How often to use articles

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’m working through the exercises in ch. 2 of Athenaze, where the implication from all the models seems to be that we would use articles in all the places where we would in English. For example, in ex. 2ζ-5:

Don’t sleep, man, but work in the field.

My translation of this would be:

Μὴ καθεύδε, άνθρωπε, ἀλλὰ πονε ἐν αγρῶ.

This is just my guess, going on the theory that articles weren’t very common in the ancient language and weren’t mandatory as often as in English. From what little I remember of my modern Greek, you also wouldn’t use the particle/interjection “ω” with the vocative either. (IIRC Athenaze says it’s not an article.) Would this really idiomatically be

Μὴ καθεύδε, ὦ άνθρωπε, ἀλλὰ πονε ἐν τῶ αγρῶ ?

For example, at the start of the Iliad, we have this:

Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί.

No article on μῆνιν, and no ω on θεά.

This reminds me of traveling in Ecuador and telling someone “Tengo una novia.” Their response was “Una novia sola?”

On a side note, could you even say “πονε αγρῶ,” without the preposition, since the case implies something that would be done in the field?

2

My suggestion is that you follow carefully the uses of the article in Athenaze which are introduced in a manageable way. Leaping to your own conclusions may well lead you astray.

On page 6 chapter 1 you will see the following:

“The definite article is sometimes used in Greek where it is not used in English, e.g., ὁ Δικαιόπολις = Dicaeopolis, and sometimes it can be translated with a possessive adjective in English, e.g.: ὁ ἄνθρωπος γεωργεῖ τον κλῆρον. The man cultivates his farm.”

It is not the case that “that articles weren’t very common in the ancient language and weren’t mandatory as often as in English”.

Your quotation from Homer underlines the difficulty of looking to poetry for rules about prose usage. In poetry the article is often omitted.

If you are leaning Greek just stick to the order in which things are revealed in Athenaze. If you want an overview of how the articles work look in chapter 28 of the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek.

3

Hi,
I don’t have the most current edition of Athenaze, but in the 1st edition in the very first part of the Grammatical Reference, you’ll find a number of rules regarding use of the article, but suffice to say that in Attic use of the article follows fairly standard guidelines. Probably its most common usage is as a definite article ( “the” vs. “a”). In the epic dialect (Homer and Hesiod et al.) the article is only very rarely used as a definite article. It is more commonly used as a demonstrative.
“ὦ”, as you mentioned is not an article, but an interjection used with the vocative.

Μὴ καθεύδε, ὦ άνθρωπε, ἀλλὰ πονε ἐν τῶ αγρῶ ?

Several very small corrections:
καθεύδε = accent in verbs is recessive, so κάθευδε
πονε needs an accent.
τῶ αγρῶ - This may be limitation of your keyboard, but here the article and noun take an iota subscript, (or, if you prefer an adscript)τῷ ἀγρῷ or τῶι ἀγρῶι.
You’ll find a lot said about this lesson in this thread:
http://discourse.textkit.com/t/plan-of-action/67/1

EDIT: Just saw Seneca’s post and agree wholeheartedly with his suggestions!

4

Just to add to the above:

In general, use the definite article ὁ / ἡ / τό in prose where you would use it in English, but there are some important exceptions.

As well as Athenaze, check out pages 8-11 of Eleanor Dickey’s book here which gives a very clear summary of the similarities and differences https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/An_Introduction_to_the_Composition_and_A/BCP-CwAAQBAJ?gbpv=1

In Homer there’s no true definite article, as Aetos says, so you would never find “τὴν μῆνιν” in Homer meaning ‘the rage’. As in Latin, you have to work out whether the meaning is definite or indefinite from the context. ὁ / ἡ / τό do appear regularly in Homer, but they are used as pronouns, most often recalling something mentioned in the previous sentence at the beginning of the next one (so ὁ γάρ = “For he…”, talking about whoever ‘he’ was in the previous sentence).

I may get corrected on this, but I think it’s unlikely that in Attic prose you’d get a locative-dative ἀγρῷ without ἐν. I think theoretically you could skip ἐν and if you used a locative ending (πόνει ἀγρόθι), which is adverbial and so doesn’t take the article, but this would be very unusual and something of a ‘special effect’ I expect.

