Morice's Stories in Attic Greek [Greek]

The idea here is to provide beginners with stories that are easier to read than real Greek. Two things about Mahoney's reprint deserve praise. (1) The font is very large, about as large as you will ever find in a Greek text, which increases reading pleasure. (2) Morice's end notes are now at the bottom of the text, making it much more user friendly. Other than that, Mahoney has not added or changed the original too much, missing the chance to give more helps. Afterall, this book is designed for beginners. Now the syntax of this book really is easy, as far as it goes. Morice himself wrote in the original preface: "The syntax of an ordinary sentence of simple Attic furnishes sufficient occupation for the intellegence of an average schoolboy." What is unfortunate is that the vocabulary is unnecessarily large and rare. In almost every paragraph will be found a rare word that beginners won't know, and in fact is so rare that it may not be seen again during normal reading. In most of these cases a much more common word exists, that the beginner will either know or needs to learn first. Some examples: DIACRAOMAI instead of APOKTEINW on page 36, EIRKTH instead of FULAKH on page 17, KALUBH instead of OIKIA on page 38. There are also many examples of common Greek words having meanings different from the usual ones beginners learn and need to master. For example on page 41 ANAIREW, which usually means "I take up" or often "I kill" here means "I reply." Now the idea Morice had is to teach beginners more words and meanings of words, but if your purpose is to provide easy Greek, why load it with vocabulary which the beginner is forced to look up. Because of this, novices will not really be able to take advantage of the easy syntax to read large blocks of Greek quickly and easily. Instead they struggle with rare words and are always flipping back to the glossary. Glossing the rarer words are on the bottom of the page would have made this less of a problem. Another problem is that the book ends with many passages adapted from Thucydides dealing with Greek history that I found boring and hard to follow. The historical events and characters seem obscure, and again why make it difficult for beginners to keep track of who is beseiging whom. Still, most of stories are fun, and more advanced students will improve their Greek. True beginners may be better off with H.D. Rouses' Greek Boy at Home, which is available free at Googlebooks.

If you've ever heard someone say that Classical Greek should be taught exclusively on ancient texts, this little book is here to prove them wrong. "Stories in Attic Greek" is a large collection of easy texts composed by a teacher of old, and the one you can trust. Unlike many classicists today, F. D. Morice really knew Greek and was able to write a stunning variety of short stories in an approachable style. Anyone learning Classical Greek should start using this book well before they're done with the grammar, and should have read it from cover to cover before taking up their Xenophon or Lysias. The editor, A. Mahoney, has done a very good job. Her "Hints for Reading" are useful throughout. "Read in order rather than skipping around looking for the main verb and its subject. Get used to the Greek word order..." (p.8): this enlightened remark is the exact opposite of what some teachers do with their students. The texts are followed by a vocabulary which is to the point in almost every detail. This makes the book a self-sufficient text to leaf through and enjoy.