares no detail, which is good for very competent students who want to get down all the minutiae at the outset, but for most students, I think it’s unnecessarily overwhelming. I found myself constantly telling my students which part of the chapters they should focus on and which they should be aware of but leave mastery of for later in their Greek career. If the textbook is going to include such smaller details, (which does have benefits), they should be clearly bracketed off as less critical. A major offender here is historical background on the morphology—I find such linguistic detail illuminating, but for some students, most of it is just additional complicated information to parse that’s not immediately helping them read Greek.
The biggest problem with the book is that the practice sentences are too difficult and too few. The lists of sentences don’t really have graduated difficulty, and they regularly start by testing difficult edge cases from the material just learned. I get the sense that Mastronarde is too good at Greek himself to grasp how hard these sentences are for a beginner. There need to be many more simple sentences drilling the most basic application of the new concept before moving onto trickier material.
The examples and vocabulary are focused on preparing the students especially for Attic oratory, Plato, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. The text does include substantial passages from these, first simplified and then in the original form with notes. This is great for those students that are able to handle it, but the choices are not easy passages; most will need more on-ramp of practice with simpler material.
Thus this is a great book for the strong and ambitious student (especially if supplemented by extra reading practice), but could be improved for the average learner.
While I liked the text pretty well, my students found it confusing. This is perhaps inevitable, as these are difficult concepts to explain in writing, but I think the prose could’ve been somewhat clearer at times. Also Mastronarde spares no detail, which is good for very competent students who want to get down all the minutiae at the outset, but for most students, I think it’s unnecessarily overwhelming. I found myself constantly telling my students which part of the chapters they should focus on and which they should be aware of but leave mastery of for later in their Greek career. If the textbook is going to include such smaller details, (which does have benefits), they should be clearly bracketed off as less critical. A major offender here is historical background on the morphology—I find such linguistic detail illuminating, but for some students, most of it is just additional complicated information to parse that’s not immediately helping them read Greek.
The biggest problem with the book is that the practice sentences are too difficult and too few. The lists of sentences don’t really have graduated difficulty, and they regularly start by testing difficult edge cases from the material just learned. I get the sense that Mastronarde is too good at Greek himself to grasp how hard these sentences are for a beginner. There need to be many more simple sentences drilling the most basic application of the new concept before moving onto trickier material.
The examples and vocabulary are focused on preparing the students especially for Attic oratory, Plato, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. The text does include substantial passages from these, first simplified and then in the original form with notes. This is great for those students that are able to handle it, but the choices are not easy passages; most will need more on-ramp of practice with simpler material.
Thus this is a great book for the strong and ambitious student (especially if supplemented by extra reading practice), but could be improved for the average learner.
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July 23, 2025well, at least the next intro to greek class i take will seem vaguely easy
August 15, 2023
Amazone
Great, but extraordinarily dense
6/10
I started out with the Reading Greek JACT series, which I love...now...after I used Introduction to Attic Greek to get a detailed sense of the inflections and verb forms, and more importantly WHY the noun, verb and other forms were the way they were. It is a personal preference thing for how one learns a language, but this book is fantastic in the regard that you can come away really knowing the technical details of the language. I needed that, since the JACT series failed to do this for me. So, I ground through Mastronarde's book in a year and a half (full-time job and all slows you down), and I am now reading the JACT series with of course great speed and enjoyment and I truly love that series.
You may be wondering why I went back to the JACT series after completing this book. It's because Introduction to Attic Greek I do not feel adequately prepares you how to READ Attic, as opposed to translating phrases and clauses. I found myself learning by failure in the longer exercises very frequently, to great frustration. I have also found myself disagreeing with the translations on 2 different occasions (I don't remember which exercises), and was found to be right in my disagreement when I checked with other translations of the same source material. So now I feel the JACT series is adequately preparing me to read the language, while Mastronarde's book adequately prepared me on the Attic dialect details and features.
This book is not an easy book in any capacity. It is a relatively thorough book, though. If you want more detail, a copy of Smyth's Greek Grammar is in your future. The density and heavy technical wording of this book is almost severe, but if you want to really know your Greek, you need to memorize the details, and this will certainly do the job.
So I give this 3 stars. I really give it 3.5, but I won't round up.
Xyloplax
---
Indispensable if you are serious about learning the language
10/10
If you have just started learning Greek and you think there is an easy way to master it, you should better stop fantasising. This book will never try to convince you that there is such a way. It would not be honest.
That is why you will find lots of grammar here. You will need it. You will appreciate later how clearly the material is presented, especially the notorious irregular verbs. Even after completing this book you will use it as a reference tool. This is one of the reasons why the book is such a good buy.