5

I see that Sean and Aetos have already said what I was going to say, namely, that the language of the Homeric poems reflects a stage in the evolution of Greek earlier than the development of a true article out of what in Homer is a demonstrative pronoun. There are few instances of true articles in the Homeric poems, and they’re suspect.

6

Thanks, all, for those very helpful replies. It’s especially helpful of Aetos to take the time to give corrections. (I’m a retired teacher, so I know how much work that is.)

My goal is really to read Homer, so maybe I’m making things more difficult for myself by using Athenaze. I also have a copy of Pharr’s Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners, so maybe I should switch and start working through that book. I started with Athenaze because I liked the way it was structured like a modern book teaching a modern language. I’ve got a big box of flashcards that I’ve been working with that are focused exclusively on the Homeric vocabulary, so it would be nice to work with that, rather than with the less familiar Attic vocabulary in Athenaze.

I do find it pretty hard to stomach in Athenaze when they make apologies for slavery and ask the students to do exercises in which we boss a slave around, describe our slave as lazy, and so on. I’m familiar enough with Homer to realize that it’s not a model of modern wokeness, but I think there’s a difference between seeing an authentic contemporary account of ancient attitudes and engaging in some sort of weird modern re-propagation of the same attitudes.

7

Smyth has a discussion in 1530 and following. The import seems to be, that in Attic prose, locative dative for proper names doesn’t need ἐν, of course (but see Smyth), and often the locative dative referring to time omits it.

Sidgwick’s “First Greek Writer” has some good beginner sections on when to omit the article or not.

I personally often wonder why a person’s proper name has it or does not have it at various times. It seems that every time I develop a new theory, I see a counterexample a few pages later.

8

If your goal is to read Homer, I strongly recommend starting with Homer. I had the experience myself of getting to Homer after Attic and Koine and feeling like I couldn’t read a single line comfortably because the vocab is so different and you have to attune yourself to the word order and Homeric formulas. I nearly wept.

Pharr is a very good book as long as you don’t get demoralised which is easy to do. Modern language courses are full of exercises and tips in colourful boxes and photos of happy tourists scoffing ice cream. Pharr is extremely dense because it was written to be padded out by a teacher in the classroom with explanations and tests, but if you take your time and really try to master the material then it gets you to where you need to be.

The website Homeric Greek Resources has lots of additional material for each unit of the 4th Edition of Pharr (interactive tests, recordings, videos, flashcards) which might help to reinforce the contents of each chapter. By the end of the book you should be able to read Homer (slowly, slowly) with a commentary and dictionary. Expectation management is key. Quickly reading through a passage of 50 lines you’ve spent a good chunk of time working through with full comprehension is extremely satisfying, though. See that as the goal.

We had a little Odyssey reading group on here a while ago, which you might be interested to look through at some point. If you click on ‘More information about the group’ you’ll be able to see all the threads. As part of it, I made a list of all the free Homer resources I could find. Geoffrey Steadman’s free pdfs of parts of the Iliad and Odyssey with lots of grammar and vocab notes are a really good way to start reading your first real Homer beyond Pharr.

Hope some of that helps!

Sean

9

Thanks, jeidsath and seanjonesbw, that’s very helpful.

My original plan was to do Homer, and then it seemed so formidable that I put it aside. I went through this cycle a couple of times, then decided to work on koine and try to read some of the gospel of Mark. That worked really well for me, since the language in Mark is pretty simple. I went about it by making up a version with aids (on my github, https://github.com/bcrowell/mark ) for my own use. But after the first four chapters, I’d had enough. (I’m not a Christian.)

So now I’m trying to build up the level of skill needed to read Homer at some slow rate. I decided that vocabulary was more important at first than grammar, so I worked on that for a few months and made physical flashcards plus audio recordings to work on in the car ( https://github.com/bcrowell/greek-audio-vocab ). I didn’t want to try to start reading the first pages of Homer without enough basic foundation in the language to make it at least somewhat feasible. I’m actually not really sure whether I need much more grammar than what was adequate for Mark, but it can’t hurt. I get the impression that the word order in Homer is a lot more flexible, so probably it will help if I can develop more facility in recognizing the inflections.

