Resources for Learning Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek, while challenging, opens doors to a rich literary and cultural heritage. This article provides a comprehensive guide to resources that can aid students in their journey to learn the language. Whether you're a beginner or an intermediate learner, this guide offers a variety of tools and methods to help you achieve reading fluency.
Why Learn Ancient Greek?
Learning Ancient Greek provides direct access to cultures that have shaped our understanding of politics, society, and ourselves. As the ancients participated in conversations about what makes for a good human life, learning their language gives us some of the tools to seek that flourishing. Latin and Greek roots run deep in our modern world.
Choosing a Dialect
Greek had four common dialects for its literature: Homeric, Doric, Aeolic, Ionic, and Attic. Later Attic merged with the others to become Koine, which lasted as a literary language.
Homeric Greek: If your goal is to read The Iliad and The Odyssey in their original language (or as close as we have to it), then Homeric Greek is the dialect to pursue. Homeric Greek was never spoken and so you learn it only to read the epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Lyric Greek - Doric and Aeolic: Other poets after Homer but before the Athenian Golden Age (Sappho, Archilochus, Alcander) write either in Doric or Aeolic depending on where they’re from. These poets were so heavily influenced by Homer that they can be learned and studied alongside Homeric, or used as a bridge back to Homer from Attic.
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Attic and Koine: Most literary Greek from the golden age of Greek tragedy, comedy, and philosophy (5th and 4th century BC) is written in Attic. After Alexander, the Koine Dialect begins to replace all the other Greek dialects so that by the time you get to the New Testament or Plutarch, the style may vary but the language has been fairly standardized. Koine means “common,” as it becomes the dialect shared across the Eastern Mediterranean and much of the Middle East as the lingua franca.
Foundational Principles for Language Learning
The bedrock of language learning is comprehensible input. The more messages you receive and understand in a language, the better your implicit mental model of that language will become.
Textbooks & Learning Materials
Philip S. Peek's Elementary Textbook: Philip S. Peek draws on his twenty-five years of teaching experience to present the ancient Greek language in an imaginative and accessible way that promotes creativity, deep learning, and diversity. The course is built on three pillars: memory, analysis, and logic. Readers memorize the top 250 most frequently occurring ancient Greek words, the essential word endings, the eight parts of speech, and the grammatical concepts they will most frequently encounter when reading authentic ancient texts. Analysis and logic exercises enable the translation and parsing of genuine ancient Greek sentences, with compelling reading selections in English and in Greek offering starting points for contemplation, debate, and reflection. A series of embedded Learning Tips help teachers and students to think in practical and imaginative ways about how they learn. This combination of memory-based learning and concept- and skill-based learning gradually builds the confidence of the reader, teaching them how to learn by guiding them from a familiarity with the basics to proficiency in reading this beautiful language.
Athenaze: Once you’re ready to start reading in earnest, the best sources are Athenaze in combination with Seumas Macdonald’s Galilaiathen. Luke Ranieri has made audio recordings of Athenaze. The grammar sections in Athenaze have been good enough for me, though I think it gives far more detail than is really necessary early on.
Galilaiathen: Galilaiathen is a supplementary reader designed to be paired with Athenaze, but focused Koine instead of classical Greek. I have made audio recordings of portions of Macdonald’s Galilaiathen and Jeong’s Greek Reader, but I’m not distributing them publicly.
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Mark Jeong’s Greek Reader: Mark Jeong’s Greek Reader is also indispensable. What makes these three texts so superior to everything else is that they are continuous and entertaining stories.
Other Textbooks: When you hit a wall or get bored, you’ll want more easy sources. Then you should reach for some of the other textbooks with lots of input (Logos, Thrasymachus, Ancient Greek Alive, 46 Stories, Mythologica) or the handful of short stories that enterprising Greek teachers have written for students (e.g., Hermes Panta Kleptei, Ho Kataskopos, or LGPSI).
Clyde Pharr’s Homeric Greek: Clyde Pharr’s Homeric Greek can be found free online and more recently editing and republished editions are sold by Oklahoma University Press.
Chase and Phillips: In my classroom, I teach with Chase and Phillips, an old Harvard textbook from 1941 whose advantage is it’s size-it doesn’t make Greek look as daunting as some books which rival door-stops in size and weight (see Hansen and Quinn above).
Ancient Greek for Everyone: I also supplement the explanations and examples from this free textbook, titled Ancient Greek for Everyone which I wish I could get a physical copy of. Right now, it’s free but only digital.
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Juan Coderch Grammar: A free grammar (digitally), with copious examples, was put together Juan Coderch, who teaches at St. Andrew’s in Scotland. If you want a physical copy (which I recommend), you’ll have to buy it. This is better for beginners as it’s not as overwhelming and thorough as Smyth.
Online Dictionaries and Apps
Logeion: For Greek to English, use Logeion or Wiktionary. Logeion compiles all the classic dictionaries and gives you a comprehensive sense of a word. My post about Latin dictionaries could fit in here, because Logeion has several robust Greek dictionaries all in one place with one easy-to-use text search.
