Ranking Greek writers by difficulty

Greek Learning Greek
1

I think you’ll find, as you progress, that this scale of measurement, which may work for modern foreign languages, isn’t really useful or valid for ancient Greek. Some texts are easier than others; some authors have a style that’s very difficult. Plato reads somewhat more easily for me at least than Isocrates; Isocrates is usually easier (but blander) than Demosthenes; and Thucydides’ speeches are the most difficult prose of all–even the ancient Greeks and those Roman who knew Greek nearly at a native speaker level found him very difficult. Tragedy is even more difficult than prose, using a different language with different vocabulary and syntactic license. And there are also many obscurities in all ancient authors that scholars still puzzle over, offering alternative explanations.

I saw this by Qimmik elsewhere and it got me wondering whether there’s been a rough list made anywhere of which are the easiest texts to begin with and which are impenetrable even when you get to a good level. It’s all Greek to beginners, after all.

Obviously, to some extent it depends on what Greek you know and which text you look at, but even with a knowledge of Koiné and Homeric I can see that the tragedians are tough in general. In that spirit then, for a bit of fun/rigorous scientific analysis:

Rank 0-6, where 6 is the most difficult.

Homer - 1.8*
Hesiod
Lyric Poets (or not grouped together?)
Aeschylus - 5.83
Sophocles - 5.8
Euripides - 5.18
Aristophanes - 4
Plato - 3
Aristotle
Herodotus - 2.2
Xenophon - 2
Thucydides - 5.17
Demosthenes
Archimedes
Euclid
Septuagint - 1
New Testament - 0.83


If you want to add anyone else, please do. Only texts with more than 5 individual rankings will appear in the final list. I’ll update this post with an average whenever a writer reaches multiples of 5, or with new writers.

*Running averages now included for writers with more than 5 responses

2

To kick things off

Homer 3
Hesiod 4
Lyric Poets (or not grouped together?) 6
Aeschylus 5
Sophocles 6
Euripides 6
Aristophanes 4
Plato 2
Aristotle 2
Herodotus 2
Xenophon 1
Thucydides 5
Demosthenes 4
Archimedes ?
Euclid ?
Septuagint 1
New Testament 0

3

I would rate everything at 6, each for different reasons.

4

I don’t disagree with Qimmik, but for me some texts are, from a linguistic perspective at least, more difficult than others. You’ll notice that I’ve spent a lot more time with Homer than other Greek. Here are my ratings:

Homer 1
Hesiod 1
Lyric Poets (or not grouped together?) 3 (I’ve mostly read Sappho. I think the difficulties with “dialectical” forms are exaggerated.)
Aeschylus 6
Sophocles 6
Euripides 5
Aristophanes 3
Plato – depends. Euthyphro, Apology 2; Phaedrus 4
Aristotle ?
Herodotus 2
Xenophon 2
Thucydides 6
Demosthenes 6
Archimedes ?
Euclid ?
Septuagint 1?
New Testament – depends. 0-2? Mark is the easiest Greek text I know.

EDIT: Seems like I can’t decide and keep changing my ratings.

5

I would generally agree with Paul’s ratings, except that I would bump Aristophanes up a notch or two and bring Sophocles and maybe Euripides down a notch. If Aeschylus is 6, Sophocles is 5. But the texts are fraught with textual issues.

The speeches in Thucydides are at 6; the narrative is only 4-5. If Thucydides’ speeches are 6, Demosthenes is 5.

Elegy and iambus are about the same level as Homer and Hesiod. I would put these at 2, if only because a huge vocabulary has to be mastered and a substantial amount of commentary is useful to get the most out of them. Of the other lyric poets, most have survived only in fragments. These require a lot of commentary, so while the Greek isn’t necessarily too hard, reading them and engaging with them takes a substantial amount of work.

Pindar is the only lyric (actually, choral) poet who work has survived, at least in part, in medieval manuscripts of complete poems. Not only is the state of the text deplorable (the problems were apparently compounded by Byzantine efforts to improve it), the Greek is very difficult. On a scale of 0 to 6, I would put Pindar at about 8.

I’m skeptical about trying to isolate the difficulty of the Greek from the effort needed to work through issues arising from the cultural and historical context and from textual issues.

6

People generally say that Aeschylus is harder than Sophocles, which is in turn harder than Euripides. I agree that Euripides is by far easier than the two. I have fought my way through Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, but when I read the beginning of Sophocles’ Antigone last spring, I still found it extremely difficult, perhaps more so than Agamemnon.

I haven’t tried Pindar. And Qimmik is not exactly encouraging me to try in the near future… :wink:

With Thucydides’, it’s possible to read bits even when you’re not that advanced, but somehow I’ve gotten the feeling that, unlike other equally difficult authors, he doesn’t get much easier when you progress. Perhaps this is not so much because of the Greek itself, but because Thucydides himself wanted to make himself difficult to understand.

I don’t know why generally people find Aristophanes so difficult. Maybe it’s because I share Aristophanes’ scatological sense humor…

7
8

My rankings below refer to the easiest portions of the LXX and the GNT, since there are some difficult books therein.

Homer 3
Aeschylus 6
Euripides 5.9
Aristophanes 5
Plato 4
Xenophon 2
Thucydides 6
Septuagint 0
New Testament 1

http://www.vnoel.com/component/option,com_gront/Itemid,1068/

9

Your sense of humor just isn’t refined enough! :laughing:

10

Aeschylus 6
Sophocles 6
Aristophanes 5
Plato 5
Aristotle 6
Herodotus 2
Xenophon 3
Thucydides 4 (but I’ve not tried any speeches)
Septuagint 2? ( of the little I’ve tried)
New Testament: Mark 0
St Paul 6

plus
Polybios 2

11

The most difficult Greek I can ever remember reading is Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides Book II. Other than that, I would rank the stichomythia and other iambic sections of both the tragic poets and Aristophanes at about 4, but the lyric sections at 6. With Homer and Hesiod, it depends very much whether one is used to the epic dialect or not (2 if so, probably 5-6 otherwise!). Xenophon would definitely be a 2 - a good introduction to Attic prose. I haven’t read much of the New Testament.

