Seeing as I’m nearing the end of my adventure with Mr. Hansen and Mr. Quinn, I want to know what I can or can’t tackle afterwards. The main reason I wanted to study Greek was Plato. I love Plato and everything he writes, so I want to read him, but what kind of reading is it? Is it something I could read after just finishing that “Intensive Course”? He seems simple in English.
I didn’t find Plato to difficult…however…the vocab was fairly straightforward, but as it is with most philosophers, you must know what they mean by a particular word. The syntax wasn’t too tough either…what bugged me about Plato was…I could read exactly what he was saying, and yet, it made little sense to me. 
We read Plato in my 4th year Greek class, and we all agreed it wasn’t too difficult, we were just all left scratching our collective heads as to what he was saying. But, I suppose that’s just philosophy in general.
Well, having learned Greek in a “traditional method”, you seem to me to be suffering from a phenomenon well known: all the grammar is in your head, but you haven’t read anything and you probably don’t have a good grasp over vocabulary, so I assume and I by no means intend to offend you. The usual recommendation according to the traditional approach is to read Xenophon’s Anabasis, which is thought to be simple, and then move on to Socrates’ apology(by Plato). However, the modern approach would say, that novice users of language should read and learn what interest them most and is related to their immediate needs. So I’d say go for it, just use a good beginners commentary. The cambridge commentaries might lack some basic information for a beginner, and you might find some useful, but too didactic in the bad sense of the word, commentaries on the Apology, which are usually intended for a class format, where the superiority of the teacher must be immortalized.
Therefore, I highly recommend focus’ edition of Plato’s Euthyphro and Clitophon.
I bought it after I read the praising review on Bryn Mawr(http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2004/2004-05-12.html).
It is a modern commentary not written in archaic English, and is almost line by line(There are even given cross-references to Smyth). A basic vocabulary for both dialogues is attached at the end, so you don’t have to use the ancient monument of L&S and put more attention to learning the grammar and vocabulary. The only caveat is that the format isn’t so comfortable, as the commentary is given under the Greek text at the bottom, so sometimes one ends up with 5 lines of Greek and the rest of the page is very useful comments. Both amazon and focus’ page mistakenly claim the book has c.100~ pages, it is a mistake; I ordered it and it’s about more than 200 pages.
No beatus, you’re very correct. I’ll try that one, and thanks.
after a semester of greek i tried plato’s apology (bolchazy-carducci has an excellent student’s edition with lots of notes and vocabulary). H&Q really didn’t prepare me for the shock of reading plato, but the only way to learn is to do it. the syntax will take some getting used to, and the vocabulary too (because H&Q is all about soldiers fighting and students learning).
I also started off with Plato’s Apology as the first Greek work I read, and I thought it was a good place to have started. I can’t remember which edition I used, but the commentary was helpful for me to get used to things like the nuances of particles, ellipsis, and certain idioms, which I would have found difficult on my own. It also had a vocabulary at the back (including the various verb forms), which made the process for me a lot easier, since I’m always tempted to look up words, even when I know them, so using an outside dictionary would’ve really slowed me down.
But since then, I’ve read passages of Plato I found interesting in English and they haven’t seemed too bad.
Plato isn’t that bad. Euthyphro would be a good one to start amnd.
I personally find Plato extremely difficult; his sentences go on forever and are extremely complex – at times I found it necessary to draw big complex diagrams that would fill an entire page just to figure them out, and even then I often needed to resort to the translation anyway – and the particles are used so subtly and seem to be far more germane to the sense of the text than, say, in Homer, Xenophon or Herodotus, where a beginner can often get away with ignoring many of the particles and still come away with the gist.
My own personal scale of difficulty is:
- Homer (by FAR the easiest; the syntax is extremely straightforward and most sentences are only one line long)
- Herodotus (his syntax is also quite simple
- Xenophon or Lucian - a bit more complicated syntax, but still very accessible
- Attic drama – here although the syntax is usually not THAT complex, the problem is that the language is quite compressed, so a lot is being expressed in very little space, almost like telegram language at times. So I’d put it at a bit harder than the foregoing prose because
- Thucydides – much harder than the foregoing, but still manageable
- Demosthenes or the other orators – VASTLY harder (for me) to the point of being inscrutible most of the time even with a good commentary
- Plato – like Demostehenes, only harder still
I haven’t tried Aristotle, but since I find him pretty incomprehensible in English, I doubt I would find him easy to read in Greek either.
