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This introduction to Homer assumes no prior knowledge of Greek. The first six sections deal with the elements of grammar that are a necessary preliminary to study. From the seventh section onwards the course proceeds through the "Odyssey", Book Five, with grammatical explanations and exercises.
A Reading Course in Homeric Greek, Book One, Third Edition is a revised edition of the well respected text by Frs. Schoder and Horrigan. This text provides an introduction to Ancient Greek language as found in the Greek of Homer. Covering 120 lessons, readings from Homer begin after the first 10 lessons in the book. Honor work, appendices, and vocabularies are included, along with review exercises for each chapter with answers.
Adult learners of ancient Greek are often attracted to it by the prospect of being able to read in the original a particular author or genre. Greek philosophical writing and Plato in particular is often the target. This book’s material has been tried and tested by the author over the years with adult classes, and can be used as a course textbook, or as a handbook for self-teaching.Each of 25 sections is clearly laid out – with tabulation of Greek word-forms and grammar. Each includes ample exercises and practice in reading Greek sentences. Readings in later sections consist of passages of continuous Greek from Plato’s Meno, a typical Platonic dramatic dialogue.
Certain characteristic features of the Cypriot script - for example, its strategy for representing consonant sequences and elements of Cypriot Greek phonology - were transferred to the new alphabetic script. Proposing a Cypriot origin of the alphabet at the hands of previously literate adapters brings clarity to various problems of the alphabet, such as the Greek use of the Phoenician sibilant letters. The alphabet, rejected by the post-Bronze Age "Mycenaean" culture of Cyprus, was exported west to the Aegean, where it gained a foothold among a then illiterate Greek people emerging from the Dark Age. Woodard's study, a combination of philological and epigraphical investigation with linguistic theory, should be of interest to both scholars and students of classics, linguistics, and Near Eastern studies.
Since their composition almost 3,000 years ago the Homeric epics have lost none of their power to grip audiences and fire the imagination: with their stories of life and death, love and loss, war and peace they continue to speak to us at the deepest level about who we are across the span of generations. That being said, the world of Homer is in many ways distant from that in which we live today, with fundamental differences not only in language, social order, and religion, but in basic assumptions about the world and human nature. This volume offers a detailed yet accessible introduction to ancient Greek culture through the lens of Book One of the Odyssey, covering all of these aspects and more in a comprehensive Introduction designed to orient students in their studies of Greek literature and history. The full Greek text is included alongside a facing English translation which aims to reproduce as far as feasible the word order and sound play of the Greek original and is supplemented by a Glossary of Technical Terms and a full vocabulary keyed to the specific ways that words are used in Odyssey I. At the heart of the volume is a full-length line-by-line commentary, the first in English since the 1980s and updated to bring the latest scholarship to bear on the text: focusing on philological and linguistic issues, its close engagement with the original Greek yields insights that will be of use to scholars and advanced students as well as to those coming to the text for the first time.
