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

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.

Well, it’s coming up towards the end of our teaching term at #SeumasU, and we’re looking ahead to the next term (starts Apr 23rd). If you haven’t heard about upcoming classes somewhere else yet, here’s what we’re teaching:

Beginner Greek Classes

These all use Athenaze as a teaching text for a conversational style of engagement with the text in spoken A. Greek

Greek 102, 103, 104, 106

Hey, where’s 101? I’ll be offering a 101 class if there’s sufficient interest to put together a cohort, so let me know.

Upper level Greek classes

Fletcher will be teaching a lower-intermediate class with readings from the NT and Septuagint, ideal for people who have completed about the first-book of Athenaze.

Plato reading group continues on its merry way through the Timaeus.

In Greek Patristics (a more ‘traditional’ style read-and-translate in English class), we’ll be tackling Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

Lastly, if you want to read a lot of Greek and then discuss it during class also in Greek, I’m launching the Extensive Reading Club. This term we’ll be covering 3000 words a week, drawn from New Testament texts.

Latin offerings

I’ve got just three Latin offerings at the moment, but they are all good ones!

Latin 103 is the third in my intro Latin courses, we’re at ch 22 of Familia Romana.

Latin 235 is going to read a selection of Medieval Women’s Letters, and it’s going to be lit.

Lastly, if you want to spend time writing original Latin material, workshopping and discussing the process with others, Latin 283 is for you.

I probably plan to start a new Latin 101 cohort in July.

I’m not likely to add new courses for the coming term, but if there are courses you want to see run, do let me know! I’m very open to course suggestions and to putting something on and seeing who signs up!

I started offering SeumasU classes (not by that name!) in 2019. I went full-time (ish), ditching my other work in 2020 thanks to the pandemic. So I’m now steaming and streaming into my 4th year of trying to teach somewhat-more-communicatively, online, as a full-time occupation (it’s not full-time, but it’s my full-time occupation, if that makes sense). And, it’s really possible.

When I look back over the slate of courses I’ve run in the last four-ish years, everything ranging from teaching absolute beginners the foundations of speaking Latin and Greek, through to playing table-top RPGs in Latin and Greek, through to reading the broadest selection of texts, covering 2800 years of Greek and 2100 years of Latin, with a high commitment to keeping our conversations in the target language as much as possible, using English whenever it serves best purposes, and helping students to learn to read, process, and communicate more readily, more accurately, more fluently, more confidently, and more joyfully in these languages.

My own speaking skills are coming along, as are my writing and reading. I don’t get as much time outside teaching as I’d like to just sit around reading slabs of Greek and Latin, but when I can I do. And seeing students come on board and read and discuss Plato, Homer, Lucian, Proba, Eudocia, Boethius, Ignatius, Augustine, Dhuoda, C.S. Lewis, Aquinas, Erasmus, Pausanias, Plutarch, Cicero, Tertullian, Egeria, Gregory of Nazianzus, William of Rubuick, (Ysengrimus), as well as some anthology classes, and even more. This is a dream come true.

Occasionally I get asked if I would think about taking an academic job. No one’s knocking on that door, and I am out of the academic game long enough that I make a terrible candidate. But also, you would have to offer me something incredibly compelling to give up the joy and the wonder that is SeumasU.

So, maybe it’s time you starting speaking ancient Greek and/or Latin, to read the ancients and the not-so-ancients in their own tongues, and to join the great conversations yourself!

Here’s my general advice for autodidacts, people looking to do a lot of Greek reading, or anyone really wanting to kickstart and turbo-charge their Ancient Greek. It’s also more of less what I tell students to do (especially if they have finished Athenaze vol 1)

These days I would almost certainly tell you to read Athenaze. My case for Athenaze as a beginning textbook rests on two principles. Firstly, it’s the best continuous-narrative textbook that we have. It’s far from perfect, the textbook itself isn’t great, but that reason alone is enough to use it. Secondly, while it’s difficulty + vocab gradient is too steep, it’s less steep than anything else. So, I would start with Athenaze.

Should you read the Italian version? Yes, but with caveats. (i) If you have no background in the language at all, buying the Italian version and not the English will leave you without grammatical explanations, which is going to make life hard; (ii) but if you can get things explained one way or another, the Italian is superior; (iii) the Italian editions can be hard to get hold of, depending on your luck in ordering things from Italy. (iv) the main advantage of the Italian is simply this: far, far more connected prose to read in Greek. At least double.