I’m quite surprised that so many people appear to have found Plato manageable so soon after introductory Greek. The challenge of reading Plato can certainly be stimulating, but I almost think that if I had started with Plato I would have been so discouraged that I would have given up on Greek altogether.
Plato, at least, is WORTH reading, despite the difficulty; I personally find windbags like Demosthenes far too boring for the effort, which is (in my opinion) immense.
I think the problem with Greek particles in general, and hence more specifically in Plato, is that they do not get good enough a treatment in standard text books, which results from the fact that their treatment in standard grammar(i.e. Smyth and Goodwin) is archaic in both greek-english translation aspects and linguistically. All these books were written in a time when translation was everything. But ask any German teacher and consult any German Grammar/Text book, and you will see there are completely other useful methods to approach particles.
The only thing I can suggest is use the basic 1500 vocabulary: M. Campbell, Classical Greek Prose: A Basic Vocabulary. The appendix on idiomatic usage of some combinations is superb, especially when most commentaries available are the traditional Victorian ones. In addition, a modern commentary(written in the last 15~ years) could be very useful, in case the commentator is aware of recent developments in Linguistics and language learning and acquisition.
IVSTINIANVS, I can understand the problem you are talking about; The length of the sentences is difficult to tackle at the beginning, but you should learn how to break the sentence in to its skeleton, and skim over the subordinated clauses, which sometimes get in the way of the superordinate(=main) clause. The new commentary which I’ve mentioned earlier does that for you, but this is something you should learn to do at the back of your head, and it would usually get you to fluent reading, especially if you have a good grasp over vocabulary.
Re-Homer: You are completely right, more archaic texts(such as Genesis in the Hebrew bible), which usually signify earlier stages of the language development, are less complicated, do not have much subordination or other complex syntactical patterns - A fact well demonstrated in a book I’ve recently read: G. Sampson, Educating Eve, London 1997. Now in a second edition, published as: The ‘language instinct’ debate, London 2005.
Maybe a bit off topic, but I have this idea in my head that languages become less complicated as time goes by. Where I got that idea, I don’t remember. Is it a misconception?
Well concerning Plato (bar my personal opinion about his style and his writing etc which could seriously offend some) I’d say that he is not al that difficult (remember though that I am used to very, very long sentences with heaps of subordinate clauses).
Plato, as long as you are familiar with his ideas, can only confuse you at first. His style doesn’t change much and once you get the knack of it you’re home free. .
Aristotle’s style may cause people more trouble and Thucydides has some passages that verge on cryptic. Xenophon is (for the most part) easy and straightforward and so is Arrian. In most Greek tragedies if you skip the chorus you get a pretty condensed but straightforward text as long as you know the story. Unless you want to parse them and get every little syntactical phenomenon down, they are not that difficult really.
Herodotus is so cute and easy that it’s worth reading.
I am too biased against Demosthenes to give an objective opinion; his writing is sometimes complicated for no reason whatsoever. However, it if you are interested in the power of participles (you know, how they can mean two things? How you can use participles to cloud your meaning or mislead your audience?) his speeches are very interesting.
Lysias on the other hand is a sly one and easy to read.
Isocrates can bore you to death and just loves paragraph long phrases (OK I am allowed a bit of exaggeration aren’t I?) but smooth reading.
In lyric poetry I was always partial of Archilochus but I wouldn;t recommend starting on lyric poetry just yet.
Perispomenon my hands are itching to start rambling on the matter! You tempt me so badly! But I guess we’ll have to start a new discussion in which, in a true “Socratean” spirit, we will first define some of the terms (e.g. difficult)
You’re conflating two separate things, I think, language and style. Demosthenes and Lysias were purportedly using the same language, but their styles are quite different.
Beatus Pistor might be thinking in terms how languages change over time – certainly English is morphologically far more simple now than it was when Beowulf was written, and you can say the same thing about French or Spanish vis a vis Latin. But there is no universal progression from more complex inflectional morphology to less complex – it’s not like all languages will end up looking like Chinese! The changes go both ways over time, and agglutinative or inflectional (synthetic) languages arise out of simpler, more isolating forms just as often as the reverse.