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On Greek Prose Composition

Robert F. Murray, A Song of Greek Prose:

Thrice happy are those
Who ne’er heard of Greek Prose—
Or Greek Poetry either, as far as that goes;
For Liddell and Scott
Shall cumber them not,
Nor Sargent nor Sidgwick shall break their repose.

But I, late at night,
By the very bad light
Of very bad gas, must painfully write
Some stuff that a Greek
With his delicate cheek
Would smile at as ‘barbarous’——faith, he well might.


I have somehow muddled through without having to write Greek prose at all. This will probably not serve me well.

(via Laudator Temporis Acti, which has the whole thing.)

Learning Ancient Greek is like being in an abusive relationship.

The following is an excerpt from an email from a senior who graduated last year, who says it was handed down to her when she was a freshman by a senior. It is not mine, by any means, and thus I am loath to put the whole thing up, but I thought it too good not to share at all.

When I first met the Greek language he was sleek and sexy in a black trenchcoat, with alpha and beta cufflinks. He had those bruised eyes and rounded vowels all the girls go wild for. He had such lithe declensions and long lashes, fluttering my way over a stack of parchment and Xeroxed Loeb editions. I wanted him like a gutter whore, writhing and screaming out dactyls in the night.

At first it was all right. He brought me flowers and I wrote out his letters in the morning. We cut quite the figure on the town—him all darkly mysterious and me with great black cow eyes, staring dreamily into his aorist forms. I would clutch him to my heart and swoon over the trilling consonants, the rough breaths, the muscled inflections. I could smell him on my clothes at night, and he whispered sweet hexameters into my ear.

Then once I conjugated the 3rd person plural aorist of luw as luoi and he slapped me hard with his great, calloused hand. I had a black eye for two weeks. Then I mistranslated gignomai late one wintry eve and he stubbed out a hand-rolled cigarette on my arm. Before long, it became clear that he was a dangerously violent dialect, with serious verb-chart management issues.

But I still loved him. The way he would look at me sometimes, his hair disheveled from a night of frantic translation—my stomach would flutter and my heart would swell, just like in the old days…