χαίρετε πάντες!

After 5 years of teaching students their way through Athenaze in an online environment, I’ve become very familiar with the book and its main narrative, and I’ve taught a lot of people all the way through both volumes now.

In 2025, as part of a number of other changes going on around SeumasU (which I’ll talk about in some other posts and in a video sometime coming up), I’m going to be streamlining the courses that currently comprise Greek 101-106.

The Old Way

Up to now, I have taught Athenaze over six terms of 10-weeks a-piece, for 60 hours of instruction. 101 gets through 6 chapters, and then each term goes through 5 more chapters. In the final 106 class, I take students up to ch 28 of the regular English edition, and then through a few sections from late in the Italian edition. The whole sequence takes 1.5 years to complete. I think this has been good, it does require students to put in some hours on their own to really succeed, but I’ve been pleased with the results given the constraints of the online format.

The New Way

In 2025, I’m going to streamline this sequence down to four terms (101-104), and increase the weekly session to 90 minutes. That does make the course move at a slightly more intense speed. Each term will cover half a volume. And I put it that way, because 101 will do chapters 1-8 and 102 will cover chapters 9-16. This aligns with the video support materials that I have available on Teachable (which can be purchased independently). 103 and 104 split up the contents of volume 2, along with the additional three sections from the Italian that I teach at the end.

Importantly, for each ‘quarter’, I have taken the main narrative text and divided it up across the ten weeks, so that I don’t have the current problem of having readings that are longer/shorter. The overall “words covered” stays more consistent each term, though you do cover more words in the second half.

This also means that, at the faster pace, you can cover all of Athenaze I and II in a single calendar year.

What this means if you’re an existing student

If you’re a current student in the following classes, I’ll be emailing all of you to offer some modifications (either a short bridging course, or delayed start) for adjusting to the new sequence.

What this means if you’re a prospective student

It means 2025 is a great year to take up Greek with me! I’ll be spending some of the Australian summer reviewing my past classes, and seeking to optimise and streamline my teaching for each part of this course, to hit the right bases at the right time, address the pressure points, and keep the class going in Greek. It means you can do the whole intro sequence in a single calendar year. And, even though the instructional time remains the same (60 hours throughout), it’s going to free me up a little to be working on some other great projects that I’ll be telling you about shortly!

Not the most inspiring title for a blog post, I know.

Yesterday I was beginning to explain grammatical case to some new students, and it’s the first time many of them have dealt with this concept at all, and my teaching method with them so far hasn’t really involved any explicit grammar instruction. But I thought that they needed some orientation to understand what was going on in the language that I was throwing at them. So we took a moment to discuss the idea of case, and here’s a bit of how I explain it. I introduced them to the Greek terms πτῶσις, εὐθεῖα, and αἰτιατική:

Basically, πτῶσις means that the endings of words tell you what jobs those words are doing in a sentence, and how they relate to each other. In English, that job is mostly done by word order. Word order tells you what words are doing what jobs. In Greek, the endings of words are telling you this information, and so word order doesn’t have to do that job, it can go and do other jobs.

And so far, we’ve mostly been using the εὐθεῖα and the αἰτιατική a bit. Each case is like a job, and so when you need a word to do a certain thing in a sentence, it needs to turn up in the right uniform.

The εὐθεῖα is the ‘straight’ case; it wears a button-up shirt and behaves itself. One of the main tasks for its job is being the subject of a sentence.

[Asked about what the accusative ‘means’]

Don’t try and think about what a πτῶσις ‘means’ in the abstract. It is possible to do that, to some extent. But it’s better, in my opinion, to think of each case as a collection of mostly related job-functions. So, one of the αἰτιατική’s jobs is to work with πρός to indicate motion towards. If that’s the job you’ve got to do, you call out the αἰτιατική. If you need a word to be the direct object of a verb, again you often call out the αἰτιατική. In that sense, the αἰτιατική names a uniform and a collection of functions that go with that job.

~~

I think this isn’t a bad route to go down, but perhaps I’ll have second-thoughts about it later. I’m trying to get away from over-abstracting cases, and teach them as a bundle of uses, but give a good metaphor that explains those bundles so that they have enough of a conceptual grasp to get on with meeting and encountering cases and their uses in our conversations.

A little while back I became involved in a discussion about whether it was okay to use/teach people to use the 2nd person negative aorist imperatives. E.g. is it okay to teach learners to say μὴ φάγε or similar.

This is the kind of thing that should be in a textbook, and frankly most textbooks are not good/clear on the topic. I say “should be”, because what you should be taught is that instead of using μὴ + 2nd person aorist imperative, you should use μὴ + 2nd person aorist subjunctive. Why? Because that is the overwhelming pattern of usage until you reach a still very minority of usage in late antiquity (3/4th century onwards).

But let’s look at some textbooks. Mounce, easy to bash:

3. μή plus the aorist imperative. Because it is a perfective imperative, the speaker is prohibiting an undefined action.

μὴ γνώτω ἡ ἀριστερά σου τί ποιεῖ ἡ δεξιά σου (Matt 6:3)
Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.[1]

Christophe Rico, Polis:

Uses negated aorist imperative in the opening of ch 5, p61. Doesn’t explain at any point that this isn’t attested usage.

I won’t keep going, but notice something very important about Mounce’s example. It’s 3^rd person. And he doesn’t discuss this, so you could easily walk away from his textbook thinking that μή + 2^nd person was fine and normal.

So, and particularly if you are trying to norm your usage to Koine/NT, you should look the data. If you run this search in Logos, “lemma.g:μή BEFORE 1 WORD morph.g:VA?M2” you should get 3 hits for the NT, all θη middle(-passives) imperatives. That suggests something to me about usage of the θη-middle more than I leap to a conclusion about μή + imperative.

For the LXX you get 24 results in 11 verses, but this requires investigation; firstly, some are separated by a comma, e.g. εἰ δὲ μή, ἀπαγγείλατέ in Gen 24:49, so that’s a false positive. Num 14:9 is the same μὴ φοβηθῆτε we see in the NT. The forms in -στῆτε are ambiguous and arguable subjunctive. But I will grant that there seem to be 7 genuine examples.