Wiktionary: Wiktionary is less technical and easier to understand. If you’re trying to write a word in Greek and you can’t remember how to decline or conjugate it (e.g, what’s the dative plural form of πατήρ?), look it up in Wiktionary.
Morpho: If you encounter a word while reading whose form you don’t recognize (e.g., what does πατράσι mean?), use Morpho (a parser tied into Logeion) to figure out what it is.
Woodhouse: For an English to Greek dictionary, use Woodhouse. Note that this dictionary will only show you words that actually appear in ancient Greek texts.
Attikos app: For intermediate students looking for material to read, I highly recommend the Attikos app (sadly, only for iOS). It’s published by the University of Chicago, the same makers of the Logeion app, and allows quick access to that dictionary and its robust features.
Bellerophon: If you want to read outside of the Attic dialect, Bellerophon takes a huge amount of the Perseus library and makes it quickly and easily available on an iPad. Though the interface isn’t as slick as Attikos, it provides an easy place for me to compare Plutarch’s Greek and English side-by-side. Also, it has English texts, so this isn’t just for students whose Greek is strong, like Attikos.
Alpheios: Alpheios is a powerful browser extension and a mobile app that helps students to read Classical texts (Greek, Latin, Persian, or Arabic) online in their original language. By clicking on the word, one can access the definition and conjugations.
Online Courses and Communities
Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies: Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies provides a comprehensive view of Greek to accompany the condensed, brick-of-a-textbook Hansen and Quinn. A couple important things to note. This professor absolutely knows his stuff and has been teaching Attic Greek for decades. The notes accompanying the video are clear and concise. The videos are between 5 and 15 minutes, usually.
The Polis Institute in Jerusalem: The Polis Institute in Jerusalem has top-notch teachers for Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and more! They recently began to teach online, during the summer and during the semester, as well as in-person.
Ancient Language Institute: The Ancient Language Institute claims to teach Attic from the natural method.
Kosmos Society: Members of Kosmos Society are running community study groups associated with these resources to support each others’ learning.
Introduction to Homeric Greek series: This Introduction to Homeric Greek series was created by members of the Kosmos Society (then called Hour 25) Community in coordination with Professor Graeme Bird as a community-generated, open access educational resource.
Introduction to Attic Greek: This Introduction to Attic Greek comprises a series of video presentations made by Professor Leonard Muellner and Belisi Gillespie. These videos cover the content covered in two semesters of a college-level Introduction to Ancient Greek course. They are designed to be used in conjunction with the book Greek: An Intensive Course by Hardy Hansen and Gerald M.
YouTube and Podcasts
Luke Ranieri’s Ancient Greek in Action videos: For absolute beginners, Luke Ranieri’s Ancient Greek in Action videos on YouTube are a great way to start internalizing the sounds of the language and learning the alphabet inductively.
Recorded lecture by Dr. Walter Roberts: A recorded lecture by Dr. Walter Roberts on the ancient Greek language (Homeric/Attic/New Testament) from the City University of New York.
Homeric Greek: Odyssey 1.221-229: What’s the feast?: These videos are from a series on reading Homeric epic in ancient Greek. In each installment we read, translate, and discuss a small passage in the original Greek in the most accessible way. If you’ve ever wanted to read Homer in ancient Greek, here is your chance to do so with teachers who have spent a lifetime studying these works.
Reading Practice and Resources
The Chicago Homer: The Chicago Homer is a multilingual database that can display and search multiple texts including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Theogony, Works and Days, Shield of Herakles, and Homeric Hymns.
Geoffrey Steadman Commentaries: Geoffrey Steadman has produced some commentaries featuring a selection of passages from Greek (and Latin) texts with vocabulary and commentary.
Vocabulary Tools
- Anki: If you want to do flash cards, use Anki. David Miller has created a marvelous set of picture-based flash cards keyed to Athenaze and made them available for free.
Additional Resources
Browse this page: Browse this page to find resources such as databases, books, journals, and more related to Ancient Greek language and culture. Other resources include tips, lists, and primary sources.
Collects newly published Greek inscriptions and publications on previously known documents.
Commentaries: Commentaries offer grammatical, interpretive, and historical notes that can help you understand and translate texts. There are many ancient Greek commentaries in a variety of languages, such as English, French, German, and more in our Library catalog.
A peer-reviewed journal focusing on Greek and Roman antiquity.
An interdisciplinary portal of papyrological and epigraphical resources.
Setting Goals
Begin With the End in Mind - Reading FluencyThis page is to help the concerned early student of Greek allay his fears. This post wants to serve more as an orientation to the kinds of decisions a teacher or student should make so that we can begin our studies of Latin and Greek with the end in mind: reading fluency at the same level a student of the English language may have in enjoying Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Austen, Hawthorne, Dickens, and T.S. Eliot. If you have other goals for your study of Latin and Greek, seek resources from another page.
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