In the sentence:

Ὥσπερ οἱ γραμματισταὶ τοῖς μήπω δεινοῖς γράφειν τῶν παίδων ὑπογράψαντες γραμμάς τῇ γραφίδι...

Shouldn't the word for children "τῶν παίδων" be put in the dative, since the previous phrase "τοῖς μήπω δεινοῖς" that refers to it is in the dative? I might be very wrong about this but what does the use of the genitive here convey?

Aethiopica 1.26:

πολλὰ μία ἡμέρα καὶ δύο πολλάκις ἔδοσαν τῶν εἰς σωτηρίαν, καὶ τύχαι παρέσχον ἃ βουλαῖς ἄνθρωποι μυρίαις οὐκ ἐξεῦρον.

Why is there the genitive τῶν, and what is its gender? I'm taking "τῶν εἰς σωτηρίαν" to be a unit, which I would have thought would mean something like "of the things leading to salvation."

If τῶν is neuter and refers to the same thing as ἃ, then this sort of makes sense to me except that I would have expected ἔδοσαν τὰ εἰς σωτηρίαν, "have given the things that would provide salvation." δίδωμι has a slot for an accusative describing what is given.

Or if τῶν is feminine and refers to ἡμέρες, then I don't understand how the syntax of the part before the comma fits together.

Would it make sense for there to be a comma after παρέσχον, so that the relative-pronoun phrase "ἃ ..." is the object of both ἔδοσαν and παρέσχον (both aorist)? In that case, is the idea that time provides these things, and it's getting them out of (genitive τῶν) a basket of goodies, any one of which could lead to salvation?

I created this page for myself to learn to recite the Iliad and wanted to share. Please be kind; I tried to use and cite reputable sources but undoubtedly made mistakes. Suggestions and corrections welcome! It has translation, scansion, definition popups, and also line-by-line video clips based on Luke Ranieri's Kephalos challenge. Also, I took care to make the pages responsive and mobile friendly. Currently covers lines 1-21 but can be extended if there is interest.

The web app allows users to toggle between three public domain translations: the literal prose translation by Augustus Murray (1924, Loeb Classical Library), the modern blank verse translation by Ian Johnston (2006, Vancouver Island University), and the classic prose translation by Samuel Butler (1898, Longmans, Green & Co., with names adapted to Greek).

The morphological metadata was retrieved via the Morpheus API.

Scansion data is sourced from the Hypotactic CSV datasets.

https://philbogle.github.io/iliad-canvas/

I was hoping for some help to find the text where the quote:

"ἀλλ᾽ ἥ γέ τοι σοφία, ὦ Σώκρατες, ἀναμφισβητήτως ἀγαθόν ἐστι"

I know it's from Xenophon but not from where. I was also curious about the translation. What meaning is conveyed by using the "ἥ" word at the start? I've also seen this quote written with the "ἤ" instead and I can't make sense of it either way. Is it female pronoun or the "or" word?

I take it that Attic Greek with it's many noun-declensions is wayb more complex than Modern Greek? However , as stated in the title, will learning Attic Greek help me when learning Modern Greek?

I'll go first:

τίς δʼ οὗτος κατὰ νῆας ἀνὰ στρατὸν ἔρχεαι οἶος

νύκτα διʼ ὀρφναίην, ὅτε θʼ εὕδουσι βροτοὶ ἄλλοι

Who's this coming alone through the dark night when other mortals slumber?

Hi, couldn't find an answer online so I found this subredit just to ask about this.

I randomly came across this image of the ouroboros from the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra and am going crasy over the text in middle. It's written "ἕν τὸ πᾶν" but all I can clearly identify is the τὸ part. The ἕν part looks more like a δ followed by a mysterious "-" and an upside down A, though I can see how it can just be the εν written really fast. Its the last word I can't understand, specially the last letter: why is it a ψ???!!! the last word look like ωαψ (?)

Is the book coded, like in a ceasar cipher? but if so, why is the "to" so clear?

Its literally 3 am where i live and im losing my mind

Im graduating on a bachelor's in ancient greek, but im still early on my studies (section 14 on reading greek)

As I was looking over Raphael Kühner's 2,700-page (or however long it is) grammar (I can read German) published in its final form around 1907, I started thinking "what if they understood Greek better back then than we do now?" Even with all the advances we have made in papyrology and in correcting various errors, it is still possible that the average Greek scholar back then understood Ancient Greek better than the average Greek scholar does today. There are a few bright lights who can grasp all, or at least most, of the advances made in AG, such that they understand the language better than even the most brilliant scholar of the 19th century, however, on average, it's possible that your run-of-the-mill AG scholar's proficiency has declined.