There are quite a few more 3^rd person negative aorist imperatives if you broaden out the search in that way.

But the main point I’m trying to make here is this: yes, there are a few examples in this corpus, but not many, and the general rule is not a matter of “I’m an Atticist and so I’m speaking ‘correct Greek’”; it’s “the data doesn’t support this being a typical usage”.[2]

And so then the question might come back, “okay, sure, but can we just teach them this and fix it later? Because it’s simpler and they haven’t learnt the subjunctive.”

From my perspective the answer to this question is no. If you’re in the “communicative approaches to ancient languages” sphere, and you are also trying to teach people who ultimately want to learn to read Greek texts with something like an intuitive feel for what’s standard and non-standard, then teaching them something at the outset that’s non-standard is a bad idea. Do I suspect 2^nd language learners of ancient Greek often came out with things like μὴ φάγε? Yes, they probably did. Did their patient teachers or sympathetic interlocutors then wince a little and say, “οὐκ οὕτως λέγεται, ἀλλὰ μὴ φάγῃς ? Probably.

We need attention to detail, a concern for corpus-normed usage, and a pedagogical head screwed on the right way, to get these things right. The only reason people think teaching the subjunctive instead is hard is because (i) courses delay the subjunctive to late in their sequence, (ii) the subjunctive is treated as spooky and hard by teachers and so students fear it before encountering it, (iii) we don’t sidestep the whole issue and teach μὴ φάγῃς as a usage first instead of a grammatical category.

[1] William D. Mounce, Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar, ed. Verlyn D. Verbrugge and Christopher A. Beetham, Fourth Edition. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 385.

[2] (I did run a TLG search through their whole corpus for μή + 2^nd person aorist imperative, but the parsing there is more problematic, and it’s harder to sort through the results).

and a sneak peak at plans for 2025..

The introductory sequence of Greek is six-courses covering Athenaze books 1 and 2. Next term I’m offering:

101, 102, 103, 104, 106

For Greek advanced courses, we’ll be reading Thucydides book 1.

For Latin, I am delighted to offer a reading course sampling parts of Castellio’s Latin Bible, and dive into Petrarch’s Letters.

Lastly, the in-person Greek class in Sydney is going ahead. IT’s an unparalleled opportunity to learn from me in the same room!

And 2025?

In 2025 I am going to do a few things differently.

Firstly, I have in mind to restructure some of my calendar and offerings. I’ll be running an introductory Latin cohort (101-104) through the year, starting in February. I’ll be simplifying and reducing the advanced courses.

Secondly, and in the opposite direction, I plan to finally offer two classes (one Greek, one Latin) running on Sydney evening time. This will be more accessible for people in Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of Asia.

Thirdly, I’ll be looking at more ways to develop asynchronous, ancillary, and other learning materials that can be used independently and inter-dependently. I have been doing some more writing in Greek to this end, and will have more details as the project develops.

Just to let my readers know that I now have some more slots available for individual 1-to-1 tutoring. If you’d like to accelerate your Latin or Ancient Greek studies, or work on a particular text or area or skill-set, I’m open to finding a time that works for us, and working on whatever suits you!

Fill out the contact form on this page, and I’ll be in touch

It’s been a very long time since I’ve taught Greek in-person. Before the coronavirus. But it’s going to happen.

When? Monday nights, 7:30pm-9:30pm, for 10 weeks starting October 14th.

Where? Lane Cove Anglican Church, Sydney, Australia.

(please don’t relocate to Australia for my classes)

How much? $300 AUD (yes, that is a very good deal for 20hrs of live Ancient Greek instruction)

What will this course cover?

This course is designed for people who (a) have no experience with Ancient Greek at all, or (b) have limited or no experience with spoken Ancient Greek. We will do a lot of aural-oral work, speaking and listening, interacting with objects and the environment as much as possible. I will provide some pre-class materials to teach the alphabet, and we’ll work on reading from my Galilaiathen reader, as a preparation towards New Testament Greek or a sideways entry into Athenaze. This course will have more of a Koine spin than some of my other classes. We’ll also be utilising material from ἕν, δύο, τρία. And it will be a lot of fun.

How do I sign up for this?

Fill out the contact form below, or email me directly. I’ll follow up with you from then.

Yes, places are limited (because I am a finite teacher).

It’s time for a new round of classes here at SeumasU!

This term I have the usual gambit of introductory Greek, not so much Latin (sorry! it’s a demand issue not a supply one), and then some nice upper courses.

The introductory sequence of Greek is six-courses covering Athenaze books 1 and 2. Next term I’m offering

101 (chs 1-6), 102 (chs 7-12), 103 (chs 13-16), and 105 (chs 23-26)

For other options in Greek, I’ve got:

Greek 234: Gospel acc. to St Matthew, chs 1-10.

This is a slightly hybrid class, as in I don’t mind if you jump in with okay-Greek but not-so-much spoken experience, and I’ll just accommodate the class to have more-or-less English as needed. So, if you want to read New Testament Greek and get an increasing dose of spoken-ancient-Greek, this the right entry point.

Greek 332: Boethius in Greek (!)

I’ve long wanted to run a class on a text in the ‘wrong’ language, e.g. Latin text in Greek or Greek text in Latin. So here’s me realising a dream. We’re going to read some of the later sections of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae, but in Planudes’ Greek translation. It’s going to be fun, challenging, and memorable.

Greek 299: Patristics Reading Group

My ongoing attempt to get-off-the-ground and sustain a discount-price, no-you-don’t-need-to-speak-Greek, ‘read-and-translate’ group reading Patristic texts. Last term we read Maximus, which was wonderful. I’m thinking of a Chrysostom sermon this coming term.

What about Latin??

Latin 234: Gospel acc. to St Matthew, chs 11-20

I figured if I was going to read ten chapters in Greek, I may as well read ten in Latin. Also the Vulgate is fun, and relatively easy as an intermediate text.

