Starting Greek in the New Testament is useful, fairly quick and healthy for both paid and unpaid Christian church leaders. If you've never learned to do a "declension" before, choose your teacher carefully.
The Greek of the Septuagint (LXX) is then readable with a lexicon like the excellent new one by J. Lust, E. Eynikel and K. Hauspie in two volumes (ISBN 3438051257 and 3438051267; one, not both, stocked at Amazon as of 02/27/2002).
However, you may already have discovered that if you want to read ancient authors in Greek outside the Bible, whether Jewish, pagan, Christian or philosopical, basic NT/LXX Greek is far from enough. For motivation to read in Greek and teach others to do so, read Hanson and Heath, Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom .
Go back to where the ancients started in Greek literature:
Homer! The Iliad and Odyssey will enjoyably help you better understand almost everything written later in Greek. You've already learned the basics. Homer's language is almost as easy as the New Testament's; the Athenian Golden Age literature is the hardest place to start. What's more, Homer was to Greek and Roman literature as Shakespeare and the King James Bible are to English literature.
Once you're confident in NT Greek, start right into Pharr and Wright's Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners for a quick, thorough introduction to Homer's Greek. Caution: get used to Homer's "ho, he, to" not being the definite article!
Enjoy reading the Iliad and Odyssey.
Yes, I said to enjoy the Iliad and Odyssey before going on. They're interesting! Most if not all Greek-language authors have assumed that their audiences knew these stories well.
Build your vocabulary using Owen and Goodspeed et al, Homeric Vocabularies: Greek and English Word List for the Study of Homer, to ease reading. The quickest dictionary to use is Autenreith et al, Homeric Dictionary for Schools and Colleges. The most authoritative Homeric lexicon in English is Cunliffe, Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, which is inexpensive and complete, but a bit hard on the eyes.
The Iliad is rather long; for the best 4900 lines, lots of language help and summaries of the other lines in English, use Benner's Selections from Homer's Iliad.
The Loeb editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek are
The Iliad: Volume I, Books 1-12 (Loeb Classical Library No. 170),
The Iliad: Volume II, Books 13-24 (Loeb Classical Library No. 171),
The Odyssey: Books 1-12 (The Loeb Classical Library, No 104)
and The Odyssey: Books 13-24 (Loeb Classical Library, No 105).
Step forward through ancient Greek literature.
Next, read selections from the Homeric Hymns and all of Hesiod, together in Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Loeb Classical Library #57). These are also in the Epic dialect. Read the Homeric Hymns selections first; you already have the vocabulary. Read Hesiod's "Works and Days" before his "Theogony."
To help you read any author after Homer and outside the New Testament, get Morwood's quick-reference grammar, Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek. (Smyth et al, Greek Grammar, is still the "gold standard" in English; even Morwood says so). Also, get a general dictionary or lexicon for classical Greek. The best pocket-sized one is Pocket Oxford Classical Greek Dictionary. For more authority and detail, you'll need to spend more money, either on the mid-sized, older Liddel-Scott An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon: Founded upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon or on the huge, newer Liddel-Scott-Jones A Greek-English Lexicon, Ninth Edition with a Revised Supplement.
Now you can move forward in Greek. The following list is based on comments by Hanson and Heath, and on Smyth's history of dialects and authors.
Herodotus' entertaining Ionic-dialect prose is now an easy step. Use Barbour's anthology, Selections from Herodotus, which has special language helps for students who started Greek in Homer.
After Herodotus, read selections from the earlier Ionic poet Archilochus before going on to the Athenians. Archilochus was a vile curmudgeon, so guard your heart, but pay attention to his insights into Greek culture.
Skip the lyric poets for now. You can come back to them later.
Attic, the dialect of classical Athenian literature, was a separate branch of Ionic. Skip Aeschylus for now; your easiest slide into Attic is through the poet-playwright Euripides. Read his "Bacchae" and "Suppliants."
After him, read his colleague Sophocles'"Ajax" (a.k.a. "Aias" or "Ajas") and "Antigone," in that order.
Then, read lots of Plato. His writing style was between "earlier" (harder) and "later" (easier).
After Plato, step back to some more challenging passages by Thucydides.
With all that background, you can get the jokes by the later-style comic poet-playwright Aristophanes. Also, read the orator Demosthenes' "First Philippic."
After him, read selections from Xenophon's "Anabasis." He's easy to read, but don't read him until now! Otherwise, you can't understand his attitude and nonstandard style as well as you need to.
After Xenophon, read some Aristotle.
Aristotle's student Alexander "the Great" led the multi-dialect army that conquered the empire that produced the Koine dialect by necessity. Koine soon replaced almost all other Greek dialects, in formal literature too.
Here are some Koine authors. Read selections from several:
Theophrastus,
Polybius,
Apollodorus (or was that Pseudo-A.?),
Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
Strabo,
Diodorus Siculus,
Diogenes Laertius,
Plutarch,
Philo,
Epictetus (Arrian's summaries of lectures & discussions)
Josephus,
Arrian,
Lucian
and Cassius Dio.
Now that you've read some New Testament and this list, all non-modern Greek is yours! |
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