Another strong point of this book are exercises. They are very well planned and designed to achieve one single aim: to develop proper language structures in your brain. Important hint however: do not buy "The Introduction..." without the answer book. The exercises are not easy and you will need a confirmation that you are doing them properly.
One tiny little drawback. The editor's work could have been done better. It is generally good practice in editing books to use different sorts of type, like bold-faced one. Another idea, which is also not entirely bad (and one could expect that it should be understood by editors worldwide), is to organise the text into clear paragraphs instead of gathering it into big lumps which are not only difficult to read but also will destroy any attempt to find an information quickly. I hope this will be corrected in future editions.
Marcin Sokalski
---
Great for self-study
10/10
Although I have not yet completed the book, I have thus far been thoroughly impressed. Now at Unit 17, I am able to construct basic sentences and read even more. The approach to the text is, in my opinion, necessarily thorough.
Admittedly, I feel that having studied several years of Latin has given me an edge, particularly when it comes to dealing with a heavily inflected language, but the text does not assume that one has done so. In fact, the explanations of very basic grammatical points are excellent and I imagine someone not acquainted with another language would do very well. Let one not be misled, however: there is much memorization of noun/verb forms and vocabulary lists. But, very early on you feel it begin to pay off through the thorough sense of comprehension you gain.
Lucid and comprehensive explanations make this an excellent book for those motivated to work through all of the exercises and memorization.
Finally, I *highly* recommend purchasing the Answer Key that is sold separately. After about chapter seven, I found it indispensible for understanding when/where I was going wrong.
Walter M. Shandruk
---
Great for in-class, difficult for self-study
8/10
After having read some reviews, I felt that someone who has actually used this book, in a class setting, with Mastronarde teaching, should comment (I have never seen the answer key to this book and I still love it). It is straight-forward in it's style, and full of grammar and vocabulary that a beginning student should know.
It is by no means a complete grammar, that's what something like Smyth is for, but this book is all you will need to learn the basic Ancient Greek language from the ground up.
It's contents are the equivalent of 2.5 semesters worth of lessons, at least that's what Mastronarde was striving towards.
Also, as some have pointed out, this book does not immerse you with reading quickly like Athenaze, but with writing in Ancient Greek. This text is a great start for those having to take Greek Composition to graduate from UC Berkeley under the Classical Languages degree (which is why I think it focuses more on composing sentences than reading).
Now, having said that, I need to point out that this book is very difficult to work with without an answer key, or without a professor. I would not recommend this book for someone who is just starting to learn the language and does not have access to a language teacher for help. It is a great text book for course work, or as a supplement to required textbooks, as the paradigms (at least to me) were easy to understand and memorize. And if you learned Ancient Greek a while ago and need a refresher, then this book will help.
Also, I may be biased having been taught by him, but Mastronarde truly loves the Greek language, and it comes across in his attention to detail. He also makes sure to update his website with addendums and major revisions when they are deemed necessary, so you can always have the most correct information available about the book. I will never sell this book, since it's what I first learned on, but I never recommend it to those who are self-teaching.
Manic Maenad
Great, but extraordinarily dense
6/10
I started out with the Reading Greek JACT series, which I love...now...after I used Introduction to Attic Greek to get a detailed sense of the inflections and verb forms, and more importantly WHY the noun, verb and other forms were the way they were. It is a personal preference thing for how one learns a language, but this book is fantastic in the regard that you can come away really knowing the technical details of the language. I needed that, since the JACT series failed to do this for me. So, I ground through Mastronarde's book in a year and a half (full-time job and all slows you down), and I am now reading the JACT series with of course great speed and enjoyment and I truly love that series.
You may be wondering why I went back to the JACT series after completing this book. It's because Introduction to Attic Greek I do not feel adequately prepares you how to READ Attic, as opposed to translating phrases and clauses. I found myself learning by failure in the longer exercises very frequently, to great frustration. I have also found myself disagreeing with the translations on 2 different occasions (I don't remember which exercises), and was found to be right in my disagreement when I checked with other translations of the same source material. So now I feel the JACT series is adequately preparing me to read the language, while Mastronarde's book adequately prepared me on the Attic dialect details and features.
This book is not an easy book in any capacity. It is a relatively thorough book, though. If you want more detail, a copy of Smyth's Greek Grammar is in your future. The density and heavy technical wording of this book is almost severe, but if you want to really know your Greek, you need to memorize the details, and this will certainly do the job.
So I give this 3 stars. I really give it 3.5, but I won't round up.
