I’ve been stalled for well over a year now in reading Euripides Medea. It’s not that it’s that hard (though the lyric meters are very difficult to “get”), but it’s just kind of unsatisfying to do it all by myself.
Myself, I’ve done oodles of Homer, both Iliad and Odyssey; the whole of Barbour’s Herodotus; about half of the Mather and Hewitt Anabasis; almost all of the Sidwell Lucian; Plato’s Apology and Crito; some speech by Lysias; bits and pieces of Thucydides and some Demosthenes; and some Sappho and Alcaeus and a few other lyric poets.
Of these, I find Homer by far the easiest, then Xenophon and Lucian, then Herodotus. Plato and Thucydides I find extremely difficult, and Demosthenes virtually impenetrable, sadly. But again, I was tackling Demosthenes by myself and it was just too thankless a task. The guy just drones on so – he’s as bad as Cicero!
Grammatically and syntactically I am not finding Euripides difficult at all – again, it’s the lyric meters that I want to really appreciate but find very difficult – but it would just be so much more satisfying to do it in a group. I’ve made it through the first 200 or so lines about 4 or 5 times: each time I pick up the book again it’s been so long since I last looked at it that I just give up and start over from the beginning.
Hm. Two books of the Iliad and six of the Odyssey, if memory serves. Loved it - there’s nothing that compares to reading Homer in the original - but wanted to expand my horizons.
Hm. I personally found Herodotus to be easier than Homer. I think I’m more of a prose person maybe–or it could be the professors involved. I actually would be interested in an advanced/accelerated reading group. I’m going to be in the Iliad book 2 group, but I think that’s going to just be 15-20 lines a week.
I could fit a Medea group into my schedule as well, probably. I would want to finish it in no more than two months, though. That would be about 200 lines a week. (I think)
My schedule is pretty crammed for the next few weeks, and then I’ll need another week to chill. I need to guard my breathing/relaxation time during this period vigilantly.
I would potentially be interested. I’ve been doing Lucian and Homer (and a bit of Plato on the side) for the last year and need something more challenging. I did part of Sophocles’ Ajax last summer but ran into the same problem you did of not being able to make progress on my own.
However, I would not have time for at least another three weeks or so (until classes get out) and after that I’m not entirely sure of what my schedule will look like for this summer. Also, 200 lines might be moving somewhat too fast for me at this point. I don’t want to hold anyone back, so don’t count me in unless it would work for everyone else.
It’s probably a good idea for me to wait a few weeks before starting, too. I have 1.5 weeks left of school, then exams–
I want to get it finished in 2 months because I’m moving in August and starting Graduate School, at which point I’ll be too busy to do the extra reading on the side (probably). Further, Graduate classes typically read about 1,000 lines a week, so I want to keep my Greek and Latin sharp over the summer.
spiphany–last semester I was reading about 40 lines of Greek and 120 lines of Latin a week–but this semester I’ve read 120 lines of Greek and 300 lines of Latin a week. I’m learning German, too. A pretty big jump. It was pretty intimidating at first, but my reading ability just grew really fast. The best way to learn, it seems, is to just accelerate. Think of it as going to the gym and working out. You don’t get stronger unless you increase the weight you try to lift. The same principle applies to learning Greek.
I know. You learn more when you challenge yourself. And the best way to learn vocabulary is by reading it in context. Homer has really helped with that. I’ve been doing about 120 lines a week for class, and could probably easily manage somewhat more, but Medea is likely to be more difficult. And it’s only possible to spend so much time hunting through the dictionary.
I will look at the first few pages sometime this week and then I should have a better idea how much I can reasonably get done at a time. I think one of the other students in my class would also be interested in reading some Greek this summer, so I’m hoping I can convince him to join in. Then if I fall behind maybe the two of us at least can keep working on it together.
I chose the Medeia precisely because there is a readily-available edition that has vocabulary in the back. I always prefer to read texts with vocabulary in the back if possible because then I can just carry the one thin text with me and not have to worry about lugging dictionaries about. That way I can read wherever I happen to be.
