pharr_homer-and-the-study-of-greek.pdf

Clyde Pharr : Homer and the study of Greek

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CLYDE PHARR

HOMER AND THE STUDY OF

GREEK

Excerpts from a study contained in Homeric Greek - A Book for Beginners , University of

Oklahoma Press 1985. The text contains some words in Greek, download proper fonts , if you

don't have.

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Clyde Pharr : Homer and the study of Greek

OMER is the best possible preparation for all later Greek literature,

much of which is unintelligible without a fair knowledge of him. He was

to Greek literature what the Bible has been to English, and a great deal more as

well. He leads us somewhere, not merely into a blind alley as does Xenophon,

both with reference to later Greek literature and to much of the best in later

European literature as well, where his influence has been incalculable and

perhaps greater than that of any other single writer. In him are the germs of so

many things. We have the narrative highly developed, the beginning of the

drama, oratory, statecraft, seamanship, war, adventure, and religion - in fact,

life as it was to the old Greeks in its manifold aspects.

Then the student who has taken only a very little of beginning Greek, even if

he has progressed no farther than the end of the first book of the Iliad, has

come into vital contact with the magic and the music of the Greek language,

used in one of the most beautiful, one of the most varied, and one of the most

influential literary compositions of all ages ; and though he may have devoted

considerable labor to mining the gold, he cannot truthfully say, and probably

will not want to say, that Greek for him has been a waste of time." [1] (...)

T IS only fair to state that although this idea of beginning Greek with the

reading of Homer is original with the writer, it is not new. This was the

regular method employed by the old Romans in teaching their boys Greek, and

it was highly commended by that capable and judicious old schoolmaster,

Quintilian, as the best possible plan. [Also in the whole history of Byzantium ,

Homer was used as the foundation of learning Greek - (Elpenor's note)]. Since

that time it has been used now and then by some of the world's ablest

educators and scholars. It was thus that Joseph Scaliger (de la Scala), one of the

most brilliant names in the whole history of classical scholarship, taught

himself Greek at Paris, and many more of the great scholars of the past learned

their Greek through Homer. It was tried also by Herbart, who began a series of

experiments in Switzerland, in 1797, where he employed this method with

marked success in private tutoring. Later he continued his experiments on a

larger scale in the teachers' training college at Koenigsberg, with such good

results that he was thoroughly convinced that this was the only suitable

method of teaching beginning Greek. At his suggestion it was tried by Dissen,

by Ferdinand Ranke, and by Hummel, all of whom were hearty in its praise ;

and, most important of all, by Ahrens, at Hanover, where it was used for thirty

years (1850-1881), with great success, but was finally abandoned because of the

lack of suitable text books and because of the opposition of other Gymnasia

which refused to adopt such a revolutionary plan. It has also been

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Clyde Pharr : Homer and the study of Greek

recommended occasionally, but without success, by other scholars and

humanists, notably by Goethe, by Andrew Lang, and by Wilamowitz, in

Europe ; while in America it has been advocated in one form or another by

Seymour, Bolling, Shorey, Lane Cooper, and others. (...)

In the first place it is essential that we disabuse our minds of the once

prevalent notion, long since exploded, but still more or less consciously held by

many, that the Attic dialect is the norm by which all other Greek is to be

judged. The language of Homer is earlier and naturally differs from it in many

essentials ; therefore it was long maintained that Homeric Greek is irregular,

crude and unfinished. Hellenistic Greek, which represents a later development

of the language, has its differences ; therefore Hellenistic Greek must be

degenerate. Such an idea is utterly unscientific and ignores completely the

modern historical point of view of the development and growth of languages.

Any period which has given birth to literary productions of surpassing merit

and artistic excellence is justified by its own works ; it contains its own

linguistic standards, and will richly repay those who take the trouble to study

it. To call Homeric Greek anomalous and irregular, because it differs in some

particulars from the Attic dialect, is as misleading as it would be to say that the

language of Shakespeare is immature and eccentric because he does not write

the same type of English as does George Ade or Stephen Leacock. (...)

According to our present system, students are taught a smatter-ing of Attic

Greek. Then they are given a smattering of Homer, who represents a period

several centuries earlier. Then again comes some more Attic Greek, and if the

student continues in his work he usually gets some Doric, with sometimes a

little Lesbian, and the Ionic of Herodotus, to which is commonly added a dash

of the Koine for further confusing variety. All of this comes at such times and at

such points in his development that it is practi-cally impossible for the ordinary

student to obtain a clear concep-tion of what the Greek language is like and

what are the funda-mental processes of its development. As a result grammar

becomes a nightmare to be dreaded instead of an opportunity to study the

structure of one of the most interesting and instructive languages in existence.

