I have found this charming volume on Google Books: https://books.google.co.il/books?id=j51PAQAAMAAJ&pg=PP20&lpg=PP20&dq=commentarii+de+bello+gallico+graece
If you still remember Caesar’s great and “easy” works from Latin class, now you can read them in Greek! (I have to mention, as much as it shames me, that I find Caesar easier to read in Greek than in Latin.)
If Wikipedia is to be believed, this version was used to teach Greek in Europe, I assume because they already knew Caesar from Latin class.
Once being the operative word. I guess my real question is whether the style is markedly different from that used by those Greeks who spoke Attic as native speakers.
My impression (from the short bit I have read today) is that the writer (whoever it was) isn’t over fond of rare words and the construction is not over complicated but the sentences are very long. They do tend to use participles less then I would expect.
I guess my real question is whether the style is markedly different from that used by those Greeks who spoke Attic as native speakers.
Well that is a difficult question to answer. Thucydides, Demosthenes and Plato all write in very different styles and are all “native attic speakers”. Lucian was not a “native attic speaker” and yet his style is famous as an example of pure attic. I think that underlying your question is some expectation that you might discover in a literary text how some particular group of attic speakers might have spoken or written “non-literary” Greek. Whilst there are some pointers in Aristophanes to everyday speech (or at least a high literary version of it) I think what you are looking for doesn’t exist. Surely everyday speech in Ancient Greece was as varied as English is today.
Perhaps if you found the text not too complicated and the vocabulary not too recherché you should congratulate yourself on having made more progress than you had thought.
Of course Attic was as varied as Modern English, it also is true that Lucian is considered to have mastered Attic so well as to write as if he was a native speaker. Likewise many today who are not native speakers write English so well that a native speaker can not detect the difference. But it is very hard to write in a language that you are not born with and often non native speakers write in way that makes their lack of mastery of the language very very obvious - like me writing in Serbo-Croat.
It may well be that the writer, let us say some Byzantine scholar had studied the Attic texts so well that had some one from the 4th century BCE in Athens read that text they would not have realized that the writer was not their contemporary but it might well have stuck our like a sore thumb.
So does the style of the translation show clear influences of Byzantine Greek or is it so well written to the kind of thing some contemporary of Aristotle might have written.
It is easier than pretty much all the other texts I have read. I said nothing about finding it easy.
(But thanks for the encouragement)
Lucian may have claimed to that his first language was not Greek and that he was a barbarian–perhaps something of a façade for an author who is usually not to be taken seriously–but he probably encountered Greek in early childhood and his education was probably exclusively Greek. In many parts of the world today, people speak one language in the home and a different language in public life with complete bilingualism. Lucian, if he even remembered how to speak Aramaic beyond household communication, was probably similar.
The ability to communicate in 5th-4th century Attic Greek, at least in writing and probably orally, too–never died out, even down into the Byzantine period. Especially during the 2nd century CE, but before and after too, authors such as Aristides, Libanius, Julian, Procopius continued to write more or less “pure” Attic Greek, and Attic Greek was the basis of elite Greek education. Ancient usage manuals for Attic Greek, listing “correct” Attic and “incorrect” contemporary usage (not always accurately) dating from the Roman period are still extant.
The corpus of 5th-4th century Attic Greek texts is today still very large, and was even larger in later antiquity: Thucydides, Plato and in particular the huge body of speeches by the so-called “Attic orators”, including Demosthenes, Lysias, Antiphon, Andocides, Isaeus, Isocrates, etc. These were preserved largely for educational purposes (though they are often interesting in themselves) and were studied intensively to hone one’s Attic usage and style.
In the second century CE performers such as Lysias (a stand-up comedian in his day) and Aristides traveled the Greek-speaking world delivering speeches, or rather declamations, in more or less pure Attic Greek, and drew large paying crowds.
I don’t pretend to know when Greek diverged from Attic that Attic had become merely a book language like Latin for East Med lands. But my question is not really about that. I am specifically asking whether the language of this version of Caesar’s Gallic War in Greek is good Attic or is it like some of the books of Septuagint where the translators have a less than perfect grasp of Attic idiom so that their own native speech interferes with the language they use.
Is this specific book good Attic?
(Everything else while interesting is not what I need to know if I want to judge whether to use this book to aid my efforts to learn Attic)
(Everything else while interesting is not what I need to know if I want to judge whether to use this book to aid my efforts to learn Attic)
I dont think it will help you. Xenophon and Lysias are the best for intermediate readers. You would be better off reading Lucian than this translation of Caesar, unless you have a particular interest in the text in which case you should learn latin.