Latin 237: John Cassian, Institutes

Let’s read monastic Latin about the vices together, and discuss it in Latin. Okay, that’s my idea of fun. Maybe it’s yours too.

Students of mine will know my predilection to call the θη forms of the so-called ‘aorist passive’ instead ‘theta-eta middles’. In today’s post, I want to explore how this understanding of the middle helps us make better sense of biblical texts.

In Mark 16:6 we read:

6 ὁ δὲ λέγει αὐταῖς· μὴ ἐκθαμβεῖσθε. Ἰησοῦν ζητεῖτε τὸν Ναζαρηνὸν τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον· ἠγέρθη, οὐκ ἔστιν ὧδε·

Is ἠγέρθη best translated ‘he is risen’, or ‘he was raised’, or something else? Before you can answer a translation question, you need to answer a meaning question. What is ἠγέρθη telling us?

The verb ἐγείρω overlaps pretty well with English expressions for ‘get someone up’. That covers both a person moving from a lying position to a standing position, and from being asleep to being awake. Just as ‘get your brother up’ might mean ‘go and wake him’ or ’cause him to stand up’.

And for this reason, when you encounter middle forms of this verb, they fall into the category of direct reflexivity that involves change in body posture. The middle voice indicates the change in body posture, regardless of the agent.

That’s why, for instance, the θη middle participle forms in the opening of Matthew, ἐγερθεὶς … ὁ Ἰωσήφ are most naturally read as Joseph getting up from sleep, without supposing or caring whether he was woken by an external cause or not. Similarly at the end of Matthew, 26:36, it’s Jesus’ disciples who get up, no need to presume any external agent (when Jesus says to them, ἐγείρεσθε ἄγωμεν)

What you need to grasp at this point is that it’s perfectly normal Greek to use ἠγέρθη in the middle and mean something like “X got up”. Just like I could say to you, “I got up at 6 o’clock this morning”.

ἐγείρω is used in reference to Jesus getting up from the dead, and sometimes with a clear agent – in the active. Acts 10:40 τοῦτον ὁ θεὸς ἤγειρεν, Acts 130:30, 13:37 similarly. We find similar structures through the epistles.

We nowhere (I can see) find an expression of Jesus raising himself, if we’re looking for an explicit reflexive structure, e.g. like ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἑαυτὸν ἤγειρε. Nor should we expect one. That’s the kind of idea perfectly expressed by ἠγέρθη.

Which is why, if we return to Mark 16, no point is being made about the agent or cause of Jesus’ getting-up. It’s the fact that he’s gone from lying in the grave, dead, to being upright, awake, and alive, that is in view. The middle doesn’t need an agent, and doesn’t have to imply one. It leaves it ambiguous. Theologically, we might say both that God raised him from the dead, and that Jesus arose. But the middle θη just tells us that he got up, that he’s up!

I just want to float the idea here of something I have tried more than once to get up and running, but never really gotten the uptake. But essentially I would really love to get a reading-group / masterclass going that read Greek Patristic texts. It’s hard work once you’re out of the beginner stage, and even the intermediate stage, to go on and work through original texts, and it’s much more fun, not to mention advantageous, to do so together. My thoughts at this stage are that this would not be run as a communicative, in-Greek class; that it would be a regular, standing 60 or 90min class, and that I’d try to keep the price quite low to reduce the barrier to entry, and to encourage it to be more than just me and one other person.

If this would interest you, please do get in touch!

I recently was interviewed by Fletcher Hardison on his podcast series “Greeking Out”, which you can listen to here. Fletcher did a previous interview with me about 4.5 years ago, so it makes interesting reflection on what’s changed in my life, and the Greek-educational space, in that time.

I know it’s been quiet on the blog side of this site for a while. Sorry about that!

As usual, a new raft of SeumasU courses is slated to start at the end of January, more about that in a second.

In-person classes

In the second half of 2024, I am looking at teaching Greek in-person in Sydney. As great as teaching over the internet is, and as proud as I am of all I’ve managed to accomplish in that space, I have a whole sleeve worth of tricks and techniques and things that I can do in real space, that I cannot do over zoom. So, if you’re interested in learning Greek in person with me, from about July onwards, and you live in Sydney, get in touch with the contact form at the end of this post.

2024 Classes – Term 1

Introductory sequence Athenaze classes:

Greek 101, 102, 103, 105

Greek 241: James and 1 Peter – A hybrid Greek/English class in which we’ll read and discuss these two New Testament texts.

Greek 276: Plato’s Apology – In this class we’ll read and discuss (in Ancient Greek), Plato’s Apology of Socrates. A more challenging text and all in Greek.

Introductory sequence Latin classes with LLPSI:

Latin 101, 103

Latin 236: Heloise and Abelard – In which we’ll be reading and discussing their letters, all in Latin.

I have a small amount of space for students interested in private tuition, or to put on a course to meet student-demand, if you want to suggest something.

Well, we are back with a new set of classes beginning on October 8th. I have a relatively limited range of classes for the upcoming term, but I hope there’s something you will like and enjoy. New 101 cohorts in Latin and Greek will start in the new year, and I am already planning courses for 2024 (but also open to suggestions – including the return of popular things like composition classes, conversation classes, and RPGs)

Latin

Latin 102: A continuing LGPSI class, commencing at chapter 12.

Latin 205: Cicero’s De Amicitia. We’ll be reading the whole thing.

Greek

Greek 102: A continuing Athenaze class, commencing at chapter 7.

Greek 104: A continuing Athenaze class, commencing at chapter 17.

Greek 106: A continuing Athenaze class, commencing at chapter 27.

Greek 141: A class using my Galilaiathen reader, suitable for those with at least a little Greek. This class also runs at a considerable discount!

Greek 229: A mixed English/Greek class reading Acts of the Apostles

Greek 276: Aristotle, Nic Eth 8: An int-adv class in which we’ll read and discuss Aristotle on friendship.