When you get to the end of volume 1, you should definitely do volume 2. But it’s also around this time that you can profitably read other beginner/basic things. I’m not saying someone should necessarily read all of the following, but one could! You’ll definitely need to do some lexicon work if you tackle anything outside the main line of your textbook though, so have Logeion bookmarked. But you could start by reading:

1. Mark Jeong’s Greek Reader
2. Alexandros, τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν παιδίον
3. Charles Moss’ First Greek Reader
4. The JACT Reading Greek course (at least 1-8 after Athenaze ch 16, then I would leave the rest until after Athenaze vol 2)
5. Stoffel’s Epitome of the Greek New Testament
6. My LGPSI
7. Galilaiathen (my in-progress Athenaze-linked NT-Koine reader. Currently available via my patreon.)
8. WHD Rouse’s A Greek Boy at Home.
9. The new Logos LGPSI reader. (My review here)

If you read all that, you’d be well, well situated for going on to read a lot of ancient Greek. This is how I’d design a fairly comprehensive reading program of extensive reading for beginning students. Once you get a lot of beginner reading done, it’s time to read more and more broadly and extensively, but I think that probably needs another post, another time.

So, like many people I’m intrigued by the possibilities of chatGPT. I have been particularly impressed that it renders responses to prompts for Latin with texts that on the whole both (a) grammatical, and (b) make sense. On the whole, it struggles with Ancient Greek, often producing texts in Modern Greek instead. I have had some limited success with getting it to produce Ancient Greek though. In the post below, I include some of my results with their prompts.

#1 Write a Latin poem in the style of Psalms about the absurdity of 21st century America

Note: probably the most impressive answer of them all. And it’s got some pretty sharp lines in there too!

#2 write a short story in classical latin about a dog and a soldier

Canis et Miles

Erat miles fortis qui in bello pugnaverat. Multos annos militavit et multa pericula passus est. Tamen, una die, dum ambulabat in via, invenit canem pauperem et infirmum. Canis fessus erat et famelicus, nec habebat ubi caput suum ponere.

Miles misericordia motus est et canem secum portavit. Canis deinde in castris militum habitavit et miles eum curavit. Dedit cani cibum et aquam, et canis fortitudinem recepit.

Per multas hebdomadas, canis et miles amici facti sunt. Canis militem semper secutus est et militem semper custodivit. Cum milites ad bellum iter facerent, canis semper ad pedes militis fideliter stetit.

Tandem, in una die pugnae, militem vulneravit hostis graviter. Militem inimici circumveniebant et occidere parabant. Canis tamen non deseruit militem. Canis ferociter latravit et hostes a milite repellit. Militem deinde levavit et ad castra reportavit.

Miles canem semper gratum habuit et semper ei gratias egit. Canis deinde in castris militum habitavit et semper militem custodivit. Semper amici fuerunt, canis et miles.

Notes: the story is predictable, a little boring, but very much sensible. The Latin is correct, if somewhat simple and almost a medieaval narrative vibe.

Why is πόρνη translated as ‘prostitute’, but πόρνος is not?

This question arose on the sinking-ship of Twitter, and since I was tagged, I started to think about it. I don’t have a very in-depth answer, in that I’m not a lexicographer, nor I have really done a very very deep dive on the question, but here are some initial thoughts. I am very happy to receive feedback, pushback, or any -back on this post.

Just setting aside the 1 Cor 5; 6 question, we are dealing with the relation of at least 5 words (certainly more, but at least 5 in tight focus): πόρνος, πόρνη, πορνεύω, πορνεία, πέρνημι

Working backwards a little, πέρνημι is a verb that tends to mean things like “sell as a slave”, and so perhaps more generally to turn things into marketable goods. This seems to be the verbal origin of πόρνος and πόρνη, and you can see how this applies to sex-slavery in particular – we are primarily dealing with women trafficked for sex.

So when you come to πόρνη, generally speaking you are looking at a noun that denotes someone trafficked for sex. No real distinction is made about who is doing the trafficking, but I would be pretty hesitant to suggest that a πόρνη was generally considered to be in control and agency of their own prostitution – that doesn’t fit ancient moral codes, views of women, or social and economic practices of prostitution. There were independent sex workers in antiquity, but for the most part these seem to have been women who were already sex workers who managed to obtain freedom, and continued on in the same trade. A woman who did have the freedom and economic means to not sell sexual services, and who then chose to do so, would fall under general Graeco-Roman society’s opprobium, because it’s seen as self-degredation, whereas enslaved women in sex-work are seen as degraded (by others), the social status being degredation in either case.

