I’ve been working away on writing course notes for λαλεῖτε, which is designed to be a course in “how would you learn to speak Ancient Greek, as if you were doing a course for a modern language and learning the basic language that a CEFR-A1 course might teach?”
It’s been a really good exercise for myself, and just this week I was going over talking about days and dates.
For days, it’s not so difficult. There’s both an ecclesiastical set of days of the week derived from Christian usage and what I would call the Classicising approach, which is also historically grounded, but it’s grounded in the use of planet names from the Roman days of the week, so again reflecting late antiquity usage. Neither of these represent a 5th BCE Athenian ideal because 5th BCE Athenians didn’t use a seven-day week:
| English | Classicising | Christian |
| Sunday | ἡ ἡμέρᾱ Ἡλίου | ἡ Κυριακὴ ἡμέρᾱ |
| Monday | ἡ ἡμέρᾱ Σελήνης | ἡ δευτέρᾱ ἡμέρᾱ |
| Tuesday | ἡ ἡμέρᾱ Ἄρεως | ἡ τρίτη ἡμέρᾱ |
| Wednesday | ἡ ἡμέρᾱ Ἑρμοῦ | ἡ τετάρτη ἡμέρᾱ |
| Thursday | ἡ ἡμέρα Διός | ἡ πέμπτη ἡμέρᾱ |
| Friday | ἡ ἡμέρα Ἀφροδῑ́της | ἡ παρασκευὴ (ἡμέρᾱ) |
| Saturday | ἡ ἡμέρᾱ Κρόνου | τὸ Σάββατον |
Dates
But what about dates? If you’ve ever dived into this, you’ll know that Athenian calendars were complicated, and don’t easily align to our Gregorian calendars at all. Plus, there are other months in use in other places. So, again, the solution seems to me to go to late antiquity, where Hellenised versions of Roman names were used:
- Ἰανουάριος (Ianuarios) – January
- Φεβρουάριος (Phebrouarios) – February
- Μάρτιος (Martios) – March
- Ἀπρίλιος (Aprilios) – April
- Μάϊος (Maïos) – May
- Ἰούνιος (Iounios) – June
- Ἰούλιος (Ioulios) – July
- Αὔγουστος (Augoustos) – August
- Σεπτέμβριος (Septembrios) – September
- Ὀκτώβριος (Oktōbrios) – October
- Νοέμβριος (Noembrios) – November
- Δεκέμβριος (Dekembrios) – December
But how should you specify a date in a modern sense? That was my last piece of the puzzle. I think the answer is πόστος
πόστος, you say, what on earth is πόστος;
Indeed. Ancient Greek has no shortage of specific interrogative (question) words, and πόστος is the word to ask “what number in a sequence?” If you’re after an ordinal number as a response, πόστος seems the perfect solution
πόστη ἡ ἡμέρα ἐστίν; Which date is it?
πόστῇ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τοῦ Ἰουλίου (μηνός) τὰ γενέθελιά σου; Which day of July is your birthday?
Very helpful – I try to start any writing I do in classical Greek with the day’s date. How would you express years? With the traditional BC/AD system?
Yes, I would use BC/AD (πρὸ τοῦ Χριστοῦ, μετὰ τὸν Χριστόν). Partly because that’s how we reckon years, and I’m not sure there’s a good way of revivifying ancient yearly naming practices. I suppose if one wanted to do that, you would be saying things like, “in the first year of the 2nd presidency of Trump”
Many thanks. Here in Britain I suppose I’d have to use the regnal year of the monarch, which doesn’t appeal much. So πρὸ/μετὰ τοῦ Χριστοῦ it shall be