I’ve been reading through Plato’s Lysis this teaching term, and it’s a great deal of fun, and quite interesting. One of the things I’ve noted is the difficulty we have of teasing out two senses of φίλος, and I feel like Socrates is exploiting this at times.

A quick visit to the lexicon, or reading some Ancient Greek literature, will acquaint you with:

(1) φίλος – a substantive noun that means “friend”

(2) φίλος, η, ον – an adjective that, esp with a dative, means “dear to”

Now, those are two different concepts, but they are intertwined in the word φίλος – Greek doesn’t require you to disambiguate and in some cases doesn’t provide the means to disambiguate. Notably in one part of the dialogue (212b and following), Socrates is arguably trying to do some disambiguation work. Who is the φίλος? The one who loves (φιλῶν) or the one who is loved (φιλούμενος). And here the ambiguity rears its head. We would say, in English, that a person who loves another with φιλία is being or acting as a friend to them, even if they don’t reciprocate. That is, they aren’t friends, but one is acting with friendship towards the other. So ὁ φιλῶν is the φίλος. On the other hand, we would say that the person so-loved (φιλούμενος) is held dear to the one so loving them (φιλῶν), so it is the φιλούμενος that is the φίλος.

Socrates’ argument is subtle, and I think the Lysis is a difficult text philosophically in many ways, but he even rejects the idea that mutual affection (where each friend also loves the other) is a workable unitary account of friendship, because then those that love things that can’t love them back, car-lovers, for instance, are not actually φίλοι to cars.

But I’m not actually here today to talk about friendship, though it’s a topic I have a lot to say about. I’m interested in the ambiguity of language. And that is, how impossible it is for us to decide whether Socrates, or Plato, thought of the two senses of φίλος as distinct or not. I’m not saying that they could or not could not distinguish those ideas, clearly they could. Because of the whole φιλῶν v. φιλούμενος construction! But when they heard φίλος did they stop and think, “Oh, there’s a subjective and an objective value to this word that I must stop and disambiguate here”, or did they always functionally just hear φίλος and think φίλος in a way that makes it difficult to pull the two apart.

I realise I’m dangerously close to Sapir-Whorf grounds, but indulge me for a second. Some languages, e.g. Mongolian, distinguish light blue and dark blue. English does not. So in Mongolian you must specify – are you talking about light blue or dark blue? Ambiguity is not an option. In English, I can just talk about blue. I can pull apart blue into light blue and dark blue, but I don’t have to. Which means I have the mental option to not think about a particular shade as ‘ambiguous’, because I don’t perceive any ambiguity – I just didn’t specify because specification wasn’t required.

Is that the case with φίλος – not that specification is impossible, but there just isn’t a perception that specification is needed, except when one decides that one does want to carve up the terrain, and make specifications that aren’t inherent to the word itself? And is Socrates exploiting that a little in the dialogue?

Hi all! I know we have been for the most part quiet on this blog. Various projects continue to tick away. But this post is to let you know about the upcoming classes I’ll be teaching, including new beginner cohorts for Greek and Latin. These start the week of July 16th.

If you want to hear about the experiences of various students, I have a range of interviews on my youtube channel.

I don’t very often commence Latin classes, but here’s a couple of testimonies from my current cohort:

“Latin 101 gave me confidence in navigating the first bit of Familia Romana, which can be overwhelming. Seumas has interactive presentations and questions for students that tell you what to focus on. It really helped me with focusing on what I needed to learn in my first stages of tackling Latin.” – Elizabeth H.

“In his Latin classes, magister Macdonald creates a lively, interactive, collaborative atmosphere among his students that encourages participation. You are not afraid to try or to make a mistake (or more!). Prepare to have fun and laughs while learning Latin. He is also very knowledgeable about additional resources available for learning Latin.” – Stephanie Y.

Latin

Latin 101: A new beginners’ Latin class starting at Familia Romana chapter 1

Latin 104: This class will be finishing off Familia Romana‘s last 5 chapters, and then dipping into some of Ørberg’s Sermones Romani by way of a transitional text.

Latin 236: Augustine, Confessions Book IV. This intermediate class will be reading and discussing Augustine’s famous text in Latin.

Greek

Greek 101: A new beginners’ Greek class starting with Athenaze chapter 1.

Greek 103: A continuing Athenaze class, commencing at chapter 12.

Greek 105: A continuing Athenaze class, commencing at chapter 22.

Greek 142: A continuing reading class using the JACT Reading Greek book.

Greek 228: A mixed English/Greek class reading Acts of the Apostles

Greek 275: Plato’s Lysis: An intermediate class in which we’ll read and discuss this Platonic dialogue on Friendship, in Greek.

Greek 299: Greek Patristics. A non-immersive ‘read and translate’ class in which we are reading Athanasius.

It’s perhaps the trickiest phrase (at least language-wise) in the Lord’s Prayer:

τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον  (Mt 6:11.)

And what on earth does ἐπιούσιον mean? It’s not at all helped by the fact that this word only turns up in texts here, and then in commentaries on this text by later Greek-writing authors. That’s not to say that Jesus or the gospel writers coined it, just that here’s the first and really only place it’s used as an adjective.

The commentators offer up three main positions:

1. That it forms from ἐπί + οὐσία, very woodenly ‘upon’ + ‘substance’. That’s where Latin versions ended up with supersubstantialem which is at least equally, if not more, opaque, and very liable to heading down a transubstantion line of thinking. But more concretely it would/could still mean “for [our] subsistence”
2. That it comes from ἐπί + οὖσα (εἶναι “to be”), with ‘day’ understood. That it, it’s bread “for the day that is”, from which we get the regular translation “today’s bread”.
3. That it comes from ἐπί + οὖσα but from “to go” (ἰέναι) rather than “to be”, again with ‘day’ understood. So then it’s ‘the day that is coming’.

