I’ve been studying book 1 of Thucydides since last September. I’m working on ch. 135 now. I work on Thucydides every day, probably for about two hours. It seems to me slow going, primarily because there is so much dictionary work. I have the feeling that the new vocabulary isn’t sticking very well.
I’m happy studying Thucydides; it’s the first thing I do each day.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I finish Book 1.
I vary in my method. Sometimes I’m satisfied with a superficial knowledge of the grammar of a sentence; sometimes I try to understand every grammar issue that a sentence presents to me. My weakest points (that I know of) are verbs and pronouns.
Hello Hugh
Have you read any other Greek works/authors prior to Thucydides? Although I would like to start reading him myself I’m slightly put off by accounts of his ‘difficulty’ so I’m purposefully postponing my own reading of him until I have some other ‘easier’ prose authors (who I’m also interested in) under my belt (i.e. Xenophon, Plato, Lucian). I would definitely recommend Steadman where they’re available to save on dictionary time and help quickly acclimatise yourself into the grammar/style/vocabulary of an author.
Another writer I’d like to get to grips with is Libanius but after picking up his ‘Autobiography and selected letters’ I found my progress too slow (largely due to lack of parsing tools and grammar aids) so I put him down for now. Similar for Marcus Aurelius, though that was more due to vocab (and again lack of parsing tools). Or perhaps I’m just a bit too impatient…
Unadapted works I’ve studied: Plato, Apology, Euthyphro, Crito. New Testament, gospel of John, Acts of the Apostles. Lysias #1.
For the NT books, I found abundant help on the internet, in addition to an old NT lexicon I found in a bookstore. The great thing about NT lexicons is that they index every word-form that appears. This is a good reason, besides their historic importance, for reading some of the NT books, even if their subject matter does not appeal. I don’t know enough Greek to distinguish Attic from koine.
For the classical books noted above, Geoffrey Steadman’s commentaries provided much help. I’m considering going through them again, with special attention to grammar/syntax. Systematic study of grammar/syntax doesn’t appeal to me; but it’s interesting when it shows how to solve a concrete problem.
For classical works, the Attikos app is helpful. It’s free on the Apple app store, if you have an ipad or iphone. A student commentary on book 1 of Thucydides by H.D. Cameron is also very helpful.
If you do change your mind about directly studying the grammar I’d highly recommend John Taylor’s ‘Greek Beyond CGSE’. It’s very accessible though admittedly it might, given what you’ve read to date just serve to consolidate what you already know. Anyway, it’s where I began my studies (after ‘Greek to GCSE’ by the same author) and I feel it offered me a fairly decent springboard (actually I read it twice, several months apart). Any further learning of grammar I’ve achieved on a point by point basis by reading texts (quite a bit of Steadman) and referring to Smyth, Goodwin, Hadley or the Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (or asking for help on this wonderful forum). I’ve been half tempted to try reading some sections of the CGCG as it’s so clearly presented and explained, but I don’t think I’d retain enough of what I read to justify reading it. But perhaps I might try, whilst making notes…
Is it not difficult to keep track of the context when reading is so slow? I have the problem with Caesar (a much easier author!) that I understand the text sentence by sentence, even chapters, but since I’m reading in chunks I have only a faint idea of the bigger picture, the story or what to call it. Perhaps you are already familiar with the work in translation?
An excellent question! I think that whenever one reads material from outside one’s zone of reading mastery, then keeping track of context is difficult. But studying a new language intensifies that problem. For me, each sentence of Thucydides requires effort. Because of this, I must work to maintain the context from one sentence to the next. In that situation I lose the picture of the larger context. But my primary effort is to get better at Greek, not to evaluate Thucydides as a historical author. For this reason, I don’t worry about the larger context.
If larger context were important for me, I’d keep a notebook in English.
I frequently lose the context when Thucydides interrupts the narrative flow to give information the reader needs , or to give a narrative-flashback. Because I focus my attention so closely on the grammar, sentence-by-sentence, it may take me by surprise to understand that the sentence now under study is a transition back to the main narrative from such an interruption. I forgive myself for such lapses.
By the way, is there a traditional literary term for what in the movies is called a flashback?
Flashback. The narratological term is analepsis (ανάληψις), but I don’t think there’s really an ancient one. Ancient Greek literary critics speak of a work’s οικονομία, and may address matters of τάξις, Lat. dispositio, arrangement. (Of course there’s hysteron proteron, chronological inversion, but that’s more technical.) And there is actually a papyrus commentary on Thucydides which pays prominent attention to his organization of events.