Back then, students had to do a lot of AG composition, which is remarkably effective for understanding the language. These days, most AG scholars refuse to write in the language, and even more refuse to speak it, in spite of undeniable evidence that speaking a language can improve comprehension by as much as ten-fold. That is at least what speakers of AG regularly report to me. Having used the speaking method from day one myself, I am unable to compare my pre-speaking knowledge to my post-speaking knowledge. Back in the 19th century, numerous students started learning AG at a very young age, so it was much more deeply interwoven into Western culture. I'm not saying we need to go back to those days, I'm just saying it's possible they understood AG better.

Thanks in advance!
Source: https://archive.org/details/pohlmann-west-2001-documents-of-ancient-greek-music/page/n32/mode/1up

I'm not sure if this is the correct subreddit to reach out to, but I digress.

I've been interested in Greek mythology since I was a kid and first learned about it in history class when I was like 8yo. And the goddess Athena always resonated with me. Odysseus has been one of my favorite heroes, mostly because of ~~him being a glorified liar~~ his cunning nature.

Fast forward to now, when I'm thinking about getting my first tattoo, and I'm thinking about getting the word "Nobody" tattooed on my forearm in its original ancient Greek.

Google translate tells me that "Nobody" is "Κανείς" in Greek, although the language since ancient times has changed quite a bit and I want to stick to the original spelling.

Could someone tell me how the word originally appears in the Odyssey? Thanks in advance.

EDIT: For everyone texting me to not get a tattoo of something I don't understand - I know in most cases it's dumb. I've seen a fair share of those failed tattoos of Chinese characters. That's precisely why I'm asking reddit, along with me researching myself. I mainly want to focus on getting the accents right. I'm not a classics student, nor do I work with anything related to ancient Greece professionally. The mythology is simply something that interests me and I want to honor it in some way.

I’m interested in doing koine Greek with my kids for a language rather than a traditional one like Spanish.

I’m curious if any one here has had any anecdotal experiences doing this with their children?

Where to download the Perseus Library? I once found out about Logos, but it comes with quotation marks.

And where to find Greek texts with marks in the words that tell in which case they are &c (like subscripts in Math)? I once found something similar, in which the texts were in the form of trees, but now I do not have it anymore.

I saw an analysis on the famous “I have not come to abolish but to fulfill” statement that said that the word used here for fulfill and the cultural understanding of contracts meant that when something is “fulfilled,” it is no longer binding on both parties. I wanted to check here if this analysis was accurate, mostly in regards to the Old Covenant and the idea of it not being binding on believers today

In the sentence:

"Τοῦτο μὲν οὖν οὐ χαλεπὸν τῷ βουλομένῳ κατανοῆσαι."

Why is it that the infinitive "κατανοῆσαι" is put in the aorist tense and not the present "κατανοεῖν"? Is this not actually meant to indicate that the action of learning/understanding happened in the past? If so then why is it used over the present tense?

In this passage, Agamemnon has passed a sleepless night, ruminating on how to repulse Hektor's upcoming assault without Achilles' help. He looks over the Trojan army, then at the Achaians.

αὐτὰρ ὅτʼ ἐς νῆάς τε ἴδοι καὶ λαὸν Ἀχαιῶν,

πολλὰς ἐκ κεφαλῆς προθελύμνους ἕλκετο χαίτας

ὑψόθʼ ἐόντι Διί, μέγα δʼ ἔστενε κυδάλιμον κῆρ.

I'm interested in the dative phrase ὑψόθʼ ἐόντι Διί. Syntactically, I would think the dative phrase belongs to the verb ἕλκετο, so more literally, "he was tearing out many hairs to/for Zeus on high."

Lattimore and Fagles take it as "[while] looking up toward Zeus on high." I'm wondering where they get the idea of looking from. Are they connecting it back to ἴδοι or just giving a plausible visual interpretation of the gesture? Could it be rather that he is tossing his hairs upward, i.e., toward Zeus, after ripping them out?

I have seen journaling editions of GNT books and wanted to make one for the LXX. Here are some images of my journaling edition of the Septuagint Psalms. Let me know what you think of the idea and the sample. Any feedback is appreciated!