That third usage is found with the participle ἐπιούση which is found in Acts 7.26, 16.11, 20.15, and 21.18, in all four instances referring to the oncoming day (with the word ‘day’ omitted in three of these four instances). It’s very difficult though to decide on strict language grounds which of these explanations is the best for the situation, although on semantic grounds they tend to converge in meaning and seem to be borne out by, e.g. Syriac and Latin (just not Jerome) translations.

Whether ἐπιούση would refer to tomorrow or today of course depends on when you say it – in the evening or night, or even morning, it likely refers to the coming day; in the daytime itself, to the following day. In either case though we are talking about a socio-historical setting in which material needs and the provision of food generally took place on a day-to-day basis, so that getting the oncoming day’s food is a pressing concern. Hence my suggestion for a slightly different translation, “bread for the oncoming day”, which sidesteps whether it’s today or tomorrow, but keeps the sense of immediate need for bread each day, day by day.

ΛΟΓΟΣ : ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΓΛΩΣΣΑ ΑΥΤΟΕΙΚΟΝΟΓΡΑΦΗΜΕΝΗ (Logos. Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata)

by Santiago Carbonell Martínez

ISBN: 978-84-945346-6-9

(Available from Libreria Aurea. I purchased mine via amazon.es)

Note: there is a resource site with a large number of auxiliary resources, which I have not reviewed here. But here is the link:
https://sites.google.com/educarex.es/logos

Review

To write an “LGPSI” is no easy feat. I should know, I’ve been at it for more years than I care to mention. But Santiago Carbonell Martínez has done so, and put it in print, so we all better sit up and pay attention. So, in this review I offer my thoughts, observations, reflections. Below the main review you’ll find some ‘reading notes’ – things I noted in each chapter, and then a few errata (I didn’t go looking for mistakes, but I noted a few along the way).

The book is 32 chapters long, a solid 382 pages. Introduction and publication material is an admixture of Latin, Greek, Spanish, and English.

With any book like this, there are inevitably going to be comparisons with Ørberg’s LLPSI, and I won’t shy away from making some of those too. The first difficulty is, of course, that a printed Greek text is not transparently pronounceable to a reader the way that a Latin text putatively is. I say putatively, because in no way does the autodidact picking up Familia Romana know how to properly pronounce Latin either, but Ørberg wasn’t quite so concerned with that since he (ὅσον οἶδα) was writing a textbook for leaners to learn to read.

ΛΟΓΟΣ opts for a colour-coded introductory few pages where sounds and Greek letters are presented with two pronunciations (‘historic’ and ‘Erasmian’; I was going to presume they mean what I would term ‘reconstructed Attic’ and ‘contemporary European Erasmian’, but ‘historic’ looks a lot more like modern Greek pronunciation, and so the choice to call that ἱστορική is itself an interesting one), with a simplified rendering of those sounds in the Latin alphabet.

I don’t presume that ΛΟΓΟΣ actually was written for autodidacts working completely solo, so I am prepared to grant that the following pages on accents and breathings and pronunciation are all useful tools especially with a teacher (or supporting audio or similar) taking a student through what these sound like in practice. I will say that I am a little disappointed at the decision not to mark long ᾱ, ῑ, ῡ. That is an incredibly helpful practice found in Athenaze, and while students will not normally read texts with those vowels marked long, in a learner’s text I consider it almost as valuable as marking macrons in Latin.

Chapter 1 begins with ‘gods, humans, and beasts’, which is a nice and reasonable change from a map of Europe. It also orients the cultural setting of this text – we are firmly here with a book that aims at transmitting classical Greek cultural and historical context. This will be welcome to anyone looking to use this book in a school setting, where classical Greek is primarily tied to classical Greece (I mention this because there is so much written in various forms of Greek from the 8^th century BCE to the 15^th CE which is not directly bound up in, e.g., 5^th century Athens, that it’s perfectly possible and reasonable to centre one’s historical and cultural orientations elsewhere).

One of the challenges of any book like this is introducing the meaning of words. It’s clear enough from a reader’s knowledge of the world, who these Greek gods and these people; the illustrations are well done, illustrative but not intrusive. I’m not quite so convinced that introducgion θηρίον with examples that are all mythological creatures was the best choice, because it suggests to me that θηρίον implies mythological, a semantic mapping that will need to be modified latter.

The grammatical section that ends the chapter is very Ørbergian – a clear and concise precis of the grammar presented in Greek, then three exercises in series: cloze with endings, cloze with words, and then sentence-type questions.

One of the things I have noticed after reading a fair bit is that a lot of the chapters are thematically organised, which is fine, that works better in an LGPSI style book because those conceptually related words are working in synergy with the structures and the illustrations. So, it’s far better than being given a list of related words. BUT, unlike LLPSI, LOGOS does not really get a story going until far later in the book, and you are not getting the slow, drip-fed, skilful repetition and reintroduction of vocabulary between chapters, which Ørberg really was a master at.

Also, as you read on, there appear more and more vocabulary items (i.e., new words), probably a too great volume. At various points there were words I’ve never encountered before (which, to be fair, is true of any textbook I read), but some of these are quite rare, unusual, or just odd. In the later chapters, a number of words appear without really being adequately explained, illustrated, or marginalised, so that the reader is left to either wonder what they mean, or resort to a lexicon.

Coverage: The book covers a fair amount of ‘the grammar’ you’d expect from a ‘complete course’. I put those in quotation marks because they are problematic ideas. But, for instance, the book does not appear to cover the optative mood at all. It doesn’t appear to really get into conditionals, and it’s treatment of the subjunctive is limited. These are all things that you’d expect in a ‘complete 1^st year college sequence’, a notional entity if ever. To be fair, there are things Athenaze never covers or even hints at – the dual, 3^rd person imperatives, etc.. And even if you push a book to ‘cover’ them, well, how well can you master something in the second last chapter of a textbook? This is a flaw of LLPSI itself – Familia Romana delays the subjunctive to very late and then you’re dealing with a whole lot of things in chs 31-34 that you don’t get the chance to solidify them. So, I’m not convinced that pushing LOGOS out with another 3-4 chapters would solve this problem. There’s plenty in here, e.g., to keep a 3-4 year sequence in schools busy with.