12

hi, these are interesting results! as i’ve already mentioned here, in response to a similar question earlier on this forum, that i don’t think you can have an objective ranking of difficulty because it depends on where your own particular weaknesses lie:

http://discourse.textkit.com/t/methods-for-learning-greek/10207/1

however i don’t mean by this that you can’t rank authors by difficulty according to some objective or subjective criterion. eg., i think of homer as easier than say pindar, based on the totally unscientific subjective criterion that after working through a few books of homer very carefully after that i could almost free-read homer, i.e. it pays off in terms of fluency with reading the rest of that work. you could use that as a subjective criterion for ranking authors by difficulty - after you’ve worked through say 25% of a work, how hard it is to read the remaining 75%?

there’s definitely a ranking you could make there between say homer and other authors where you just keep having to chip away word after word even after the first 25% of the work - the analogy i’ve used before is like digging a mine, you’ve only really gained the area you’ve actually dug and it doesn’t break you through to some grand open space as i used to hope (for these types of authors). this can be for a whole range of reasons and isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all - as aristotle notes in the poetics (1458b), it’s important for tragedians to seek out the rare and unusual words (i.e. the hard ones!) and to avoid constantly ordinary prosaic language:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0055%3Asection%3D1458b

this is not just specific to greek - although i only read him in short doses, huysmans is still one of my favorite french authors, and my annotations to e.g. his à rebours are as heavy as on say my greek text of thucydides - someone described him as dragging mother image by the hair or feet down the worm-eaten staircase of syntax, or something like that (you could probably apply the same idea to some greek poets!), and i think i read he went out specifically searching for dictionaries of rare and obscure words to give his text this particular flavour.

with pindar, i had to go through and re-order his words just to make sense of what went with what, which i typed up in this article here (see the italicized text): http://www.aoidoi.org/poets/pindar/O1.pdf, something which you definitely don’t get with other types of authors.

so i think you can rank authors according to a particular criterion like this (or another particular one) but if you just say “this guy was the hardest overall” then you run into the issue i raised in that earlier response linked above - whether tragedy or thucy seems harder will really depend a lot on your relative strengths in the 10 factors i mentioned there (and probably in other factors that i didn’t mention or realise), rather than being a purely objective difficulty factor.

i’d be interested to know, from those who’ve voted above, what was it in particular that you had in mind when you voted someone as super difficult, compared to an author as easier, i.e. what criterion did you use as your rule of thumb? was it e.g. still bashing your palm into your forehead when reading the final pages of some work, rather than being able to glide in to the finish easily as you can with other authors, or something else? cheers, chad

13

It’s all a matter of which genre you’re most familiar with, that plays a hugh role as well.

And I agree with Qimmik, Pindar is CRAZY difficult. Honestly, that stuff is practically impossible to read for average readers without a very good commentary and a good knowledge of dialects. The fact that Finglass wrote an entire commentary on only ONE epinikion is already telling, that doesn’t happen very often. To get things started, Colvin’s ‘‘a historical Greek reader’’ is a pretty good book that explains and outlines the basic principles of dialectology. It’s not the perfect work, and there are some mistakes in it as well, but they are few.

I think Sappho is sometimes easy, but the new poem has some tough stanzas in it. Just like in Aristophanes, you have easier and more difficult parts. Tragedy is pretty straightforward, especially the dialogues, but the choral lyric can be quite obscure, even though the only Doric elements in these parts is the long a. Other typically Doric phenomena are left out most of the time. It’s so difficult because it is heightened language.

I heard Proclus is pretty tough too. Haven’t given him a try yet though.

Homer, Euripides, Plato (not all, but some) and Lysias are excellent authors to start with. From there, one could try Sophocles, Aristotle, and Demosthenes (same genres, but a higher tier).

I’m going to read Nonnus’ Dionysica next semester, and from what I’ve heard, it is pretty awesome!!

14

Finglass

I would rank Finglass as level 5. If you can read Finglass you don’t need him. Valuable for scholars but beyond the reading level of casual dabblers in classical texts.

15

I agree that he is very extensive in his commentary, but one can hardly, despite Finglass’ age, overestimate his contributions to the field of Ancient Greek studies. He just seems to get everything. Can’t wait for the new book on Stesichorus coming out in a couple of weeks!

But yes, not for the average dabbler. And far too expensive as well.

16

I’m surprised I didn’t find that other post when I was searching, so thanks for posting it. My rule of thumb when giving my rankings was how quickly I could pick up the syntax as I read through, so that when I was encountering new vocabulary it was a quick trip to the LSJ to unblock the sentence, rather than ages playing ‘match the cases’. The reason I’ve given the NT a 0 is that not only is a lot of it arranged syntactically like a model Greek exercise, but there’s heavy reuse of rhythms of the syntax and speech markers (αμην αμην λεγω υμιν) that let you scan very easily once you’re in a groove.

With the tragedians, every line is a stretch on my mind’s ability to hold all of the meaning in one place, like with long Shakespearean clauses (Who would these Fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered Country, from whose bourn No Traveler returns, Puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others that we know not of) that take twists and turns until you’ve lost the start of the thread.

When I’ve given a 3 or 4, I find a mix of repetition for clarity and poetic diversity. These are the writers where I have pages of lucidity followed by forehead bashing. So I suppose my criteria are innovation or regularity in syntax and phrasing.