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.
How were the Greeks of the sixth century BC able to invent philosophy and tragedy? In this book Richard Seaford argues that a large part of the answer can be found in another momentous development, the invention and rapid spread of coinage, which produced the first ever thoroughly monetised society. By transforming social relations monetisation contributed to the ideas of the universe as an impersonal system, fundamental to Presocratic philosophy, and of the individual alienated from his own kin and from the gods, as found in tragedy.