Xyloplax
---
Indispensable if you are serious about learning the language
10/10
If you have just started learning Greek and you think there is an easy way to master it, you should better stop fantasising. This book will never try to convince you that there is such a way. It would not be honest.
That is why you will find lots of grammar here. You will need it. You will appreciate later how clearly the material is presented, especially the notorious irregular verbs. Even after completing this book you will use it as a reference tool. This is one of the reasons why the book is such a good buy.
Another strong point of this book are exercises. They are very well planned and designed to achieve one single aim: to develop proper language structures in your brain. Important hint however: do not buy "The Introduction..." without the answer book. The exercises are not easy and you will need a confirmation that you are doing them properly.
One tiny little drawback. The editor's work could have been done better. It is generally good practice in editing books to use different sorts of type, like bold-faced one. Another idea, which is also not entirely bad (and one could expect that it should be understood by editors worldwide), is to organise the text into clear paragraphs instead of gathering it into big lumps which are not only difficult to read but also will destroy any attempt to find an information quickly. I hope this will be corrected in future editions.
Marcin Sokalski
---
Great for self-study
10/10
Although I have not yet completed the book, I have thus far been thoroughly impressed. Now at Unit 17, I am able to construct basic sentences and read even more. The approach to the text is, in my opinion, necessarily thorough.
Admittedly, I feel that having studied several years of Latin has given me an edge, particularly when it comes to dealing with a heavily inflected language, but the text does not assume that one has done so. In fact, the explanations of very basic grammatical points are excellent and I imagine someone not acquainted with another language would do very well. Let one not be misled, however: there is much memorization of noun/verb forms and vocabulary lists. But, very early on you feel it begin to pay off through the thorough sense of comprehension you gain.
Lucid and comprehensive explanations make this an excellent book for those motivated to work through all of the exercises and memorization.
Finally, I *highly* recommend purchasing the Answer Key that is sold separately. After about chapter seven, I found it indispensible for understanding when/where I was going wrong.
Walter M. Shandruk
---
Great for in-class, difficult for self-study
8/10
After having read some reviews, I felt that someone who has actually used this book, in a class setting, with Mastronarde teaching, should comment (I have never seen the answer key to this book and I still love it). It is straight-forward in it's style, and full of grammar and vocabulary that a beginning student should know.
It is by no means a complete grammar, that's what something like Smyth is for, but this book is all you will need to learn the basic Ancient Greek language from the ground up.
It's contents are the equivalent of 2.5 semesters worth of lessons, at least that's what Mastronarde was striving towards.
Also, as some have pointed out, this book does not immerse you with reading quickly like Athenaze, but with writing in Ancient Greek. This text is a great start for those having to take Greek Composition to graduate from UC Berkeley under the Classical Languages degree (which is why I think it focuses more on composing sentences than reading).
Now, having said that, I need to point out that this book is very difficult to work with without an answer key, or without a professor. I would not recommend this book for someone who is just starting to learn the language and does not have access to a language teacher for help. It is a great text book for course work, or as a supplement to required textbooks, as the paradigms (at least to me) were easy to understand and memorize. And if you learned Ancient Greek a while ago and need a refresher, then this book will help.
Also, I may be biased having been taught by him, but Mastronarde truly loves the Greek language, and it comes across in his attention to detail. He also makes sure to update his website with addendums and major revisions when they are deemed necessary, so you can always have the most correct information available about the book. I will never sell this book, since it's what I first learned on, but I never recommend it to those who are self-teaching.
Manic Maenad
January 23, 2008
not as fun as reading greek but if you like this kind of thing it doesnt condescend to you by giving you greek made easy reading when youre not ready for the real but dry as fuck if you hvnt got an interesting teacher
August 22, 2010
Excellent resource.
July 17, 2019
Ideal for completionists.
September 4, 2024
Need a southern edition where every “you (pl)” is replaced with ya’ll.
April 14, 2025
This book is utterly useless for learning classic attic Greek. I have been using it for my class for Ancient Greek for over a year now and it confuses learners more so that Clarifies very dense grammatical concepts. I have found other books far more useful and actually aid with grappling with Ancient Greek. This book doesn’t work well in a classroom or even for a self study. I would avoid this book if you are a beginner learner of Greek because it will truly feel draining and not inspiring. Which is sad because it is truly a marvel that we can learn a language from thousands of years ago and this author has almost killed a thousand years old tradition.
March 4, 2023
shiteeeewwwwwwwww
August 9, 2016
Through intro the language, but probably not for absolute beginners.
Currently reading
March 30, 2013its a textbook... but, going a lot smoother then I'd expected... it has shown me that, I can handle challenges that, I didn't think I could ...and I'm loving this one!
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