So when we come along to the masculine counterpart term, πόρνος we have a much more complex set of questions to deal with. The lexica tend to supply three main senses: (i) a [male] prostitute, (ii) an active or passive participant in male homosexual activity, (iii) a ‘fornicator’, and then metaphorically (iv) an idolator.

Sense (iv) really applies to biblical literature where adultery and fornication is set up as a metaphors for spiritual unfaithfulness. (i) is the male version of πόρνη. Generally male prostitutes were young males, with male clients. (ii) is used primarily in a pejorative sense, by extension of the fact that male sex-workers were young and generally serviced male clients. That leaves sense (iii).

Which is where we probably need to talk about πορνεύω and πορνεία. The verb πορνεύω seems to be used in the middle to refer to selling one’s sex services, and in the active its usage is a little less clear; the active seems like a later usage, and requires a bit more investigation than I’ve had time for so far.

πορνεία though, clearly is related to all these words, but I do agree with the general idea that it comes to be used as a catch-all term for “all forms of sexual immorality”, which is a pretty large set of practices, and it depends upon what speakers/communities consider to be immoral. If you’re in a community whose normative view of sexual behaviour is with a sexually faithful marriage, then any departure from that, whether it involves the transfer of money or not, could be considered πορνεία. We would also need to consider a bit more broadly the question of whether sex with enslaved persons “counts”, or is considered indifferently, and then how much this broader idea of πορνεία weighs back in to usages of πόρνη and πόρνος.

Alright, so this is me thinking aloud basically, and now I’m going to loop back to the original question – why do translators treat πόρνη in 1 Cor 6(:15) as a profession, but in 5:11 as a descriptor of sexual immorality? Let me suggest briefly then why this is a plausible reading and translation strategy:

1. πόρνη is established as a term to refer to female sex-workers, very often trafficked women. The noun stands with this meaning, it’s not transferring over a more general meaning from πορνεία to a women who is engaged in sexual immorality more generally.

2. πόρνος is a more difficult to pin down term, its more precise meaning differs more in contexts. Here, in the context of a vice list of descriptors of behaviour rather than occupations, I think it would strain our understanding of the text to suppose that in the midst of behavioural terms, πόρνος should be understood as an occupation.

Lately I have been listening to Ursula Le Guin’s classic novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which portrays the world of Gethen, populated by a version of humans that are androgynous most of the time, except for a period once a month (kemmer) where they become male or female. It’s a good novel, and it’s a concept that is explored with rich texture and thought. However, one of the criticisms that Le Guin always endured was the choice to use the pronoun ‘he’ throughout for these androgynous humans. In a follow-up story in the same world in 1975, “Winter’s King”, she choose to instead use ‘she’ throughout. The choice of “they”, I understand, Le Guin felt was too confusing.

Of course, being who I am I wondered what would happen if you were translating this text into ancient Greek, and this strikes me as offering up a particular conundrum. I’m of the view that Ancient Greek’s gender system basically breaks down to:

Masculine = positively marks a person (a sentient animate being)

Feminine = positively marks a person as female

Neuter = categorises something as a person or non-person

That needs a lot more exploration and explanation, especially I don’t mean that the grammatical gender that nouns have, implies the above. But when you use modifiers, articles and adjectives, and you select a grammatical gender for them, this is the kind of implication. You can read a much smarter discussion of this here: Mussies 1971 on Grammatical Gender.

Now, if we were to translate LHoD into Ancient Greek, what would we do, what should we do? Here’s the question- I think that by Ancient Greek’s own patterns, you would default to masculine pronouns, articles, adjectives throughout for discussing the humans of Gethen, because they are marked as persons. I think you’d only use feminine modifiers and determiners to refer to a Gethen human during kemmer when they took on female biological traits.

Except, and here’s the conundrum part, most contemporary readers of Ancient Greek have been habituated to think of gender in several modern languages (including English), and in their reading of Ancient Greek, so as to treat masculine as marked for maleness, the way English ‘he’ has come to be marked for exclusivity rather than inclusivity, and so a contemporary reader of an Ancient Greek translation of this sort is probably going to read it in the same way that contemporary readers of Le Guin’s English novel read the “he” choice as unsatisfactorily gendering the androgynous humans of Gethen. Which, if you were going to cater to the sensitivities of contemporary readers of AG fiction (small group that they are), you would be left with a set of translation questions similar to Le Guin – do you then choose to use feminine modifiers as a reverse of standard practice, do you use neuter ones and risk the de-personalising effect that tends to have by turning persons into non-persons, or do you attempt some creative reimagining of the language to create a 4th gender category (the way some Latin speakers use a non-binary set of endings in contemporary Latin)? Or, do you just translate it with masculine modifiers and tell modern readers to learn to read them as marking personhood not maleness exclusively?

