query about commentaries on the Euthyphro by Plato

Greek Learning Greek
1

Listed below are three student commentaries on Plato’s Euthyphro. Because I’m not ready to tackle Plato’s dialogues with only a lexicon, I need a student commentary. I wonder if anybody can offer any observations on these books, or on one of them. I want a grammatical commentary, not a historical or philosophical one; a student commentary, not a scholarly one.

Charles Platter, A Student Commentary on Plato’s Euthyphro (Michigan Classical Commentaries) 2019

John E. Hare, Plato’s Euthyphro (Bryn Mawr Commentaries, Greek) 1985

Jacques A. Bailly , Plato: Euthyphro & Clitophon (Focus Classical Commentaries)

If I cannot find a satisfactory commentary on the Euthyphro, I’ll consider taking up Plato’s Crito instead, for which a Geoffrey Steadman commentary is available. I’m just finishing my second reading of the Apology. I used Steadman’s student commentary on the Apology of Socrates by PLato, and found it most helpful. Unfortunately, I cannot find a Steadman commentary on the Euthyphro. Steadman knows what I will stumble over. Although his grammatical remarks are much abbreviated, I know just enough Greek to use them.

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Hi, the student commentary that comes to mind is actually another one: by Emlyn-Jones:

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/plato-euthyphro-9781853991325/

It seems to meet your requirements, with a focus on grammar and aimed at students coming to Plato for the first time.

Cheers, Chad

3

Thank you Chad, I found a used Emlyn-Jones commentary at a good price.

I’m also experimenting with using an English translation to trigger dictionary work.

4

John Burnet’s Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates and Crito is also very useful in conjunction with a more basic commentary. He’s very good.

Mark

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I see your point, Mark, that Burnet is useful along with “a more basic commentary.” An online peek at his notes persuaded me that I need that more basic study in order to make good use Burnet’s work. Maybe reading Burnet’s notes, every page or so, just after doing the basic study would work.

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I used several of these commentaries for Euthyphro, which I’ve reread many times now. Nothing for Euthyphro really is as good as Helms is for a new reader of Apology. But Euthyphro is a much much better dialogue to start with than Apology, so you don’t need as much help. And Burnet is not really the “easy grammatical help” we’re talking about, though I love him.

The single best thing that I ever did for fluency in my first couple years of Greek was to use a good translation (not necessarily “literal”) to learn the gist of sentences, and then work with the translation until I could read through a text grasping 80-90% of the sense, leaving the difficult bits for a more mature knowledge of Greek. And then I read through the whole thing a dozen times. Eventually, I could leave the translations behind entirely, and then switch to lexicon-only, and then eventually ditch those.

Commentaries, I have found, are a tremendous way to use time extremely inefficiently (as much fun as they are). You can play translator with them without achieving much fluency. Even (sort of) same language commentaries or translations (like scholia, or Gaza for Homer) involves a lot of context switching.

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When you have time jeidsath, I wish you’d describe that process in greater detail. For example, was your mastery of the forms complete before you started using a translation in this way? How did dictionary work fit into this?

I worked my way through the Apology twice, which required two months each time, with about two hours every day. Although I’ve considered a third reading, the thought of a dozen readings is daunting. I can see the value of many readings. ISTM that this must gradually transform a difficult text into comprehensible input; it’s maintaining morale that I’m concerned about.

There is so much disparaging comment about translating and translations, that I don’t see much on how they might be used effectively. For my part, I need a translation to check my understanding of a passage. How else is one supposed to know?

For myself, I don’t worry about subvocal translating as I read. I think this falls away, word by word, and idiom by idiom, as one becomes more familiar with the particular expressions.

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I’d suggest that you just try various things and find out from experience what works for you. There’s a variety of personality types on this board. I think of it like I’m a kid who’s been sent to summer camp. You’re not going to enjoy hanging out with every single kid who’s at the camp. If there’s a kid who tells you that only wimps wear shoes, and you should go barefoot on all the hikes, you don’t have to listen to him.

Personally, what works for me, at the stage I’m at in Greek, is a process like this:

(1) For each page of text, I start by going over the vocabulary that I don’t know. I do this using the software-generated presentation linked in my signature, but I’m sure there are many other ways of doing it.

(2) Read a paragraph and try to puzzle it out. In each sentence, make sure that I’ve found the main verb and its subject. Flip back to the vocab list when my short-term memory fails me. Make notes in pencil. Look up any words that aren’t on the vocab list and that I don’t know. If there is some such word and I can’t guess its dictionary form from the inflected form, either guess or go to the computer look it up on logeion.uchicago.edu. (But for me, this doesn’t happen too often, because my software generally is able to flag the most irregular forms, and it prints them on the vocab page.)

