Reading Greek: A World of Heroes : Selections from Homer, Herodotus and Sophocles (Reading Greek)

Rating:
Summary: Not the Best Reader for Intermediate Greek Students
Review: A World of Heroes is one of a number of readers published by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers for students who have finished learning the basics of the language. This volume contains selections from Homer (a book and a half of the Iliad, with the twenty-second book -the slaying of Hector- in its entirety), Herodotus (focusing mainly on Xerxes' invasion of Greece, particularly the battle of Thermopylai), as well as about 650 lines of Sophocles' Oidipous Tyrannos.

Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, I cannot recommend the reader to intermediate students, particularly to those learning the language on their own.

The first reason is that, although Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles wrote in different dialects, no material is presented that would familiarize the reader with the salient features of each dialect. Although the reader who has worked through the Reading Greek course published by the Joint Association of Classical Teachers will have been introduced to the basic features of the dialects, other students who come to the text having learnt only Attic Greek via the standard texts or Homeric Greek via Pharr's course will need a few pages explicating the basic peculiarities of the dialects.

The second reason is that the help offered with the texts is meagre at best. All that is given is a running vocabulary with only the most occasional explanation of difficult phrases. Even with Homer and Herodotus, who are easy authors, a running vocabulary barely suffices. However, with Sophocles, who is most definitely not an easy author, a running vocabulary without extensive explanatory notes is simply cruel.

In order to make reading Sophocles an even more nightmarish experience for the reader, the editors have made errors in printing the text. For example, although lines 435, 436, and lines 447-462 are spoken by Tereisias in every other edition of Oidipous Tyrannos, they are attributed to Oedipus in A World of Heroes. Having to check a translation or other edition of the play in the original to figure out who's really saying which lines only adds to the frustration.

If you have some prior experience in reading Homer and would like to read Book 22 of the Iliad quickly, then you might find A World of Heroes useful. Otherwise, it is not worth the purchase.
A bit of browsing around Amazon.com will lead to much better books for the intermediate student of Ancient Greek.

Rating:
Summary: An Alternative Idea
Review: I used the JACT Reading Greek course as a Freshman and have recommended it to many people wanting to learn Greek on their own. It focuses more on reading fluency than on syntax-worship (boring Smyth stuff like "dative of throwing by means of rocks") but doesn't neglect formal grammar, has a nice teach-yourself book to accompany it, and has lots of fun readings from Aristophanes.

In other words, unlike most teachers, I *liked* the Reading Greek course a lot. But the point of the course is to introduce you to basic vocabulary and especially the grammatical structure of the language and its peculiarities. Once you've done that by going through the first-year course, what you need is lots of practice with actual texts. That's what the JACT follow-up books like this offer, with "highlights" of different authors and running vocabulary, and if you find that the most helpful, more power too you.

Me personally though, I recommend using the Loeb parallel-text editions, whose texts are good and whose translations have tended over the last many years towards fairly strict literalness. The advantage there is that, even though you'll still want to look many of the words up to see what their central or most basic meaning is (independent of present context), you have a translation there specially designed to guide the language-learner. You won't sit there thinking, "did that say what I think it said?", or start joking with or pontificating to your fellows based on a wrong reading.

The classic second-year text for Greek is Xenophon's Anabasis, which is very repetitious but in a good way. Less conventional but just as appealing are the mythographer Apollodorus, the historian Diodorus Siculus (book 17 is on Alexander the Great), and of course Plato. The first book of Herodotus too, though not Attic, would be an excellent second-year text.

And if you're particularly eager to get into Homer (the best of all) and then the tragedians, I recommend Pharr's excellent Homeric Greek, which is meant as a first-year book but better for a second- or third-year one. He takes the whole first book of the Iliad, a paragraph or so at a time, with notes and full vocabulary. (You might even use it with the very literal Loeb translation by A. T. Murray.) Good luck!