Customer Reviews

Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is an excellent way to learn classical Greek. It takes you straight to unsimplified Homer within a few lessons and if you tough it out you can end up able to read Homeric Greek quite well. It works fine as a teach-yourself book. I had had a semester of Greek many years ago, but I was essentially starting from scratch.
Each lesson provides the vocabulary for a few lines of Book I of the Iliad and sends you to the reference grammar at the back of the book to learn the grammar incrementally. Early on there are some prose sentences in Homeric Greek to translate, but these go away in later lessons. Once you have finished the book you will have read all of Book I and will be ready to continue through all of Homer (with a lexicon). My only gripe is that a few more prose sentences to illustrate the grammar points by repetition would have helped a bit. Overall a great teach yourself book.

I learned ancient greek before I bought this book, so I can't speak to how well it serves someone just learning the language. Basically, I was a few years out of school and wanted to refresh my Greek. It really served me well, and actually gave me a better mastery of Homer's language than I ever had in college. I highly recommend it to anyone. I would say to beginners that Homeric Greek is the correct approach to learning ancient Greek: first, starting with Homer is a better foundation for learning later dialects than vice versa; second the Iliad (and Odyssey) introduces a beginner to characters, themes, phrases, and other allusions that fill nearly all later Greek literature to some extent; third, the Iliad is simply a damn good story that reads even better in the original. Expand your experience.

such as the one at greekgeek dot org. Also from time to time a new study group for this book will start, on the forum/message board of textkit dot com.

This book has helped me realize a lifelong dream-- to read Homer in the original Greek. This book is a reprint, with some revision, of a text used in the early part of the 20th century. It is not, as far as I can tell "watered down" and the vocabulary started with words that allow the learner to begin reading the Iliad almost immediately. The practice lessons are sentences that relate to the first lines of the Iliad. Both Greek->English and English-> Greek are provided. The first half of the book are the lessons and explanation, the last half is a grammar and usage. The lessons take the learner through the first book of the Iliad. You begin actually reading and translating the first five lines in Lesson XIII. The author also spends times explaining the scansion of the Iliad so that the learner can begin to "hear" the Iliad as well as read it. Although Attic Greek is different from Homeric Greek, I found Teach Yourself Ancient Greek: a Complete Course helpful in clarifying some of the explanations of the grammar and syntax. This book is also available from Amazon. In fact, I don't suppose I would be reading Greek now if I hadn't discovered Amazon (pardon the plug, but I'm hooked!). Finding the complete Iliad can be a challenge. I finally located it at Harvard University Press: Greek and English on facing pages. Join the new Renaissance made possible by the Internet and read the real Homer. It is, to use a common expression, awesome!

If you already own this book in its original form, you don't need to replace it with this edition. Despite the publisher's claim that this is a "thorough, up-to-date revision," it's hardly been touched. Not that this classic couldn't stand to be revised. As good as it is, I'm sure everyone who has used it can think of several ways to improve it. For one thing, an updated commentary and bibliography would be appreciated; the world of Homeric scholarship has certainly advanced since 1959. Yet instead of enlarging the commentary, Wright has actually reduced it. Out has gone, for instance, all the provocative parallels between episodes in the Iliad and the Old Testament. True, none of this shed light on Homeric grammar (Wright's stated but selectively applied criterion for what made the cut), but it made for good reading, especially for those with an interest in comparative religion and mythology. Gone, too, is the charming ditty that began, "Polyphloisboisterous Homer of old...." Why drain the color out of Pharr's notes this way? In its place, Wright has supplied grammatical headnotes to each chapter, ostensibly to help students along whose command of English grammar might be weak. In my estimation, though, these notes are too short to be useful--if your grammar is that poor, you're still going to need a teacher to explain everything. In some cases, Wright simply repeats, in condensed form, material that was already present in the grammar section.