Word Count: So, it’s a little difficult to accurately count the words in a text like this. I employed the following method – avg of 7 words a line, only counting the main text, gives 26187 words for the whole main text. I suspect that might be a little generous, but I’m not going to manually count it. The main narrative line of the English 3^rd edition of Athenaze comes out at 17488, so on that calculation LOGOS seems longer. I don’t have an accurate number for all of the Italian double volume of Athenaze, but given the vast amount of extra Greek text, it would dwarf both these. My whole point in counting though was to get and idea, and give you an idea, of how much text is here. Would that we had dozens of variously designed Greek textbooks and readers with around 20k words or so.

Is this an Athenaze-killer? (Ask those who are used to hearing that Athenaze is the best textbook that at least can be molded to a communicative approach, even if Athenaze leaves much to be desired) – Maybe? I can’t say for sure. Honestly, I’d be happy to teach from LOGOS, and I’d be happy to assign it for students to read from the beginning. I don’t plan to shift my whole teaching program over to using LOGOS as its basis though, but partly that’s because I’m very familiar and invested in Athenaze at this stage.

Is this really the fabled LGPSI that we’ve all long awaited? – Almost (?). Honestly, this is a really well written text that carries the spirit of Ørberg’s LLPSI deep in its DNA. So much of the book echoes, appropriately, its Latin predecessor, and its use of repetition, attention to marginal notes, illustrations, scope and sequence, is well-laid out, and remains “Greek-only”. It does fall short, though. There are numerous points that a learner in this book is going to remain confused, and just cannot figure out what’s going on from within the text itself. The more you read LLPSI, the more you see the careful genius of Ørberg at so many points. This includes, not the least, his good efforts at introducing words  and then bringing them back into the narrative later on. LOGOS suffers from thematic units which introduce a lot of words that you won’t meet again. And it suffers from inconsistent narrative – I think this would be a stronger book if the narrative elements carried more of the book, and we had more of a story. Again, comparisons are inevitable and so Familia Romana achieves a huge amount of story in a putative 3 day period, interweaving it with some thematic discourses, but LOGOS sets aside its nascent story to do thematic work, and alternates more than interweaves. Athenaze, of course, maintains narrative steam throughout (but then lacks some important thematic parts). JACT purports to have a narrative thread but quickly abandons it in place of extensive adaptations from ancient sources.

Final assessment: LOGOS is great. It’s a tremendous achievement, and the author and all the other contributors deserve incredible respect and thanks from the broader community of ancient Greek teachers, students, speakers, and devotees. It has its flaws, and I think I’ve been frank and clear about pointing out where I see them above (and below), but none of this should take away from the simple fact that here is an introductory textbook written all in Greek, suitable for students from zero, which is mostly per-se-illustrata, and will carry them very far in their early stages.

Post-Script: Hey, Seumas, what does this mean for your LGPSI? Well, I am still at work on that, even if you haven’t seen much public progress. It’s both an encouragement to me to keep at work, and a signpost of sorts. There are things here that I don’t want to do, and that’s because my vision of LGPSI is different, both pedagogically and content-wise. There are things here that I probably do want to do, but want to do differently, precisely because we need a lot more Greek content for beginners. So, onwards with my own LGPSI (which, to be fair, probably needs its own name someday).

Reading Notes

Chapter 2: ΘΕΟΙ, ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΙ ΚΑΙ ΘΗΡΙΑ

I’m not entirely sold on the distinctions they introduce in chapter 2 between παιδίον καὶ παῖς, νεανίας, κόρη. That is, I think they are suggesting stricter age distinctions than those words will bear.

Chapter 3: ΑΝΔΡΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΕΣ

δύο Ἑλληνικὰ γράμματά εἰσιν – choice to use plural noun with plural neuter subject. Was this a pedagogical choice?

Λατινικός – this is not a well attested adjective; I presume it was used to distinguish ‘Roman’ and ‘Latin’, but ὅσον οἶδα it would have been more correct to stick to Ῥωμαϊκός.

κεφαλαῖον – I don’t know if this term can be used in the grammatical sense of a ‘capital’ letter.

Chapter 4: ΖΩΙΑ

I don’t mind learning ἄναιμα and ἔναιμα, just wasn’t quite sure those were words I needed to learn. In fact, similarly throughout this chapter there are a lot of terms useful for classifying different types of animals. I suppose they are all relatively understandable. I just felt stuck in Intro to Natural Philosophy 101.

We are given the word τέρας here to get a handle on mythological creatures.

Chapter 5: Ο ΟΙΚΟΣ

Very much like LLPSI ch 4, introducing family relations including slaves.

Chapter 6: Ο ΚΟΣΜΟΣ

I appreciate the use of some ancient sources here, e.g. the 5 planets, the Hekataios reference to 3 continents. I’d personally like to see a modern complement to this chapter, with 8 (dare we still say 9) planets, and 7 continents, etc., still in AG.

Chapter 7: Ο ΜΥΘΟΣ

This chapter is a really nice treatment of the gods and their parentage, with good repetitive structures and also you just get a good overview of lots of Greek gods.

Chapter 8: ΕΥΡΩΠΗ

This is Logos’s ‘geography’ chapter. We’re better prepared for it having done 7 prior chapters. It reads very much like LLPSI 1, and that’s fine. We all probably need a chapter like this. I certainly wrote one.

Chapter 9: ΕΛΛΑΣ

The illustration on this page suffers from not being as clear and crisp as one might like for a map of Greece and its islands.

This is the first chapter I note a neuter plural noun with a singular verb.

Chapter 10: Η ΟΙΚΙΑ

Finally we return to the family. This chapter is simple, repetitive, but fun. The repeated structures work well language-wise, but following the ‘action’ is difficult. Line 101 probably needs improvement grammatically, it’s unclear who the subject of τρέχει καὶ πέτεται is – presumably Ὑπατία, but it needs better syntax.