Hylander I enjoyed your post modern reading of Lucian’s self-representation.
Lysias is far too hard for me and while I can manage Xenophon even he is really too hard for me at the level I have reached.
I may master Ancient Greek before I die - I have no chance of then going on to master Latin. If I am going to read a translation I do of course have the option of reading it in English.
That you advise me to avoid this text implies that it is poor Attic but you do actually say so. Is that your reason, or are you advising me to avoid it for some other reason?
After looking at a paragraph or so, I didn’t see anything that looked to me like it was not Attic, but honestly I personally don’t have time to read at length to make sure (and I might not catch every non-Atticism, anyway). Caesar’s style is very succinct and the vocabulary is somewhat limited, and it wouldn’t be beyond the competence of someone who knew Attic Greek well to produce such a translation, almost word for word. But if you can read Xenophon, you can read Lysias, and you might as well go the source rather than trying to develop your skills on something derivative.
You can start out by using a translation to help you along–eventually you won’t need one. There’s a modern translation of Lysias by Todd with explanatory notes. I haven’t looked at it, but the Texas series of translations of the Attic orators is generally pretty good.
Hylander gives good advice. There are commentaries on lysias 1. As I have said before the first paragraph is harder than the rest of the speech and you can ideal with it after you have read the narrative. The beginning does provide lots of practice on the optative.
It might be helpful if you were to read some of lysias 1 and then post about what is especially difficult. As Hylander says if you can read Xenophon you can read lysias. If you continue to just say it’s all too difficult you don’t isolate what the actual difficulties are. Very few people actually master Greek even after a lifetime. But that’s no reason to despair, we can all learn a bit more and try to remember what we once knew. I recently found some notes I had made on various Greek and Latin authors which I had entirely forgotten I had made! Ars longa, vita brevis. Or Ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή if you prefer.
Thanks for your replies. Especially the encouragement to post more often when I get stuck is welcome.
There are times when I have got stuck in the past and have not posted from a feeling that I should not over work the experts here. However, the main reason I don’t post difficulties is because when I get difficulty is that even though I may get stuck on a sentence even spending a whole afternoon in some cases I do eventually get there. Sometimes when I give up the very process of focusing on what I don’t understand so that I can pose a question allows me to grasp what I had up till then been missing.
Now on a different note I want to explain as to why I am not going to take your advice to avoid this version of the Gallic War and instead concentrate on Xenophon or Lysias.
This is an old argument and I would hesitate to revive it were it not that I simply don’t understand your point of view. And I think the reason I don’t is that both of you are giving me advice on basis of assumptions that are so obvious to both of you that they don’t need stating.
To my mind the best way to learn a language is to read that language. By read I mean really read not decode. Any real Greek is so difficult for me that I am only decoding.
The advantages of reading as opposed to decoding to me are obvious. First it allows me to experience a greater quantity of Greek. This means that by repetition vocabulary, accidence and constructions become so well learnt that they become second nature. I also feel that there is a qualitative advantage in reading over decoding. To read a aorist optative is a much better way of fixing that form than decoding it because if is more internalized .
I should say here I do spend a lot of time learning the grammatical forms (ie declensions and conjugations). I have set up my computer to quiz myself on a list of forms and it is the first thing I do every day. It is obvious that that alone is not enough for me to learn those forms. I keep on doing this because unless I get them in my head in this way, they are not accessible when I read. It is. I believe when I read forms without having to look them up that real learning happens.
There is a belief that is so widespread to be unquestioned that THE ONLY WAY TO LEARN ANCIENT GREEK IS TO READ THE ANCIENT AUTHORS THEMSELVES. I meet it again again and is clearly so entrenched that most Ancient Greek scholars consider it to be so self evident as to require no justification.
I do have some sympathy for it. If I am reading some real Greek I have far greater motivation than when I read synthetic Greek. It is especially disheartening to get stuck on “easy Greek” like that of Morice while to spend an inordinate amount of time on a single sentence feels worth it. I however think this feeling is irrational.
A learner should be reading texts which they can actually read albeit with sufficiently difficulty that they are being stretched. If anything this version of the Gallic War is a little too difficult for me. I am more semi-reading than actually reading. However, this is still far better than decoding Xenophon.
I don’t imagine that this is going to convince anyone but I do hope someone could explain the counter argument sufficiently that I at least understand why they (along with the vast majority of Greek scholars) have such faith in the original texts only method of learning Ancient Greek.
