Ancien
Ancien
A WINDOW
TO THE PAST
by benjamin Croen
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22 imagine
I
’VE BEEN A HISTORY and mythology buff since I turned three, when I
received a copy of D’Aulaires’s Greek
myths for my birthday. The stories in
that book showed me an exciting world I’d
never seen: the world of the past. The myths
excited me even though I knew they weren’t
real. No fiction I’d ever read had made me
feel so connected to an actual place and
time. Through these stories and others I read
throughout my elementary school experience, I started to appreciate how our modern
civilization has descended from the world of
two thousand years ago or more.
nt Greek
By the time I was in sixth grade, I wanted to read more works
written in ancient times, but not in the convenient translations found in bookstores. I wanted to gain the deeper sense
of understanding that comes from reading poems and prose
in their original language and form.
The Latin verb trado, ere means either to pass down from
generation to generation, or to surrender. These meanings
are substantially different, but the Romans could easily tell
which meaning applied by using the context of the rest of the
paragraph, something that we rarely need to do in English. A
translation, while it would supply the appropriate meaning,
would deprive a reader of that experience. And translations can
be made several different ways, which can lead to a different
voice or mood than the author might have intended. I wanted
the words as they were originally written and read.
Fortunately, my school offered Latin, and after a few
years, I was able to translate poetry, such as Catullus’s love
poems or Ovid’s advice, by myself. But I still had work to do
if I was going to read other ancient texts. The description of
CTY’s Ancient Greek course promised to give me the tools
to help me do that. I signed up, excited for the chance to
study the language that would open new windows to the
ancient stories I loved.
basic training
After picking up my textbooks on the first day of class, I flipped
one open to a random page and attempted to read something.
Needless to say, never having learned the Greek alphabet, I
failed at this. Later that evening, the Ancient Greek students
from our dorm gathered for our first study hall to take a pretest. We all had a lot to learn.
We started with the alphabet. The word alphabet is derived
from the Greek Αλφάβητος, or Alphabetos (from the first
two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta). Things
became somewhat tricky at the letter nu (N), or ν in its lowercase form. The similarity between it and our V had us tripping
over the simplest words; for example, the word Άνθρωπος,
meaning man, or human being, is pronounced Anthropos, not
Avthropos. Still, we were able to transliterate Ancient Greek
by the end of the first day. The next day, we translated a short
passage about the life of the pessimistic farmer Dicaeopolis,
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who, along with his family, played a large part in our education,
as he and his family appeared in nearly every story we read.
In addition to learning a new alphabet, we also had to
understand some unfamiliar features of Greek grammar,
such as the definite article. Essentially a more descriptive version of the, the definite article varies according to the noun
it modifies, allowing you to immediately determine the case,
gender, and number of the noun. Knowing all the forms of
the definite article was key to deciphering the texts we would
soon encounter.
beyond language
As we became more proficient, we read from Herodotus’s
Histories, from which we learned not just about the writing
style of the Ancient Greeks but the history of the times in
which they wrote. Herodotus tends to exaggerate at times,
making his estimations and calculations somewhat comical.
For example, he reckons that Xerxes’ army at the beginning
of the second Persian War drank dry all the streams on their
march toward Greece. This, along with the many interesting
(and true) anecdotes he adds in, makes his works a very entertaining history. We read other material from the time as well,
such as the well-known Oedipus Rex, and Iphigenia in Tauris,
about the struggle of Agamemnon’s daughter to return home
with her brother, Orestes, and his faithful servant, Pylades.
As we learned to read, we became comfortable with the
quirks and idioms of the language, and, most important, we
began to think differently. Reading histories, plays, and even
passages from the New Testament, we learned not only Ancient
Greek, but about the people who spoke the language, how they
spoke it, and how it has influenced modern languages.
In the end, CTY Ancient Greek wasn’t just a language
course. It was a chance to explore a culture that has fascinated
me for most of my life.
i
Benjamin Croen is a sophomore
at Phillips andover academy in
massachusetts, but new York city is
his hometown. his interests include the
classics, writing, reading, mathematics,
traveling, theater, and singing.
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