10

Hi Ben,
To give you a reasonable time frame for working through Pharr, I will say it’s normally a two semester course. (think GK101, 102). Now if it’s the only item on your plate, you will probably move through it a little more quickly. I did both the Greek-English and English-Greek exercises but in retrospect, I probably could have skipped the English-Greek, although I do think it helped me retain the vocabulary. IIRC, there are exercises for the first 54 lessons and after that it’s reading and review. By the time you’re done, you’ll have read the entire first book of the Iliad.

As Sean pointed out, once you finish Pharr, you should be able to continue with the Iliad with the help of a commentary and dictionary. The only thing I’d add is that as you progress through the work, you’ll find that you’re able to handle more and more material as your vocabulary continues to increase. Sean’s recommended goal of 50 lines is very realistic. Even now, after the Iliad and the Odyssey, I still only do 50 lines of new material at a time.

Enjoy your journey!

11

I think that Aetos was right about being able to read through with a dictionary and commentary after Pharr. For me, that took about a year or so of Greek, and I read the first book of the Iliad at about that time. Being able to ditch the dictionary and commentary took me a few more years, and the ability for that seemed to come in this order: NT Greek (1-2 years) → Attic prose (3-4 years) → Homer (5-6 years)

I did a lot of work with flash cards (Anki, etc.), dictionary and commentary work, composition, and work with various textbooks and grammars. I now regret most of the time spent with dictionaries as mostly unproductive, and my flash card work as somewhat misguided (at least with my methods). If I were to do a flash card program now, for vocabulary, I’d concentrate on characteristic word pairs.

For example, instead of

μῆνις | rage

My card would not contain English, but instead something like

μῆνις | οὐλομένη

And if I were working on declensions, further cards like

μῆνιν | οὐλομένην

(and gen./dat., dual/pl., etc.)

I would have also ditched the dictionaries/commentaries much sooner. Very few are built for language acquisition help rather than “getting you to the translation” help. So I’ve found anyway. I personally find them more enjoyable for bringing out parts of something that I know well rather than as guides for first (or second or third) reads.

12

It’s easier to learn Attic Greek and then turn to Homer than vice versa. If your interest is limited to Homer, and you have no interest in reading Thucydides, Demosthenes, Attic drama or anything else in Greek, then by all means focus your efforts on Homeric Greek.

13

I have read that the Romans often used Homer as a primary teaching text for learning Greek, but I’ve never seen a primary source material to support it. Does anyone know of such? I agree, however, that Attic is the best starting point either moving backwards or forwards, besides giving us lots of excellent literature of itself.

14

I agree very much with what Bill writes. If you learn Attic first you will have greater flexibility in what you will be able to read later on. Homer tends to use quite simple grammatical constructions but the morphology can be challenging especially at first as you adjust to seeing different ways of spelling words that you may already be familiar with and other idiosyncrasies.

Homer is also very repetitive and so by dint of simply reading the text you should be able to acquire the necessary vocabulary. There are lots of words however that aren’t used that often and don’t figure in Attic Greek. I wouldn’t have thought it worthwhile to commit them to memory.

Motivation is of course an important factor, but how can you be sure now that you don’t want to read Tragedy (“slices from Homer’s feast”) later on. “Homeric Greek” is such an amalgam of dialects and forms which no-one ever spoke studying it first may give a very misleading, or at least partial, picture. Although there is a gap between the register of most Attic literature and what one can construct about spoken Classical Greek it was still fundamentally the same living language.

In a recent post MWH who is much respected around here and has forgotten more Greek than most of us could ever hope to learn described Pharr as “abominable”.

I think Athenaze is very well structured and although I have never studied the first book I worked through the second book in an intermediate class and was well prepared at the end to read Lysias and Euripides. After a bit of adjustment reading Homer was also not very problematic and a welcome relief in terms of difficulty after Sophocles.

This has all been reheated many times in this forum. Ultimately it will be a personal choice. As a retired teacher I am sure you know that approach is almost as important as text book. Careful preparation and regular habits are important.

15

Abominable! Poor old Pharr. Well, it worked for me but then I’d learned my rudiments elsewhere. Bran i bob bran (there’s a crow for every crow), as we say in Wales.

Have a look at Homer in the Roman Schools in A New Companion to Homer pp.44-48.