This has reference to the linguistic features, apart from its literary value. If on

the other hand we begin with Homer and obtain a good grounding in his

language, the transition from that to later Greek is simple and natural and in

accordance with well-established laws, so that a student who once gets a grasp

of the processes involved not only has acquired a valuable scientific point of

view, but he might be untrue enough to the traditions of countless students of

the past to find Greek grammar interesting.

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Clyde Pharr : Homer and the study of Greek

Furthermore, since most of us learned our Attic Greek first, when we came

to Homeric Greek and found so many different forms, the feeling very

naturally arose with many that Homer has many more forms than Attic Greek,

and that they are more difficult. On the contrary, the Homeric forms are not

only simpler and more transparent than the Attic and as a consequence more

easily learned - many Attic forms have to be explained by a reference to the

Homeric ones - but the Homeric forms are considerably fewer in number. (...)

Many Atticists have maintained that the great number of irregularities in

Homeric Greek would be an added difficulty to the beginner. It is true that they

are troublesome, but not so trouble-some as the considerably greater number of

irregularities in Attic Greek. Any one who will take the trouble to count them

will find that the irregular formations in Attic Greek considerably outnumber

those in Homer. There is not space here to catalogue the various irregularities,

heteroclites, metaplastic forms, etc., of Attic Greek, but the lists given in

Kuehner-Blass, or any other of the more elaborate Greek grammars, are enough

to convince the most skeptical.

If we leave aside the irregularities and look at a few regular formations

which must be memorized, the evidence is none the less conclusive. For

example, the "regular" declensions of such words as πόλις, βασιλεύς, ναῦς,

πῆχυς, ἄστυ, comparatives in - ιων, and other forms which will readily occur

to any one who has studied Attic Greek, are so complicated that they are not

ordinarily mastered by students of beginning Greek, and it would be rather

remarkable if they were. Or let us consider a single class, such as typical words

of the third declension in υς, as πῆχυς, δίπηχυς, ἡδύς, ἔγχελυς, ἰχθύς. If the

student learned the declension of any one of these, and attempted to decline the

rest accordingly, he would go far astray; for of these five words, all of the third

declension, and all ending in υς in the nominative, no two are declined alike

throughout. A comparison of the declensions of ἔγχελυς (eel) with that of

ἰχθύς (fish) will illustrate the point. It seems that the old Athenians were never

able to decide definitely whether an eel was a fish or a serpent. Accordingly, we

find that they declined ἔγχελυς the first half of the way like ἰχθύς, while the

other half was different. What a pity that there are not a few more such

convenient mnemonic devices to help the student keep his bearings on his way

through the maze of Greek morphology! If a student finally learned to decline

such a word as ναῦς, he would not know how to begin the declension of

another word formed in the same way, such as γραῦς; nor would a student

who had learned the declension of βοῦς in Attic Greek know the de-clension of

the next word like it, χοῦς, and he might be led very far astray by such a simple

and common word as νοῦς. All of these forms, and many more which could be

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Clyde Pharr : Homer and the study of Greek

cited, are highly interesting to philologists, as they illustrate so beautifully

certain abstruse principles in Greek phonology and morphology. Un-

fortunately they do not usually have the same strong appeal to the beginner

who is trying very hard to learn how to read Greek.

The whole system of contraction, which is regular at times, and the

variations caused by it in the general rules of accent and quantity, all of which

are so confusing and so difficult to the ordinary beginner, are so little used in

Homer that they can very profitably be omitted, or else touched quite lightly,

and the time saved can be invested elsewhere to much greater advantage.

In the field of syntax Homer is so much simpler than Xenophon, that

students ordinarily find him a great deal easier. Thus Homer lacks the articular

infinitive ; long and involved passages in indirect discourse never occur, as

well as many other strange and foreign characteristics of Attic Greek and

Xenophon, all of which give a great deal of trouble to the ordinary beginner.

These elements all contribute to a quicker and an easier learning of Greek

through Homer, as has been abundantly proved by experi-ments also. Thus

students who begin with Homer regularly read more Greek in the time devoted

to him than do those who begin with Xenophon and spend this time on the

Anabasis.

It has long been a commonly accepted myth that Homer has such an

enormous vocabulary that students would have more than ordinary trouble

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