Chapter 11: Ω ΖΕΥ! Ω ΗΡΑ!

νίζω : interesting choice of word. Nothing wrong with it, just interesting.

Interesting to choose προσεύχομαι in preference to εὔχομαι.

Not sure what I think of ὅρᾱ.. πρὸς τὸν οἶκον μου. Think I’d prefer βλέπε here. I suppose it’s okay.

l 23 : I’m not sure φέρω is typically or properly used with living persons as the object. I’ve been told that it’s not typically used with living persons, and that the saying ἄγεται μὲν γὰρ τὰ ἔμψυχα, φέρεται δὲ τὰ ἄψυχα bears upon this, attested in ancient grammarians. So, look, could you use φέρω to ‘get’ someone? Maybe, but I don’t think this is exemplifying “ideal Greek for beginners”.

Chapter 12: Η ΥΠΑΤΙΑ

I’m not convinced that μέγας and μῑκρός should be used as adjectives for siblings unless perhaps describing physical or metaphorical stature.

l.77-78 . I think οὐκέτι would be better here for connecting the sense of χήρα

Chapter 13: Η ΤΡΟΦΗ

I feel like we are skimming over the fact that children often did drink wine.

Chapter 14: Ο ΚΥΚΛΩΨ

Is it an ancient Greek textbook if there isn’t a Cyclops episode? I’m not sure I needed to learn so many new vocabulary items in the first paragraph, like οὐρητικός (diuretic), πεπτικός (digestive), διάπυρος (inflamed), ἡδύποτος (pleasant to drink), τρόφιμος (nourishing), or that these would be applied (perhaps with dubious accuracy) to red and white wine.

There’s more vocabulary in this chapter that is not ‘per se illustrata’ and probably does require an explanation.

Also, we’re introduced to the imperfect tense, without a good and clear set-up like Ørberg used. I’m not sure there are any temporal indicators to tell the reader they are now in the past.

πέριξ ? really?

ὑπὸ is used with the accusative, which I feel is a more Koine usage. But I prefer the use of the middle κρύπτομαι here to Athenaze’s reflexives.

Unsure we needed to learn βυθίζω.

Chapter 15: ΚΑΘ’ ΟΔΟΝ

line 18: I’m not sure why you wouldn’t gloss χαμαί with ἐπὶ τῇ γῇ or ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς instead of ἐν τῇ γῇ.

Chapter 16: Η ΑΓΟΡΑ

Is χορτοφάγος really the right word to describe Kallirroe? I presume this is meant to mean that she is a vegetarian, not that she literally is a grass-eater. The word is attested 6 times in TLG, so there’s a bit of a question here about vocabulary choice.

Unsure of the choice not to decline δύο. Certainly that is true in some dialects, but this feeds into my question of ‘which dialect or period is this book aiming at?’

Chapter 17: ΤΑ ΜΕΡΗ ΤΟΥ ΣΩΜΑΤΟΣ

So, when Ørberg does this section (human body parts), he uses the dying Gaul statue and places a fig leaf over the genitalia. LOGOS has opted to open with a picture of a reclined Hermaphroditos, breasts exposed, the suggestion of a penis. When I reviewed Via Latina, I received sniggering criticism from Europeans that simply raising the fact that some illustrations in that book contained either nudity or gore, in a way that American schools would find unacceptable, was somehow a sign of US prudishness. Those things were brought to my attention by a US teacher. Frankly, I’m not bothered by a naked Hermaphroditos picture in a textbook, but you would have to be either blissfully unaware, or deliberately uncaring, to think that this wouldn’t impact the ability of your book to sell in a US marketplace. Given that the illustration is not used as a main point of reference in teaching body parts, what is gained by visually depicting this? And what would be lost by having a textual discussion of Hermaphroditos without a picture? The amount of space that talking about Hermaphroditos takes up in the text is incredibly minimal (1.5 line, no discussion of the mythological content of the Hermaphroditos’ story).

Also in this chapter is the sensitive topic of gods turning humans into other things, mostly because these are stories of male gods attempting (or actually) raping human women. This isn’t a topic I intend to treat here, I think contemporary scholarship on these kinds of myths is far superior to anything I would offer up here, but these particular myths present a challenge for textbooks in particular. They can be taught appropriately, sensitively, intelligently; the question is can they be presented in a textbook in a way that suits. I leave that for teachers to decide. The necessity of facing such a challenge lies in the fact that change and transformation (as this chapter amply reminds us) pervades Greek myth.

Introduction of “passive structure(s)” παθητικὴ σύνταξις – long-time readers will know my positions on the middle and ‘passive’ voice.

Chapter 18: ΟΙ ΠΑΙΔΕΣ

It wasn’t transparent to me what the ὄχθος was here.

Also why are there Macedonian visitors just playing at the river? And Spartans? I suppose we should just embrace this as a pedagogical conceit.

ἰλιγγιάω : well that’s a new word for me.

I have to wonder if tripping over a stone and falling to the ground is a little nod to Athenaze.

Chapter 19: Ο ΔΑΚΤΥΛΟΣ

I’m not really sure using a present participle of λαμβάνω makes best Greek in the context here.

This chapter has another nod to Ørberg, about the seemliness of noses.

I’m not really sure why Kallirroe is wearing a στεφάνη?

In line 70 τάδε strikes me as odd, because it would normally be kataphoric.

line 79 , ἄληθες is quite correct here, but this adverbial form used in questions appears (afaik) only in drama, and then in grammarians discussing it.

line 123 : I don’t at all get the point of a marginal note (ἔστιν ὅτε…) which doesn’t tell you anything but repeats the structure from the text.

Chapter 20: Ο ΒΙΟΣ

It’s not really clear in the text what ἄπορον means.

This chapter has a clear, not bombastic or overly moralist, identification of what slave and free means.

