Personal Update - Greek

A while ago, I was blogging Xenophon’s Anabasis here, but stopped, and have been absolutely quiet about Greek. I’ve still been studying Greek, but found that the labor of translating into readable English and posting it to the blog demanded too much time. Also, I suspect that forcing myself (an intermediate Greek student, at most) to re-work every phrase I read back into English might even be counter-productive.

At any rate, Xenophon’s Greek mercenaries (or somewhat more than half of them) made it back to Greece. What remained of the army was absorbed into a Spartan expedition against Persia. Xenophon himself was exiled from Athens, but apparently lived out an otherwise prosperous, comfortable life, and wrote several other books, besides the Anabasis. As I remarked earlier, the ability of a small, disciplined, trained Greek army to slice through the Persian Empire was noted by Alexander the Great, who did that quite successfully 70 years later.

I’ve been reading Plato, who, despite the egg-headed reputation of being a philosopher, wrote in a Greek style no more difficult than Xenophon’s. I read Euthyphro, and am almost finished with the Apology.

For my friend Tom Roper, here is a snippet of Greek text, typed into Wordpress: ἄλλοι δε ἄρα αὐτὰς οἴσουσι ῥαδὶως

I didn’t try to get every accent right, but it demonstrates the concept. :)

Comments

  1. Alon Levy wrote:

    What does the phrase mean? The only word I can make out is radius.

  2. Stephen wrote:

    “And that others would tolerate such things lightly?”

    ραδιως = easily, lightly

    It’s from Socrates in his Apology, explaining why he didn’t propose exile as an alternative sentence.

  3. Tom Roper wrote:

    Good stuff, Stephen, certainly looks just right. I think the problem was I was cutting and pasting form other applications. When I type correct text in GreekKeys straight into the webpage, it seems fine (for the moment)