I have finished reading Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae which I really enjoyed. Part of the fun is Euripides’ father-in-law dressed as a woman acting out the roles of various heroines. I had considered continuing to read Aristophanes, and my plans to read Plato’s Phaedrus are still out there (it’s quite long), but I instead decided on something else.
In addition to the primary text I’m reading, I also read a bit of poetry at night before bed. For quite a while I had been reading Theognis, until I got tired of him. I decided to pick up Archilochus since he was considered to be one of the best of archaic poets, and papyrus finds substantially add to his known work. Refreshingly different tone from Theognis, who often seemed whiny.
Despite having a tin ear, I thought I really ought to try to develop a feel for meter, which I thought might best be done by listening to Homer at first. It occurred to me that I might alternatively listen to the same book read by Julius Tomin and Ioannis Stratakis. Tomin articulates the meter, and Stratakis gives an animated reading and is enjoyable to listen to. I figured that after listening to Tomin I might then be able to feel the meter in Stratakis. I imagine that the bards/rhapsodes were above all story-tellers who dramatized their material. (Stratakis, BTW, pronounces the lost digammas both where implied by the meter and where denied by the meter. Not a big deal to me.)
I chose book 3 of the Iliad which both Tomin and Statakis do. I figured that it made sense for me to know the text while I listened to it, so suddenly after having avoided Homeric Greek in order to solidify my Attic, I’ve decided to read it a bit. Benner has the full text of book 3 in his Selections from the Iliad. Then it occurred to me that I have Pamela Draper’s An Odyssey Reader which provides a great deal of support to first-time Homer readers with vocabulary and notes next to the text. So I started there. I have Homer Odyssey I by Simon Pulleyn which I have read before. I read his notes while working through Draper’s text from book 1. I recommend Pulleyn’s book to anyone who’s studying Attic and wants to get a feel for Homer without making a big commitment. The facing translation lessens the work, and Pulleyn’s notes are fantastic. They give you a feel for Homeric issues and scholarship.
I have also been working my way through Andreas Willi’s Origins of the Greek Verb. I know little about linguistics and much of it is way over my head, but the promise of a chapter on pre-Proto-Indo-European was enticing to me. I had always wondered how PIE developed such complexity. I have to admit that occasionally I skipped pages – particularly when Willi explains why a certain theory just presented must be wrong – but mostly I plowed through even when it was generally hard to understand. From time to time I have eureka moments where I completely understand an idea, and luckily Willi is very good at referring back to the section number where he previously developed an idea that the current section relies on. Now I have arrived at the chapter “From Proto-Indo-European to Pre-Proto-Indo-European”. It’s quite interesting. Spoiler alert: Pre-PIE was an Ergative, rather than an Accusative language. It explains things like why neuters have identical forms for nominative and accusative which match the accusative ending of 2nd conjugation nouns and adjectives. I had been aware that early in PIE, there were only two genders – animate and neuter – but now suddenly I realize that “gender” isn’t about gender at all.
Willi’s book also sparked my interest in Homer. I had always assumed that there were only a small number of stem aorists. Now I see that there were quite a few in archaic Greek. In a way, Homer is a window into where Greek came from. For anyone tempted to tackle Willi’s book, Wikipedia is wonderful for linguistic concepts – although is one case, I googled a word and found only a reference to the word’s use in Willi’s book.
Mark