Syra, quae male audit, id quod medicus dīcit audīre nōn potest; itaque interrogat: “quid dīcit medicus?” Aemilia (in aurem Syrae): ‘Medicus puerum dormīre’ dīcit.”

So, in Chapter 11 of Familia Romana, Ørberg uses a simple but effective technique to introduce indirect speech (oratio obliqua, or as I prefer to teach them, clauses acting as nouns) to the learner. Syra can’t hear well, and so has to have the doctor’s comments repeated to her. This device or trope invites endless repetition, moving between direct and indirect speech.

The other week I inflicted the same technique on my Greek optatives class. As one of the optional uses for the optative is indirect speech in secondary sequence, you can generate infinite (though possible boring) content by taking any text, and fronting it with some kind of Greek equivalent, e.g. ἡ Σύρᾱ εἶπεν ὅτι…. You can do this transformation on direct speech in dialogues, of course, or even on a third person narrative, by reporting sentences as the speech of the author/narrator. You can even do this to textbook content, to keep it easy:

«ὁ Μῑ́νως οἰκεῖ ἐν τῇ Κρήτῃ· βασιλεὺς δέ ἐστι τῆς νήσου.»

τί εἶπεν ἡ Μυρρίνη;

ἡ Μυρρίνη εἶπεν ὅτι ὁ Μῑ́νως οἰκοίη ἐν τῇ Κρήτῃ, βασιλεὺς δὲ εἴη τῆς νήσου.

In light of last week’s discussions on twitter and then here, I ended up doing a bunch of reading and reflection about CEFR things…

Not that you have the time, but sitting down and reading some of the extended documentation on CEFR scales is not an unprofitable activity. I think in a lot of discussions we drop CEFR assessments as macro stand-ins for proficiency, without really paying attention to what they are meant to mean. In particular, the CEFR standards also recognise that different skills also have sub-elements. E.g. just in terms of speaking you can rate how a person speaks in terms of fluency : how quickly they speak, how and why they hesitate, how long pauses are, and turn-taking; accuracy : how consistently they use grammar and vocabulary correctly; range : in terms of both breadth of vocabulary, and also breadth of structures they use; phonology. People can be better at some sub-elements, and worse at others. It’s not monolithic. Proficiency is a multi-factor, multi-faceted thing.

Secondly, I was doing some musing on how long it takes to achieve various levels and what is required. I spent a bit of time looking at the cross-language estimated for various European languages, which tend to break them down into “Instructed Hours” and then “Additional Hours”. These estimates tend to come in around 1000 instructed hours to reach C2, and an equivalent number of extra hours.

I broke that down with some examples as:

Option A: 4 years of college, 2 x 12 week semesters, 2.5hrs instruction a day, 4 days a week.

Option B: 5 years of SeumasU, 40 weeks a year, 5 classes every term (e.g. 5 contact hours a week)

Option C: Live-in immersion, if you could take 52 weeks of 5 days a week, 4 hours of class + 4 hours minimum extra study.

I also often refer to an article in the Foreign Language Annals [1] , “Setting Evidence-Based Language Goals”, by Senta Goertler, Angelika Kraemer, and Theresa Schenker, which looked at benchmarking in the college German program at MSU. The research is interesting on a number of levels, but not least that they place some revised benchmarks for levels of college study:

It’s also worth noting, if you don’t know, that there does exist a set of CEFR-aligned tests for Ancient Greek (https://www.languagecert.org/en/language-exams/classical-greek) covering A1, A2, B1, for “Reading and Language Use”. The sample materials are worth looking at. The A1 vocab list is very long in my opinion, full of things that aren’t that common in Ancient Greek teaching materials. It costs money, and it probably needs to be done through online proctoring, which I don’t really believe in.

There are no vocab estimates or lists for CEFR standards, they don’t function like that. There are some estimates out there. I imagine it differs by language. Something on order of 10,000 words for an active C2 vocabulary. That’s quite large by any standard. More like 5000 for C1, which is closer to the active vocabulary of a native speaker without tertiary education. Greek, I think, has a smaller core vocabulary, but a larger peripheral vocabulary. Which is why a mastery of a smaller range of words goes further, but also why you never feel like you know all the words.