I dont think anyone (expert or not) would mind you posting questions you are stuck on. Maybe if you cant figure something out in an hour and cant see it the next day then is the time to ask. If you were to use a commentary you would probably find enough help there but if not you can ask for more.
Reading a sentence does require analysing the function of all the words in the sentence and deciding what the meaning is. You can call that decoding if you like but I call it reading.
My reservations about an unknown Greek translation of caesar is that its very unlikely that you will find some help in the form of a commentary. Who knows what state the text is in? Do you want to spend hours working on something only to find its a misprint or something is missing. If its a literal translation of Caesar to what extent is the author imitating latin usage. If you could read latin and were interested in Caser it might be an interesting study and possibly a subject for a PhD thesis on reception theory.
On the other hand there are commentaries on Lucian and Lysias and the texts are well established. There is also no doubt that these authors are worth reading for their own sake and their contribution to Greek literature.
I think you might find it helpful to jettison the idea of “easy” Greek. All things are relative but as has been said before learning Greek is a difficult task. I also think that you have to ask yourself if your current methods are not working why not try approaching it differently. Try Lysias 1 with a commentary and see how you get on.
This is precisely why the Greek Caesar and texts like it were used to teach beginners Greek in the pre-Grammar/Translation periods. Having already worked through the text in Latin, the input was comprehensible to them, and they did not need L1 lexicons, grammar books, translations and commentaries. And of course they had learned Latin itself through the Direct Method.
Warnings that such and such a language approach will lead to disaster are always overblown on Textkit. Nobody makes these sorts of statements about living languages. Becoming good at language learning means assembling a great bag of tricks and methods. You will find out for yourself which tricks work for you, and at what stages of the journey, for any particular language.
Personally, I’ve found the correspondence between Latin and Greek very useful for going in the other direction, using Latin translations of scripture and Xenophon.
Also, I know too many people who have learned living languages through reading and watching trash to think that the quality of the literature has any impact on language learning speed. Personally, I look for something comprehensible that I can plow through.
We have been through all this before. I simply observe that one should judge methods by the results. Do whatever you like but if you are not making progress perhaps a new approach is needed.
Hylander and mwh are ahead in both achievement and experience of the rest of the posters on this board by a country mile. Wouldnt it be worthwhile listening to what they have had to say?
Thanks for encouragement to turn for help more often. I always use every commentary I can get my hands on but they never cover all the things I have trouble with
These are good reasons. That you are only now putting those reasons does however illustrate my point that the real Greek is best bias is so entrenched (and I don’t need just in your mind) that you did not initially feel the need to give those reasons.
One advantage with this text which makes it attractive over texts of simplified versions of Greek texts (ie “adapted”) is that the English translations are, judging from what I have read so far, are a good guide to what the Greek text should mean.
On top of that your reasons only apply to this specific text. I still don’t understand why there is such faith in the real Greek as the royal road to Greek mastery rather than the destination.
I have read, or should I say decoded, the whole of book 1 of Xenophon’s Anabasis. I have four commentaries to help me and I do have a commentary for book 2 so if I will probably do that next.
(Lysias is probably not harder than Xenophon but as I personally read more of Xenophon he is probably easier for me.)
There are only a limited amount of easy Greek so I do tend to read more real Greek than easy Greek. You don’t seem to appreciate that I have and indeed continue to use the method you advocate so if the method I actually use is failing it is the above all else the method you suggest that is failing.
I do have the feeling that I am going to run out of easy Greek and this is one reason I spend so much time reading real Greek. Much much more in fact. There is also something about reading the real thing that means I am willing to put up with battering away at a sentence of Xenophon even though that isn’t really the most effective way of learning Greek.
Ideally there would be far more easy Greek so learners would be able to select those readers that were right for them. However, judging from what I have read so far this Gallic War is close to what I need.
I do repeat I do try what you advocate and I will continue to read real Greek in parallel. When I say that I don’t think it is a good method it is not because I haven’t tried it.
Daivid I can only speak from my own experience of how I learned Greek. Adapted Greek was used until we could have a go at Lysias and some simple Euripides. Then some Plato, Sophocles and Homer. It was hard, it was meant to be. But having to do exams does concentrate the mind. Admittedly my Greek is rusty but it is all there still.
There are no shortcuts and no quick fixes. It is hard but not impossible. In aspiring to read say Sophocles you are trying to do something that I think few ancient Greeks could do. Most of them were too busy looking after their farms or fighting each other.