(3) Try to put the paragraph together in a way that makes sense. Cycle through steps 2 and 3 a few times until I think I’ve got the best understanding I’m going to get.

(4) Check a translation to see what I’ve missed.

(5) Go on to the next paragraph.

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I wrote a couple of method review posts when I started:

A year of Greek, Dec 2014: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/a-year-of-greek/13117/2
2 years of Greek, Dec 2015: http://discourse.textkit.com/t/2-years-of-greek/13907/1

I would do things differently now, and have a wider set of tools for language learning. But it’s fair to say that reading for the gist of things was my primary tool for a number of years, and I think that it has a lot of advantages. No one else seems to like to play in the Random Greek Passages thread with me, so it’s hard to level-set, but it may be that I’ve gotten all right at context guessing because of spending so much time at it. And I’ve had a lot of fun over 8 (!) years now of learning Greek. Your having 2 hours a day for reading makes me envious though. That has rarely been true for me since kids came along.

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I’m 83, Joel. Our children are 50 and late 40s. They’ve been taking care of themselves for some time.

I really am interested in your use of translations in learning Greek.

I’d love to attempt your Random Greek Passages, but they are beyond my ability.

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And I thought that I started late, in my mid-30s. But I believe that it’s the energy and the passion that determine your progress, not age. Therefore here is a serious suggestion, one that you can take or leave, but that I think might help with the problem of not understanding as much as you would like on re-reads. Remember though, that I’ve never taught anybody, and only have my own progress to judge by.

The method comes from Francois Gouin (sort of), and can be used to make a minimal modification to reading and translating. I’ve played around with it and found it extremely useful. One advantage would be that it only requires a modification to what you are doing now.

Method: as you read, take notes in Greek (no English!) for every verb and participle. The note should be the smallest complete phrase that you can make for it, with subject and object. For example:

Example (fr. Apology 25): πολλήν γέ μου κατέγνωκας δυστυχίαν. καί μοι ἀπόκριναι: ἦ καὶ περὶ ἵππους οὕτω σοι δοκεῖ ἔχειν; οἱ μὲν βελτίους ποιοῦντες αὐτοὺς πάντες ἄνθρωποι εἶναι, εἷς δέ τις ὁ διαφθείρων;

Notes:

κατέγνωκε Μέλητος Σωκράτους δυστυχίαν
ἀπεκρίνατο Μέλητος Σωκράτει
δοκεῖ Μελήτῳ οὕτως ἔχειν. (οὕτως ἔχει.)
ποιοῦσιν ἄνθρωποι ἵππους βελτίους εἶναι. (εἶσιν ἵπποι βελτίονες.)
ἄνθρωπος διαφθείρει ἵππους

And so on, varying however you would like. I’ve used finite verb forms and kept tense, but you don’t have to. And then, when you re-read, you can go back to these notes as a first resource whenever you have a problem. You can review and modify them, cleaning up inevitable mistakes. My strong suspicion is that that you will find that your comprehension on a second read goes up significantly.

The theory behind the above is that when we are learning new words, the meaning is only one of the many things to pick up (and not even the most important). The first thing that we should concentrate on is habitual context and usage pattern. Notes like these concentrate on the important things first (usage, context), and leaves the less important bit (meaning) as a latter concern.

If you find it useful, Gouin’s book has a great deal along these lines, including natural extensions, once you’ve mastered verbs and their objects.

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Well-described and illustrated, Joel. From your examples, I see that you transformed the verb, by putting it in a different person. I can see power in that.

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Your whole process is impressive, Ben.

I usually don’t make a reconnaissance of the next sentence before I try to read it. Instead, I start with the first word, and go one word after another. When I don’t know a word, or can’t parse it, I look it up, make a guess at the local meaning, and move to the next word.

I do lookups in the Attikos app in my iPad, placed on a little stand near the paper text I’m reading. To the right is my spiral-bound notebook. As I read along, I try to write the words together in grammatical phrases on the same line in the notebook. Attikos links words to Perseus word study tool.

I use the English translation to get a meaning for the sentence that baffled me, and then go back through the Greek to see how the translator got the English meaning from the Greek. Usually after that I can see the Greek meaning, and the Greek grammar. The translation also helps when I’m unsure of the antecedent of a pronoun. When I suspect an unknown idiomatic word or expression, I study the Greek and the translation until I find the Greek words not accounted for in the translation; then I do detailed dictionary work on those words. Liddell Scott usually notes idiomatic meanings.

When everything else fails, I analyze the sentence word-by-word, in detail. Usually the most difficult sentences yield to this.