All this got me thinking in turn about two things:

1. Could you write Ancient Greek content keyed to CEFR guidelines?

To which the answer is yes. I am doing some experimenting in this area at the moment now, thinking through “okay, a person at A1 is attempting to learn core functional abilities in the language, to cover a certain range of situations and competencies, what is the Ancient Greek needed to do that?”

Don’t expect me to release Ancient Greek for A1 any time soon though…

That said, the amount and volume of material needed to go from A1 to A2, and then A2 to B1, and then B1 to B2, just grows and grows. You need reading material, listening material, watching material, and time spent in live conversation. And more and more of it. A full sequence of material to take you from A1 to C2, we are talking about a minimum of 2000 hrs of content. But really more. So, no, I am not releasing “Seumas’ Course to C2 Mastery in Ancient Greek.”

2. C2 isn’t unrealistic for PhD graduates in classical languages

I mean, plenty of them aren’t C2, but let’s put it like this – if you do a 3-4 year bachelor degree, and then 7 years for a PhD, that’s 10-11 years you’ve put into higher education. Even if you didn’t do Greek (or Latin or whatever) in school (which I didn’t, by the way), you could very reasonably get to B2 at the end of 4 years, which is often considered functional fluency, and then you have 7 years to reach C2, which is entirely achievable. That suggests to me that it is a methods problem, though it’s not only a methods problem. But PhDs in Ancient Greek could be C2 proficient active users of the language, if we designed our education systems to produce them.

[1] Foreign Language Annals, Vol. 49, Iss. 3, pp. 434–454. © 2016 by American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

I realised that not everybody is on twitter (blessed are you), and so here’s a short note that a few months back I started (yet) another blog/substack, in which I write about Christian life, praxis, and do book reviews. If that’s of interest to you, hie ye to jeltzz.substack.com

This weekend, I’ll be hosting an online conference on the online teaching of (classical) languages. If you haven’t heard that by now, apologies for not telling you! I thought I would put up a last call for registrations here. It’s On Saturday 15th October, 3-6pm US Eastern Time (New York). You can find out about our excellent range of speakers here:

I’d be so pleased to have you join us, and if you’d like to register, head along to this page and let us know.

Strange Fruit (original by Abel Meeropol)

(English Below)

καρπὸν τὰ τοῦ νότου ξύλα φέρει ἄτοπον

(ἐπί τε φύλλοις αἷμα, τῇ τε ῥίζῃ αἷμα)

ἀνέμῳ σῶμα αἰωρούμενον μέλαν νότῳ

ἄτοπος τῶν λευκῶν κρεμασθεὶς καρπός 

νόμιον τοῦ ἐσθλοῦ νότου θέαμα

ἐξῳδημένα τε ὄμματα στόμα τε διεστραμμένον

μαγνωλίᾱς εὐωδίᾱ καινή

καιομένης ὀσμὴ σαρκός ἀλέπτη 

καρπὸς τῇδε τοῖς κόραξι δρέπειν

τῷ ὑετῷ συλλέγειν, τῷ ἀνέμῳ ἀνασπᾶν

τῷ ἠελίῳ σήπειν, τῷ ξύλῳ καθιέναι

καρπὸς τῇδε ἄτοπός τε πικρός τε.

Original

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

(Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,)

Black body swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

(The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,)

Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh,

(And the sudden smell of burning flesh.)

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

I realise that by now you are mostly used to me starting umpteen projects. Some of those get finished. Some of them are ongoing. And some eventually wither and die due to my lack of impetus. Anyway, none of that deters me, really. I spend my free time working on things that I get passionate about, and if that passion gets sustained to completion, all the better for you and for me.

All of which is to say that I’ve been working away at something else new recently, and I want to share a small glimpse of it. The idea is to produce a Reader’s version of the LXX Psalms, with accompanying devotional commentary and notes. It aims to do three things: (a) combine enough tools and tips in one place for your intermediate and up reader of Greek to read the Psalms with understanding, (b) alongside a framework for understanding the content and theme of each psalm, in a way that makes them more approachable for personal (and corporate) prayer, (c) while giving myself an excuse to diligently read and write about the Psalms in conversation with the great tradition of the church.

Unlike some other things that I’m working away at much more rapidly, I expect this to take a few years to reach completion, and I’m quite okay with that. I’ll post future samples for this to my patreon.

LXX Psalms Dev Reader Sample