Compared to some of the claims people using LLPSI and such make, I’ve heard varying claims about how much you even can learn Homeric/Early Greek. Some people talking about how Homer & Hesiod are absolutely manageable, don’t be afraid to start with them, and so on. And then you have one scholar with a decently well-known Homeric tutorial series on YouTube (blanking on the name right now, this was a while back) almost lamenting about how difficult it is for even scholars to “hold onto” Homeric. How he’s/they’re always going back to dictionaries, forgetting everything - endlessly relearning, it really sounded like or he straight-up claimed.
Obviously, even writing in English, I occasionally have to refer to the dictionary or ain’t none too sure bout proper grammar like. Ditto for French - a bit more than English, since it’s a language I learned but haven’t used extensively in a while, but it’s still there. And with Attic/Koine, plenty of folks online seem to be very comfortable with it, it’s there for them.
I’m not gonna sit here and pretend like I’m gonna out-do a true-blue scholar, but I’m holding out hope that with all this conflicting advice, maybe that was just a relative lament. Like how a pro athlete will talk about how terrible they are compared to some of their peers, while still literally running laps around even the next percentile of elite beneath them.
Absolutely it’s doable. After a while you may find you’re able to read much of Homer almost as well as you can read English (or French, let’s say) and almost as fast. Once you learn to pick up on the built-in cues and not fuss too much over fiddly grammatical details it flows quite rapidly for the most part, verse by verse, though some of the technical vocabulary can hold you up.
I recommend using Cunliffe’s Homeric Lexicon along with the Greek, and perhaps the Loeb translation at the outset (but only at the outset).
Here’s the first verse of the Iliad, to get you started:
μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληιάδεω Ἀχιλῆος.
“Sing, goddess” (ἄειδε, θεά) “the wrath” (μῆνιν) “of Peleus’ son Achilles.”
Very glad to hear it - any idea where that scholar was coming from, then?
Something I saw on Reddit recently was a discussion about how far forward you could theoretically go with just Attic. So start in the Classical period, and just gently push forward, taking a few writers from each century at a time, all the way to the end of the Byzantine period. The general consensus was that regardless of exactly how far you could go, you’d have to stop before reaching modern Greek, but by that point you’d have developed such an intuitive understanding of the language you could probably pick it up almost casually.
All that to say that of course someone jumped in about how you really should just start with Homer, if you’re gonna do all that.
For me there are two feasible options to start Greek:
1 - Start with what you want to read: regardless of whether your choice is easier or harder, learning what you want to read helps keep your motivation and you will keep on learning.
2 - Start with Attic: Why? Because it’s where you have plenty of tools (books, audios and videos), and you can choose the ones that suit you best.
So, starting with Homeric could be my choice only if I fit into option 1. There are limited resources to learn Homeric, some of them very old, it’s not easy for a self-learner. In the past when the resources were more limited, the difficulty would be almost the same, but that’s not the case anymore.
Furthermore, I like and recommend the Raniery Roberts’ approach.
It doesn’t seem that hard to me, maybe this is hubris. Of course the vocabulary is a little different from what you frequently see in both Attic and Koine (general and biblical) prose, but it’s not especially abstract.
Also the grammar tends not to be that difficult.
I’d be sceptical about reading too hard into “even scholars X”. Scholar seems like a purposefully vague term; are we talking about people specialising in a different field who sometimes reread Homer for fun? I doubt academics who specialise in poetry have great difficulty.
As for the YouTube thing, you don’t mean Gregory Nagy, do you? He has this Harvard Extension School course which is wildly popular, but he’s a scholar of the first rank (though I find none of his work convincing), so there’s no way he’s forgotten anything.
As everyone else has said, Homer is not especially difficult. In sight reading courses, the consensus was that he was much easier than most.
Pharr made a convincing case to start with Homeric Greek in his introductory Greek textbook. I’ve never used it, so this isn’t an endorsement per se, but it shows that Homer’s language is not especially difficult.