I’ll get you the ISBN number of this edition when I get home this evening. It’s a very nice edition: very interesting notes, and lots of information on the meter as well.
The vocabulary is also unique. Everything is listed under the root. So if the word has a prefix of any kind you have to analyze that out. Sometimes it’s a bit of a challenge. I’ll give you an example of what I mean when I get home, too.
ah, yes, I was going to ask if there was a particular edition you had in mind.
One alternative, too, is that Perseus can generate vocabulary lists for specific texts. I’ll probably generate a list of high-frequency words and make flashcards of unfamiliar lexemes.
I’m using the Alan Elliott edition, Oxford University Press, first published in 1969, ISBN 0199120064, at Amazon.
It’s quite a thin, slight volume, but it packs an awful lot of information in it.
As I said earlier about the vocabulary, you really have to be able to manage morphological analysis, which I think is a very good thing. For instance, for δυσθυμουμένηι you have to look under θυμός, and for πάλλευκος you have to look under πᾶς (I might have thought λευκός instead, but I think he sees it more as a compound than as a simple prefix+root.)
Now, I also have to come clean that I don’t usually use just one single edition when working on Latin or Greek. It’s an extravagance and a self-indulgence, but I prefer to work from multiple annotated texts and translations, to “triangulate” to an understanding. So, for instance, with the Medeia, I also have the Page edition (which has no vocabulary, but copious notes --useful especially for metrical analysis), and of course I also have the Loeb edition. I have at least four English translations. When I come across a particularly opaque passage, I like to see how different translators have tackled it – often they do so quite differently. I did the same thing with Herodotus: sometimes a translator uses quite a lot of imagination!
Yes I think it’s going to happen but you guys had both suggested you wanted to wait a couple of weeks (until the end of your current semesters, I gather), so I’m just biding my time. Plus in the meantime there is a tiny chance others may express interest, as well .
Okay, as of yesterday I am finished with finals, but I’m still waiting for the Elliott text to arrive. I’d have it already, but there was a mix-up somewhere and I got the wrong book, which messed up my plans. I wanted to start looking at it to get a feel for the text. I’m hoping it will get here by the end of this week, but if it doesn’t I’ll use something else until then. I did get a hold of the Page commentary, which looks quite useful.
How does this work? I haven’t participated in a study group before. Do we e-mail each other or sign up somewhere or what?
I’m new to it too. As best as I can tell, you sign up for a mailing list. All the lists pretty much seem to go through the same listserv, so I get all the emails for the Homeric stuff, etc. People seem to email their translations to a person who does the collation and sends them all back out again for people to comment on. Or something like that.
That’s not how we run things at Textkit. Each reading group gets its own individual mailing list.
Ah, indeed. I appear to have suffered a temporary Brain Bypass by confusing the Greekstudy@nxport.com list I signed up for with the TextKit study groups. Unfortunately I can no longer remember where I stumbled upon the Greekstudy@nxport.com list; I had just assumed it must have been TextKit, but obviously not .
Well, I’m ready whenever spiphany and rindu say they’re ready and have a text to go by.
I would recommend that for the first week, we attempt to tackle only the first 95 lines and see how it goes. If people manage to do more than the first 95, then we can set the pace accordingly. If this is the first time folks have tried Attic Drama then it will take some adjusting.
William – I wonder if you have any suggestions on how to manage analysis or discussion of the meter, as opposed to just translating for sense, over a mailing list. Is it even possible? Have people tried to? The first 95 lines are all in iambic trimeters, which are comparatively easy to scan, though for people who have only mastered dactyls the resolutions of iambs can be a bit iffy at first (I know that I had trouble figuring it out at first). The next 35 lines or so are anapaests, which are also quite easy, especially once you’ve got the knack of handling the resolutions. (And I’m honestly only talking about basic scanning; I’m not even worried about things like caesuras and diaereses.) Anyway, if it’s too complicated to talk meter without being able to listen to one another, then we can just focus on the sense, which is certainly challenge enough in and of itself.
(Oh, and I only just noticed your new Kang-and-Kodos-campaigning-as-Clinton-and-Dole signature. Heh.
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