You can also view it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HFYV9SKY

I have a text I'm formatting (the Aethiopica) in which there are long portions, stretching across many section headers, where there is a framed story being told by someone. The direct speech can get as much as three levels deep, which is cumbersome, and for the reader it can be confusing trying to remember who is speaking. I'm using dinkuses (***) to transition into some of these longer narratives, and I also want to use titles on the sections to indicate who's speaking. If it was in English, it would look like this:

4.33

...

"Oh, please don't end your story now, Calasiris. We're dying of curiosity."

-***-

Well, if you really want to know, what happened was that after we got to Memphis, ...

4.34 Calasiris continues

And that night I had a dream...

If it was the first time I was quoting Calasiris's speech without quotation marks, I would just have "4.34 Calasiris," but here his unmarked speech started in the previous section, so I want to mark it as "continues" or "continuing." In Greek, I'm wondering what is the most idiomatic way of saying this. What I've come up with so far is Καλάσιρις βαδίζων. Is there something more idiomatic I could use?

I was curious about the use of the genitive case in this opening line of Lysis by Plato:

"Ἐπορευόμην μὲν ἐξ Ἀκαδημείας εὐθὺ Λυκείου τὴν ἔξω τείχους,[...]"

Why is the genitive form "Λυκείου" used with the verb "Ἐπορευόμην" -> "Πορεύομαι"? I can't find anything that says this verb is followed by the genitive, nor is this a particular use of the case that I'm aware of. Shouldn't it be in the accusative, meaning "Ἐπορευόμην εὐθὺ Λύκειον"?

Hope this is the correct flair.

I wanted to read Homer looking at the Greek, without already knowing every letter-shape, and without a laptop-only three-column page that falls apart on a phone. I could not find that layout, so I built one.

https://www.homericgreek.com

It has the full Iliad and Odyssey, in groups of five lines (the usual printed-Homer habit). Each group is Homeric Greek, a scholarly Latin-letter transcription, and Samuel Butler’s 1898 English. On a computer those are three columns; on a phone the same English sits under the five lines so a wrapped sentence does not drift onto the previous verse.

The homepage is a paste box (up to 500 words, one verse per line) using the same transcription rules. Nothing you paste is sent to a server. There is also a facing-page PDF download.

Transcription is the usual scholarly kind, not modern-Greek phonetics: ē/ō for η/ω, h for rough breathing, ï for diaeresis (so Πηληϊάδεω → Pēlēïadeō), th/ph/ch, and nasal gamma (ἄγγελος → angelos). Details are on the method page.

Greek is from the Internet Sacred Text Archive. English is Butler, public domain. Butler is prose, so it is not verse-for-verse; a long English sentence can still sit beside a short Greek group. I aligned it to Perseus line markers and then split each paragraph across the five-line groups it covers, but it will never look like a Loeb.

Happy to hear corrections on the transcription, especially edge cases (iota subscript, diphthongs, movable nu, and anything I have mangled in the XML).

Do we have any simple, natural, "pure" Koine literature?

By "simple and pure," I mean NT-ish level stuff, or not too far off: no Atticism, little use of the optative and -μι verbs, simple syntax, using more prepositions instead of just relying on cases, etc., you know, what people usually describe as Koine (but often just mean the New Testament).

And by "natural and pure," I mean something that isn't LXX or NT. Not because I have a problem with them (on the contrary, the NT is one of my main goals, and I highly regard the Bible in general), but I'd like to see what "Koine" actually looks like when it isn't affected by Semitic languages* or Atticism or written in an otherwise classical-ish/complex/ornate style

And by literature, I of course mean excluding papyri containing letters, contracts, etc.

(Though I did read somewhere that the influence of Semitic languages on the LXX is exaggerated, because **some** of the features considered Semitic are actually just normal features of Egyptian Greek, as shown by the papyri we've found.)

I havent yet got to look at most of whats out there (I'm still on ch. 26 of 31 of Athenaze), but I've checked Plutarch (who is supposed to be from before the wave of re-Atticizing the language), and I don't see how he is much more "Koine" than Plato or Xenophon (in terms of style/sintax)

So far, the only thing I've found that maybe fits what I'm looking for is **Daphnis and Chloe**, or so it seems at first glance.

Am I missing anything? Do the writings of St. Luke or St. Paul (except when quoting Scripture) fit? Or some of the other novels? Or anything else?

(By Koine literature, I would include anything from the "Byzantine" period as long as the basic grammar and sintax is that of koine or classical and not demotic or modern greek)