Though in the Hellenistic and Roman periods we may assume access to complete texts resembling our own, we do not know just how much of the two poems was read in school at various levels. By the second century A.D., the poems were probably studied by means o f anthologies. Numerous partial texts and copy texts, apparently from the schoolroom, survive…
…

One tremendously valuable text throws light on the teaching of Homer in the schools of the Roman empire. After serving as an introduction to the poems for many centuries, the work of unknown authorship lay neglected from the eighteenth century until our own time. Many passages echo Plutarch, under whose name it was known to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Apparently the work of a
grommaticus of the late second or third century, and variously titled De Homero and O n the Life and Poetry of Homer,’ it presents itself as an introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey for the first-time reader.21*

Also Homeric Papyri and Transmission of the Text, but I won’t quote directly from that chapter because the author is notoriously litigious.

16

What he said.

Seriously, though: Seneca and Hylander make very good points and sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have started with Attic.
The transition to Attic has not been easy and I know there are still some serious gaps in my overall knowledge (especially syntax), but I’m getting there-I’m able to read Xenophon and the N.T. fairly easily, so I believe I’m making progress. I also have had the luxury of free time to allow for relearning vocabulary and morphology. In the end, I don’t believe choosing Homer to start with is a choice that will prevent you from moving on to Attic authors, but be prepared to put in some extra work when you do.

17

The real problem with Homer in isolation is that the vocabulary has no context except for the Homeric. There’s enough enough Attic literature left that you can see the same words in different contexts, see multiple shades of meaning, etc. Epic is much more samey.

Take μηνις again, for example. It’s anger, sure. But it’s not the sort of passing anger that someone feels when he’s irritated. It’s not the anger of a husband annoyed by his wife. Etc.

Unfortunately, reading Homer in isolation, all we have is the (sometimes a bit cramped) Homeric context and it’s hard to see the the poetic connotations and the versatility of the language on display. How many ways does Homer have of saying “fight” or “brave”? They all tend to blend together without seeing how these words can be deployed in other environments (or at least their roots and related forms). Wider reading brings out the depth in Homer.

18

I hope you won’t think I am being pedantic but I think this is evidence of teaching Homer not that Homer was used to teach Greek to non-native speakers. The first step must have involved (at first) native Greek Speaking “grammatikoi” teaching the basics of the language, later on there were many “grammatikoi” who were non-natives who had proficiency in both languages. (The evidence for this switch comes I think from inscriptions.)

I am no expert on this but Stanley F.Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny, London 1977 looks helpful.

I hope, Sean, your "grommaticus " has the right trousers. :smiley:

19

Haha! What would the study of ancient languages be without a bit of pedantry.

From the “…” in my previous quote (p.45):

When the Romans took up that educational system, Homer was already installed at the base of the pyramid of instruction in the Greek language. He was the first Greek author studied in the schools of the empire, where to know Greek meant to have read Homer.20* Like Shakespeare in the traditional twentieth-century pedagogy of the English language—an author remote in date and style, whose language could not in any immediate sense be taken as a model for composition—Homer served as an ideal of Greek eloquence and poetic power, an inspiration rather than a model for imitation.
The process did not stop with the elementary instruction of the grammatodidaskalos. Another of the anecdotes of education in Plutarch’s Alcibiades (7) has the arrogant young man demand a copy of Homer of a grammatodidaskalos who in turn supplies one that he himself has corrected. Alcibiades’ response is that this teacher should not be teaching children (presumably, ten to fourteen year olds) to read if he had the skills to correct a text of Homer, he should rather be teaching older teenagers (neoi). This probably meant (at least in Plutarch’s time, if not in that of Alcibiades) that this grammatodidaskalos had the requisite skills to present himself as a grammaticus. If the stu­ dent aspired to still more education, he would turn to a teacher of rhetoric, where Homeric exempla might again be studied.

*20. See e.g. Heraclitus, Homeric Allegories, ch. 1; [Plutarch] Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer, ch. 1.

Vale(s?) grommatice!

20

Augustine, in Confessions, said that he hated being forced to study Homer when he was beginning Greek and didn’t understand a word. Only one of the dual-language texts in Dickey’s Latin Textbooks book seems to be Homeric (it presents cliff notes style dual-language summaries of several books of the Iliad).

To me at least, the general scope of the materials in Dickey seems to suggest that the range of elementary language-learning material was fairly wide, and not limited to, or even primarily about, Homer.