Ancient Greek literature

Anyone read this stuff?

How readable is the Illiad, or Plato?

The only formal Greek literature I've read is Sophocles, which I found kind of dull.

The myths on the other hand were enjoyable

The Illiad is fun, I'd recommend a prose version over verse, but that's just my preference.  The only Plato I've read is Apology and Crito.  How much you enjoy these probably depends on how much you care for Socrates' philosophy.

I'd also recommend Aristophanes, particularly Lysistrata.  Funny stuff.

>>3
I'd recommend a prose version over verse
If you aren't reading it in Greek, there's something wrong with you

The thing is, "ancient Greek literature" is rather a broad field.  You have long, traditional mythological epic like the peoms attributed to Homer, then you have recreations of that with a quite different background, mindset, and agenda, as in Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica.  You have tragedy which takes traditional stories and uses them in particular ways to explore particular things;  and you have different forms of comic theatre:  Aristophanes is satirical, very nudge-nudge-wink-wink, but hard to understand with notes in the same way modern topical comedy will be in a 100 years time;  Menander (little survives, but his style was taken up by Plautus and Terence in Latin) is more comedy of manners and less time-bound.  You have short lyric poetry (lots of it in pieces - of Sappho, for example, we have at best two or three more or less complete poems) that can be about almost anything;  and you have stylized, allusive, public poetry (Pindar), and you have short epigrams about sex and love (Book 12 of the Greek Anthology is filled with the stuff, mainly [male] homoerotic).  You have historical narrative (Herodotus - a great storyteller, Thucydides - difficult and complex, Xenophon) and biography (Plutarch), and you have fictional narrative (Longus, Achilles Tatius, Heliodorus - the so-called "novels", relating the adventures of young [different-sex] couples), and everything in between (Xenophon's Cyropaedia, a fictionalized treatment of a historical figure).  You have comic dialogues, like Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans.  If you're into myth, Hesiod will be as interesting as Homer;  so will the ancient handbooks like Apollodorus' Library.  Philosophy can be serious and technical (Aristotle) or more entertaining (the shorter, more famous Platonic dialogues - and a different view of Socrates comes from Xenophon's ones).

Also, there is a LOT of ancient Greek literature on the Web, but too much of it is in old translations:  these aren't bad, but they were written in and for their time and can be inaccessible in style, language, etc., so rather try to find versions published in the last twenty years or so - you will find the style, and the range of notes and such, different and often more accessible or in tune with modern interests.  Also, remember than translation is an art, not a science, and translators have their own style:  if you don't find one version of, say, the Iliad or Odyssey appealing, try a different one - there is no shortage of them (in verse, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, Mandelbaum;  in prose, Rieu, Hammond).  The same goes for most of the really well known writers.

By the way, it's one "l" in Iliad (as in "Ilion"="Troy")!

>>5 here again.  My point, in reply to OP, is try to find types of writing, and versions, that appeal to you.  The more you read, the better a judge you will be, and the more things you will find you are able to read.  Oh, and in translations, do look for versions that have bibliography, preferably including other translations:  good translators are seldom afraid of comparison.

Or just learn ANCIENT Greek because reading them otherwise is a waste of time!!

>>7
But that takes years of soul-crushing work.

Hi.

>>7

It would, of course, be nice for everyone with an interest in Greek literature to learn ancient Greek (and Latin) to a sufficiently high level to read the original texts without the aid of translation.  But that just isn't practical for every reader.  Greek is a complex and difficult language, and the range of period, style, and dialect mean that, unlike that of Latin, the vocabulary of Greek beyond the most common words is really a set of different vocabularies from different times and places.  Even an experienced reader with years of study can find a new text from an unfamiliar period, genre, or writer difficult, and achieving reading fluency is a seriously time- and effort-consuming undertaking.

Reading translations is (as any intelligent reader knows) not ideal, but it is not a waste of time either.  For one thing, even fluent readers of Greek read translations because a good translation is a kind of running commentary in which another fluent reader - often one with scholarly knowledge and understanding of the work in question - elaborates his or her understanding of the text;  and for another, a translation can give one a very good sense of the content of works, and in some cases even of the style (Richmond Lattimore, best known for translations of Homer and tragedy, the former giving a very good sense in English of the features of oral composition, also produced a version of the New Testament in which, rather than evening the style as most biblical translations do, he explicitly sought to reflect the stylistic range of the component books).

If translations leave one unsatisfied and make one seek to learn the languages, so much the better;  but if one can't and doesn't learn them, reading good translations is a very great deal better than nothing.

No. If you do not read the Epic of Gilgamesh compiled by Sin-Leqi-Unninni in the ORIGINAL Akkadian then you can go fuck yourself thanks.

>>8

Not if you're William Sidis.

One more comment on originalism.  Even if one is reading ancient literature in the original languages, one is almost always readng it as mediated through scholarly process: orthography is regularized, word-division is present, words are printed in full and in standard typefaces, on the pages of books or the screens of computers and digital viewers, and so on.  This is all very far from the (mostly medieval, rarely earlier than 9th or 10th century) manuscripts through which these works survived into the early modern world;  and that again is very different from the form in which ancient readers found their texts (usually scroll, not codex [book] format).  If they read them, that is: much of the audience of many ancient works would not have read them, but heard them spoken or sung to musical accompaniment (which we lack the evidence to recover) or read in recitation, or seen them performed.  Those who did read seldom read silently as we do.  So, yes, reading Greek or Latin (or ancient Egyptian, or Gothic, or OE, or whatever) gets one closer to the original work;  but it's still a massive leap away from the experience of the works' first readers.  Google Oxyrhynchus and you'll find papyrology.ox.ac.uk where you can see some photographs of the remains of ancient copies of ancient Greek literature (in this case from a site in Egypt), which despite their poor state of preservation give one a good idea of the difference between a modern printed text and an ancient copy.  Medieval manuscripts are pretty easy to find images of on-line, and there again even a fluent reader used to printed modern texts will often find it hard to read the copies that provided access to these works for hundreds of years.

Point:  any modern reader's experience of pre-modern literature is very different from that of contemporaries, and while original language reading is the ideal, anything that gets one somewhere along the route to what these writers wrote is not without value.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and good translations are good.