Please don't get me wrong. This textbook is still a great way to learn Homeric Greek. (The initial learning curve is very steep, but by the time you make it to lesson thirty or so, it's smooth sailing to the end.) Evaluated as a revision, though, it falls far short of any standard I could name. IMHO, Wright does not deserve any credit for this edition. I do hope it was the publisher's decision, not his, to give his name top billing on the cover, as every classical scholar knows what happens to those guilty of hubris.

Alas, a major shortcoming of this particular book -- and quite a few otherwise superb Ancient Greek textbooks -- is the lack of an answer key for the included translation exercises. Some highly motivated learners cannot take a formal course or afford to pay a tutor. Most attempts to teach oneself ancient Greek from scratch probably ultimately fail, and the enterprise is already daunting (or foolhardy) enough without relinquishing the corrective feedback a live instructor -- or dead answer key -- provides. One almost suspects a conspiracy against would-be autodidacts on the part of the professional classics community!

Some may not like Pharr's approach to teaching a heavily-declined language like Greek. In each chapter he presents a set of common Homeric vocabulary words. Afterwards as an exercise the student must translate various sentence permutations containing the vocabulary from Greek-English and vice-versa. It may seem at times boring. However, it is effective. After the fourth chapter I began to easily recognize case endings with minimal difficulty. Very effective. I wish I had learned Latin in such a way.

If you're that all too rare individual who loves Homer and would like to learn how to read him in the original, then this is the book for you. Along with a quite thorough introduction to the grammar of Homeric Greek, Pharr's course includes the first book of the Iliad with an excellent beginner's commentary.

Some might be turned off by the fact that the lessons and the grammar are contained in two different sections. Others might be turned off by the fact that Pharr offers up the grammar in itsy bitsy portions from lesson to lesson. As someone who did find the grammatical spoonfeeding a turn-off, I was actually quite happy to have the grammar separate from the lessons, since it made it possible for me to customize the course to better suit my own learning style. Moreover, the grammar serves as an excellent reference tool until you decide to go whole hog and pick up Monro's Homeric Grammar.

Another reviewer was concerned that learners new to inflected languages might have some difficulty in understanding the functions of the cases. I had not had any experience with inflected languages prior to reading Pharr and did not find picking up the basic functions of the cases to be particularly difficult. If you do have difficulty, consulting the opening lessons of any Latin or Greek grammar should help clear away any confusion.

Also, if you find the work daunting at first and wonder whether or not it will be worth it or not, be reassured. Although it takes a while to gain a feel for Homer in the original, once you do you will come to see that Homer is infinitely more lovely in the original Greek than he is in even the best English translations. Bon voyage!

Actually, I think very highly of the text itself, and largely agree with the praise most reviewers have given to this book. However, the quality of Kessinger Publishing's reprint is so far below that of the University of Oklahoma edition of some years back that I strongly discourage purchasing it. What they are offering here is actually a poorly photocopied version of a marked-up used copy! Moreover, it does not include the revisions that John Wright made to update Clyde Pharr's original text for the Oklahoma edition. There is no point whatever in producing an unpresentable version of an out-of-date text. Students of Homeric Greek should seek out either a used edition of the Oklahoma edition (in reasonable shape) or a modern text.

Kessinger has played a useful role in reprinting otherwise unavailable books (e.g., an early novel of Dostoyevsky), but I cannot see any value in this edition at all. I am returning mine. I think the Amazon page should provide some warning about the quality of the book (as Kessinger actually does on the reverse side of the cover page).

A professor once told me that it takes ten years of constant work to become really good in an ancient language. After working through Pharr, I could and did read the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, with the help of a lexicon. They are much much better in Greek than in any translation I've ever read. (One must also practice reading Homer aloud.) With a little work (learning not to miss the elided vowels), one can then read classic Greek, such as Herodotus. It is a pity that schools no longer emphasize these languages and what they teach about the structure of language. It is great to see Pharr here, and I highly recommend it to the diligent. If one does not understand the concept of inflection, however, and have the patience to learn the Greek alphabet, Pharr may be a frustrating exercise. If you succeed, however, and memorize a few lines here and there, you'll never regret it. "En de pithoi oinoio...." Homer is so incredibly human and real.