I am a graduate student studying classical political philosophy and the university I attend does not have very good resources for me to learn ancient greek. I am particularly interested in reading Plato and Aristotle, and rendering literal translations from the greek. I have worked my way through the Hanson and Quinn, Crosby and Schaeffer, and Athenaze books. I have a pretty solid understanding of the basics. I am hoping someone here would be able to direct me to some good resources for learning what I am interested in or suggest a good method for tackling Plato and Aristotle. Thanks in advance.
I think you should start reading selected passages from Plato and Aristotle.
Textkit offers some Plato readers for free download.
Perseus is a terrific website, and it provides everything that you need to start reading. It has Greek texts with each word hyperlinked to grammatical information and dictionary entries. It has a searchable version of the LSJ, commentaries, cross-references, and a morphology tool which analyzes word forms.
I haven’t read Plato or Aristotle yet in any substantial way, but I think some other people here are reading them (Aristotle at least). Hopefully they’ll be able to provide more information specific to your interests.
Oh yeah: Perseus also creates vocabulary lists for specific works and even different sections of works. It allows you to choose which information to include, and it can organize the words based on frequency. It is a great tool to use when you decide what you want to read first.
hi, you need different approaches for aristotle and for plato. there are libraries full of books on their philosophy but for actually reading them in the greek, there are general differences:
with plato you have:
lots of modern commentaries covering his grammar and syntax line-by-line
lots of commentaries covering his philosophical ideas
much less dense concentration of philosophical thought and vocab per page of text (padded out in dialogue for easy public consumption)
with aristotle you have:
very few easily-accessible commentaries covering his grammar and syntax
excellent commentaries by ancient commentators covering his philosophical ideas, which are being translated at present into english and other languages
much simpler, un-literary and repetitive sentence contructions, so that soon you can read it almost as naturally as your native language
much denser philosophical thought and vocab per page of text (probably designed for reading consumption within his school)
so the best thing to do is, unless you have particular texts in mind already (e.g. the political texts), get a commentary of something short like plato’s crito and say the simplicius commentary of aristotle’s categories (which was used by neo-platonists as the classic introduction to a course of plato’s and aristotle’s philosophy) which has greek-english and english-greek vocab lists in the back, and if you have questions, many people here will be able to discuss them here
Thank you for the input everyone. I have the complete works of plato from Oxford (Platonis Opera edited by Burnet) and the loeb editions of Aristotle. Does the perseus project have any tutorials? I have had some problems using it. Although, those problems are largely due to the slowness of the server.
When lurking earlier this year someone made apost about the ‘Old Idiosyncrat’s Method’ (or something like that), has anyone tried to use this method with Plato or Aristotle, and if so, any luck? My intuition is that the best way to learn to read them is simply to start doing it and eventually I will get the hang of it.
hi alcibiades, i plan to put together a 1-page summary of notes for reading aristotle’s categories in greek, listing the main common constructions which are likely to be tricky, e.g. tw=| + infinitive, genitive absolutes, &c; aristotle’s fairly constant use of prepositions in one single sense (from memory, e)p/ is used in all but one case as “in the case of…” + genitive), and the forms of trickier verbs which aristotle uses often in the subjunctive, optative, perfect &c like a)podi/dwmi, e)rw=, &c, and maybe some conceptual diagrams. i’m going to try to get it done this weekend but i’m really busy…
i’d like to know if anyone has seen something like this for aristotle because i’ve never seen one, i just read with a dictionary, no commentary, thanks
The only book I have seen that has good information on Aristotle is ‘Philosophical Greek’ by Francis Fobes. It is out of print from University of Chicago Press, but is available online.
and welcome