Chapter 21: ΓΕΩΡΓΙΚΑ ΚΑΙ ΚΑΤ’ ΟΙΚΟΝ ΕΡΓΑ

I would say this is the chapter that is really a tipping point in terms of reading difficulty. Sentences are getting both longer and more complex, and we’re reading decent narrative Greek. And this probably has to do with participle usage.

Chapter 22: ΔΕΣΠΟΤΑΙ ΚΑΙ ΔΟΥΛΟΙ

So this chapter introduces the aorist, and again there isn’t the sophisticated temporal set-up like Ørberg, we are just straight in.

This chapter is fun though! And echoes some of LLPSI in its drama and structures. Line 135 has a beautiful Socrates allusion.

Interesting choice to use οἶδας in place of οἶσθα.

Chapter 23: Η ΑΤΤΙΚΗ

This is a nice little geography of Attica chapter.

Chapter 24: ΑΙ ΑΘΗΝΑΙ

It’s not useful to put a marginal note telling us that θέα does not equal θεά, if the reader doesn’t know what θέα means. This is not very PSI, and could have been alleviated by, well, having introduced and used θέασθαι before this point and using that as a way in.

This chapter feels a bit like ch 36 of LLPSI, the infamous ‘tour of Rome’ chapter. It’s good, but it really is hard to process a bird’s eye tour of Athens with names and features flying at you one after the other.

The alignment of line numbers with lines is a little off in this chapter.

Chapter 25: ΓΛΩΣΣΑ ΚΑΙ ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΟΙ

I am not convinced that ἐπιδέξιος ’s range of meaning and appropriate sense is transparent enough by itself here.

This chapter suffers the same difficulty as the Athens’ tour – we are treated to a smorgasbord of names, giving the mythical origins of Ἕλλην, Γραικός etc., and this isn’t easy for a learner to ‘track’ all that’s going on.

Chapter 26: ΤΟ ΣΥΜΠΟΣΙΟΝ

It’s a nice touch to have Sappho presented in the original and then Atticized. I think that’s a good approach.

Chapter 27: Η ΔΗΜΟΚΡΑΤΙΑ

I have some hesitations about different parts of this chapters ‘ready intelligibility’ to a student. e.g. line 32-34 μετέχουσιν τῆς πολιτείας οἱ ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων γεγονότες πολιτῶν καὶ ἐγγράφονται εἰς τοὺς δημότας ὀκτωκαίδεκα ἔτη γεγονότες. I’m not really convinced that a learner will get οἱ ἐξ ἀμφοτέρων γεγονότες πολιτῶν as “having been born on both sides from citizen-parents”, especially alongside the differently-nuanced usage of ὀκτωκαίδεκα ἔτη γεγονότες.

This chapter does lay out (relatively) simply and elegantly the political organization of Athens, which I’ve never seen a Greek textbook do before.

Chapter 28: Η ΚΛΟΠΗ ΤΟΥ ΠΥΡΟΣ

φύγω – is that an aorist deliberative subjunctive being introduced with not enough context?

κώνειον – how is a learner to guess this?

So, here we’re introducing ἐλεύσομαι as a future for ἔρχομαι, one more thing suggesting that this book is comfortably leaning into Koine rather than a strict Attic.

Chapter 29: Ο ΔΟΥΡΕΙΟΣ ΙΠΠΟΣ

A good prose retelling of the start and end of the Trojan war. Once more, probably too much going on in terms of new language content.

We’re into the subjunctive here, and ἵνα purpose clauses.

Chapter 30: ΤΑ ΜΗΔΙΚΑ

Recounts the Persian invasion, Thermopylae, Salamis

Chapter 31: Ο ΠΟΛΕΜΟΣ ΤΩΝ ΕΛΛΗΝΩΝ

Recount of the Peloponnesian war.

The aorist ‘passive’.

Chapter 32: ΠΕΡΙ ΕΙΡΗΝΗΣ

We finally get a treatment of the perfect participle here, as well as aorist passive participles. We seemingly won’t get any further into perfect verbs.

Errata

Note the published errata here which is much more comprehensive.

P 5 Contents : the Roman numeral for the last chapter (32) is missing an X.

P 104, line 12. τὸν οἶκον μου should be τὸν οἶκόν μου

P 119, line 100 τῇς should be τῆς

P 152, line 122 δοῦλος μου > δοῦλός μου

P 152, line 123 δοῦλοι μου > δοῦλοί μου

P 283, line 179  This is a Sappho poem, but I believe that it’s usually accented : οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων…

P 318 I’m not sure about ἐρᾶμαι. My understanding is that this verb (related to ἐράω), accents as ἔραμαι.

I recently tweeted (yes, that dying star-system) that I had recognised an allusion to Plato’s Timaeus while reading Athanasius recently. I don’t at all think that I am the first to notice this particular allusion, but it was a thrill to recognise it just from the happenstance of working through both authors in Greek at the same time and being able to see the connection.

Athanasius, On the Incarnation 3

Ὁ Θεὸς γὰρ ἀγαθὸς ἐστι, μᾶλλον δὲ πηγὴ τῆς ἀγαθότητος ὑπάρχει· ἀγαθῷ δὲ περὶ οὐδενὸς ἂν γένοιτο φθόνος·
For God is good, or rather exists as the font of goodness; and the Good would have no begrudging about anything.

Plato, Timaeus 29ε:

ἀγαθὸς ἦν, ἀγαθῷ δὲ οὐδεὶς περὶ οὐδενὸς οὐδέποτε ἐγγίγνεται φθόνος
For he was good, and the Good has no begrudging about anything ever.

It is particularly ironic, because Athanasius has just spent a section in 2 laying out the position of Plato and (Platonists) that creation took place from pre-existent matter, a position that appears relatively consistent with the preceeding section of the Timaeus, and now Athanasius is articulating his own Christian position on creation, and sees fit to directly allude to Plato. With, no doubt, the expectation that any educated reader of his own work would make that connection. This is just one small reminder that (i) a large bulk of Greek patristic texts are in dialogue with the whole tradition of Greek philosophy, (ii) reading in Greek pays off.