Greek Nobility

There are lots of ways to begin the study of Greek, but by far the most popular in schools is to start with Attic Greek, or the Greek of Athens in the 5th and 4th Centuries B.C.E. This is because Attic Greek represents so many of the cultural achievements of the Ancient Greek world, from the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle. The mastery of this particular form of Greek was my aim at the Berkeley Summer Workshop. I have purchased a book, however, which begins instead with Homeric Greek, the language of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Apparently, the move from Homer to Hesiod is relatively seamless, but otherwise there are no other authors or works for which this book adequately prepares the reader. So the obvious question is: why limit yourself to Homer? In the introduction to this handy little book, author Clyde Pharr argues that Homer is at least as good as Xenephon, the traditional primer, in preparing students for Attic Greek. His reasons are well argued, but they are not mine.

I choose Homer because his works represent, more than any other book the beginning of Western Civilization. He began the conversation, so to speak.

I chose Homer because I am an American. The father of the American Ideal, Thomas Jefferson in so many ways prescribed Homer to the rest of us. He placed it as a central feature of the University of Virginia curriculum, in letters to various proteges he gave it as their first reading, imploring them to learn to read it in the original Greek, and he even speculated that American farmers pick up tips on wheel building from their reading of the Iliad. An even greater endorsement comes, though, from Jefferson's most direct intellectual inheritor, Henry David Thoreau. The Iliad was one of the few books he took with him to Walden Pond. He says of his reading there:

"The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have."

Thoreau was a radical individualist and, like Emerson and Nietzsche before him, deplored the use of books as a substitute for experiencing life itself. Too many they thought stake a lifelong claim on the ground another had trod previously. Emerson called this man a satellite in another's system. But Homer is an exception to this rule. He is worthy to devote one's lifelong study. Why? Because the study of Homer was, to these woodsmen, synonymous with the study of Nature herself. It is as if Homer has sprung from the ground like a tree, without the decay of time. He offers a view into a more barbaric and noble time, when men dealt with each other without the hypocrisy of humility.

It will not be until Lesson 13 that I will encounter the actual text of The Iliad, and I am just beginning Lesson 5. But I wish to apply the same line by line, word by word analysis Thoreau describes.