About to toss my copies of Mastronarde and H&Q

Greek Learning Greek
21

Those are helpful thoughts Andriko.

What I’m doing now is:

  1. Reading Acts, several verses a day, copying the text by hand, and adding handwritten notes on definitions and grammar.

  2. Doing selected verb drills on Mastronarde’s web page. I try to do one drill each day.

  3. Taking the material after M’s unit 33 very slowly, just as you suggest, an revisiting earlier material that I forgot.

I made an effort on Plato’s Apology, but it was just too much. Each sentence required so much new learning that I decided to leave it aside for a while.

BTW I just read Arthur Melzer’s book on esotericism in premodern philosophy, and “I’m aflame” with desire (apologies to Cole Porter) to see if I can read Plato that way.

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I never got a lot out of the Strauss crowd, but Thomas Taylor’s essay on the Elysian mysteries was worth the read. He has convinced me to read Plotinus, once I get through all the tetralogies.

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Thanks for the recommendation Hugh, sounds interesting!

I’m not sure the mysteries do you much good once you’re in Elysium.

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Hah. Indeed

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hlawson38,

The Greek NT is a great read and mostly fairly easy Greek (Hebrews being a major exception). When you’re ready to try Plato again, I suggest looking at Geoffrey Steadman’s editions, which provide vocab help and grammar commentary on the same page as the Greek text. Free PDF edtions are available, and if you want hardcopy you can buy those fairly cheaply on Amazon. Here’s a link to his site: https://geoffreysteadman.com/. I’m reading Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods in a similar editon by Hayes and Nimis (Faenum Publishing, http://www.faenumpublishing.com/lucians-dialogues-of-the-gods.html). After i finish that, I’ll go back to Plato. I first tried his Symposium, but found it too difficult (I began my Greek study with Koine, starting with the NT) without help. I’ve used Steadman’s edition of Ovid’s “Daphne and Apollo” (from the Metamorphoses) for Latin, and it was quite helpful. Besides Plato’s Symposium, Steadman has editions of several other of Plato’s works. Good stuff. Also, Steadman is a working Latin teacher and is quite sympathetic/empathetic to the needs of learners, including autodidacts. I’ve reached out to him for reading advice by email and he is very kind and willing to interact with you.

Oh, gettng back to the Greek NT, be sure to check out Faenum Press’s edition of the Gospel of John in Greek and Latin with vocabulary and grammar helps. Great help indeed. I have dipped into that a little, need to go back sometime.

Best wishes,
Persequor

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Oh, another quick thought on reading Plato: if you can, get some audio recordings to listen to the Greek texts before/during your reading sessions. This is helpful in building comprehension over time. (Helps with the New Testament also.) Librivox has some Plato materials for this, free downloads. Good stuff.

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Julius Tomin has a bunch of audios of dialogs read in Greek, including Euthyphro, Apology and Crito.

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http://www.juliustomin.org/greekreadaloud/plato.html

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Many thanks to persequor and others for the thoughts and suggestions.

I must correct my misattribution: the text of “That Old Black Magic”, acc. wikipedia, was written by Johnny Mercer, and not Cole Porter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Old_Black_Magic