After studying Lysias #1 for the second time, I decided to start Thucydides.
All the Greeks are hard for me, so Thucydides doesn’t seem that different. I have the Attikos IOS app on my ipad. This is a wonderful help. When I cannot form a plausible understanding for a sentence, I check the LCL translation against the Greek, if necessary word by word. This procedure often shows me unexpected secondary meanings for common words, as well as new-to-me idioms. Sometimes it hints at partly forgotten grammar topics. An example. “Where,” I asked myself, “is the noun for this definite article followed by an adjective?” A little reference work refreshed my memory on the point that a definite article can give substantive status to an adjective, just as in English. E. g. “the rich, the poor”, and so on.
I estimate that for one sentence in ten I can make a good meaning on my own, without dictionary and grammar work. Someone once asked the great cellist Pablo Casals why in his nineties he continued to practice. “Because,” he replied, “I think I’m improving.” An inspiring story for the student of a difficult subject.
Nice. I brought Lysias and Thucydides with me on vacation, but have only opened up Lysias so far, reading speeches I-IV yesterday and today. Thucydides has stayed in my bag oppressing me, but now I am getting very tired of these personal injury cases and will go on to him shortly if there’s no change soon.
I was probably at one in ten sentences a few years back. Once you hit one in five, you’re on the way to easy street.
Congrats on conquering Lysias 1! In the stuff I’m reading (Homer), the clever oratory is by far the hardest material to understand, so I would imagine Lysias is pretty hard.
As a personal landmark, I recently completed book 5 of the Iliad and am now plowing ahead with book 6. If and when I complete the Iliad, I’ve been thinking maybe I would try some Attic prose such as Xenophon, which I have an impression may be fun and relatively easy. Did Thucydides seem to you like he’d be more interesting/fun/easy than Xenophon?
That sounds great. If I could only use the vocab I knew on sight, without pre-loading my brain with per-page vocab, I think my success rate would be lower than that. With the vocab pre-loaded, I think my success rate is getting up to something like one sentence in three. I’m finding it rewarding that I’m now able to move through the material faster and with better comprehension. Sometimes I have to puzzle out the meaning of certain words and scribble trial translations in the margin before I figure out the meaning, but I’m hoping that that figuring-out process will continue to become less laborious.
For Ben Crowell:
Why Thucydides rather than Xenophon? By academic training I am a history guy, and Thucydides is regarded as an early model of the critical historian. So, I wanted to test that. Moreover, “long ago in a galaxy far away” I read Xenophon in English, a very enjoyable experience that I didn’t want to return to, a purely subjective response.
On vocabulary: I don’t pre-study vocabulary lists. I start with the first word of the next sentence. If I don’t know it, I look it up (Attikos makes that easy!), and I make a note. Then I go through the sentence that way. I try to identify the phrase divisions of the sentence, and relate them to my shaky grammatical knowledge. I don’t know if this procedure is faster or slower, but it matches my temperament. And I want to enjoy my study. I have been toiling away on Latin, and now Greek, for more than ten years, and I’ve enjoyed every minute. I just keep banging away.
For Joel: I am encouraged by your reports of your progress. Thanks!
To paraphrase Mark Twain on quitting smoking… Starting with Thucydides is the easiest thing in the world, I’ve done it a thousand times.
Anyway, congratulations on your resolve and good luck! Maybe I should have a(nother) go at Thucydides myself.
The Perseus presentation of Thucydides, Book I, includes commentaries by two different scholars, as well as three different English translations. I just looked there for some advice, and found something helpful.
I’m currently reading selections from Xenophon’s Hellenica in Cynthia Claxton’s Attica. Previously I have read the Anabasis, so I was surprised at how dense the prose is in the Hellenica. I imagine Xenophon is following Thucydides style while extending his history of Greece.
Like you, Hugh, I’m finding it a challenge to break down sentences into phrases. I often wonder, how do readers know when a new phrase is beginning? Claxton helps in pointing out that there is often parallelism in the phrasing – if the first phrase ends in a participle, the other phrases in the series are likely to end in participles as well. Unfortunately most of the time there is no parallelism.
Sometimes when Claxton explains how a sentence works, I’m left thinking “you’ve got to be kidding”. One example “We have a future less vivid condition within an indirect statement in which the protasis has been expressed by the participial phrase ἀντιπράττειν δέ τι ἐπιχειροῦτας. Remember that circumstantial participles may be taken conditionally.” I felt very comfortable with Ἐντεῦθεν ἐξελαύνει διὰ τῆς Συρίας σταθμοὺς ἐννέα παρσάγγας πεντήκοντα · καὶ ἀφικνοῦται πρὸς τὸν Ἀράξην ποταμόν. Maybe I should go back to reading the last three books of the Anabasis.
Mark
In my experience, Thucydides’ prose is the most difficult Greek I’ve ever read. The narrative, while not necessarily easy, isn’t impossibly difficult, but the speeches are on a whole different order of difficulty. In many cases there are differences of opinion among scholars as to grammatical structure and meaning.
And even the ancient Greeks found him difficult. His tortured style is a reflection of the horrible events of his narrative.
One thing to look out for: abstract nouns consisting of τό + neuter participle. Also, he often deliberately avoids parallelism.
Mark wrote:
Like you, Hugh, I’m finding it a challenge to break down sentences into phrases. I often wonder, how do readers know when a new phrase is beginning? Claxton helps in pointing out that there is often parallelism in the phrasing – if the first phrase ends in a participle, the other phrases in the series are likely to end in participles as well. Unfortunately most of the time there is no parallelism.
I don’t try to make my phrase breaks match an ideal phrase identification. I enter a line break in my handwritten copy of the sentence when I think it will help me understand the sentence. In the case of verbs I often put just the verb on the line, to leave room for annotating when necessary the complexities of verbs. My writing is meant to help me learn. I believe that, even if I never look again at a note, the mental focus required to put it in writing helps me learn.
Thank’s for those sobering comments, Bill.
I (re-)started the Thucydides and also picked up a digital copy of Hude’s Scholia in Thucydidem which has been proving a huge help.
Hellen in the scholia is claimed to be a grandson of Deucalion, not son. Deucalion it says had three sons, like Noah: Pronoos, Orestheus, and Marathonios. Pronoos was father of Hellen. Is there an equivalent in the Noah genealogy? Shem/Elam? I suppose that the traditional descent would be Japheth.