The proverb was about breaking a vase before the door, and probably meant to fail before reaching one's goal. I'm very confused as to from where I know about its existence and whether or not it exists at all, so I turn to you for help.

For context, I've probably read it somewhere in the context of Odysseus' crew incident on Thrinacia, but I'm not 100% sure. It's possible that it's from Homer, but I've searched four of my translations and failed to find it.

I'd very much love to find the original phrasing of this, because I want one of my tragedy's characters to use it if it's indeed a real ancient Greek proverb.

In the verb ἀμύνω, the upsilon is normally long. However, CGL says that in the future active and middle it becomes short. This doesn't seem like it would affect the accentuation, so I assume the only way to know would be from the meter in poetry.

Is this some kind of general phenomenon that would apply to other verbs? If so, was it a poetic artifact or an organic thing in the language? A word like ἀμυνῶ is short-short-long, which may be slightly easier to fit into the meter than a short-long-long, but the latter isn't impossible.

Another possibility is that this isn't even really true for ἀμυνῶ, but one poet just pretended one time that the upsilon was short for the sake of the meter.

This must seem like such a strange question, but I take classics and in my class today we were joking about Odysseus being Calypso’s boy toy, of which my teacher said there actually was a word for and he said it. However I can’t remember it 💔 he then also said another word for it and it began with ca I think but he didn’t want to tell us what it meant…so if you have any knowledge of any words meaning boy toy or like that pls help 🙏🙏🙏

I also have an irrational fear that he is on here cause tbh he seems like the type, no offence

As mentioned I was wondering if anyone could translate anything at all from the Lycian tomb from turkey (roughly 40km southeast from the city of fathive, turkey). The tomb was found off a hiking trail, with no signs of marking toward it and I couldn't find any evidence of its existence on the internet at all. Thanks in advance and sorry if the photo is hard to read, it's the best I have.

HI! I need help on a lesser god called Penthos, his meany is sorrow, and grief. I’m trying to find out what his symbol are and if he has any type of food like some of the other higher gods/godesses.

Hi folks. I just finished the Odyssey. I didn't expect to cry big tears towards the end >!when much enduring Odysseus meets his father!< —as my Greek is still very sketchy, but it turns out not as bad as I thought it was. Anyways, looking for some ideas for where to turn to next. Thank you.

For my level, idk but I've done Pharr, read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and a few books of the Septuagint, all with translations for help.

/ I meant The Iliad and The Odyssey*. Sorry.

I'm aware that Ancient Greek has "πυρφόρος" for a bearer of specifically sacred fire (and also for non-sacred fires, but I'm focused on sacred usage), and a bunch of terms of burnt offerings---but I'm having a hard time finding terms referring to the fire that consumes the offering itself. The only reference I can think of is Acts 2:3 (I'm aware it's koine rather than "ancient") seems to use the term "πύρ" and seems to not be referring to a fire at all.

I'm left wondering: did Ancient Greek authors tend to have a "set" way to refer to Divine Fire, or the fire that consumes the offering? Was there similar attention given to the spark/ember/touch used to ignite or transfer that fire?

Or was that not a concept/practice particularly present in their religious rites (or otherwise not consistently termed---which given how regimented religious rites tend to be, I wouldn't expect it to be an established concept but have no preferred way to refer to it)?

Past the LSJ, in order to find more phrasal references, I'd have to actually read the corpus of Geek texts we have, which is beyond my skill and beyond the time I'm able to allot to this sidequest, sadly.

Recently I bought a copy of Smyth’s grammar (the 1956 revised edition) to help with my learning. One thing I especially wanted to look into more was how sound changes and phonetic constraints affected how different verb forms were made. 462. has a nice chart of all the personal endings in their original forms, before applying sound changes, and I saw that the sigma for the 2nd Sing Active Indicative comes from -σι. Smyth then says in 463. b. 2. that, when added to λυο/ε, gives us λυε-σι > λυεϊ > λυει, with -ς added later.

From what I understand, the -σ- drops out between vowels, hence λυεϊ, and why -σι (from -τι) in the 3rd Sing drops to give us λύει (correct me if I’m wrong there).

So that leads to my question: why was the -ς added? Was it to distinguish better from the 3rd Sing? Did it help to preserve the earlier association of the sigma sound with the second person? Was it a sort of metathesis? I flipped through other pages of Smyth and had trouble finding anything, so if anyone has good insight I would like to better understand the processes behind all this. Thanks!

Καὶ σὺ τέκνον, καὶ μὴ βράδῡνε μηδʼ ἐφʼ αὑτοῦ. Τί ὁρᾷς.

Καὶ σὺ τέκνον, καὶ μὴ βράδῡνε μηδʼ ἐφʼ αὑτοῦ. Τί ὁρᾷς.

After almost believing in the things that dr Ammon hillman said about not having the accurate translation of the New Testament I want to ask how can we know for sure we have the right translation

Greetings,

I am doing a fantasy world building project and I am trying translate some of the deity names into Greek.

They don't need to be perfect for sure, but, can someone phonetically spell out the name of each of the gods I have tried to translate here? So I can check the translation of them is correct?

ΚΡΥΣΕΙΣ - ΖΟΓΟΘ - ΣΑΛΙΞ - ΑΓΛΑΙΑ - ΔΟΜΙΤΥΣ - ΦΥΛΑΚΤΟΣ - ΜΥΡΟΝ - ΘΕΟΝΟΣ - ΓΑΛΙΔΟΡΑ - ΛΥΚΟΣ - VΛΑΣΣΙΣ - ΖΟΤΙΚΥΣ

Edit 2: For reference. These should be:

Chryseis - Xenoth - Salix - Aglaia - Domitus - Phylaktos - Myron - Theonos - Galidora - Lykos - Vlassis - Zoticus

I'm aware the V in the second to last one wouldn't exist but, ignore that letter, what would the sound of each of these be? and, are there any glaring mistakes? I know little about ancient Greek linguistics so far.

My thanks!

Edit: Hoping this isn't in the wrong place. I assume the sticky thread is just for English to Greek.

My textbook gives me "you (in this case) escaped the notice of..." and I am kind of bored of using that same exact translation over and over. Any way to throw some spices in there? Thank you!

What do you think of the Granville Sharp rule? Do ancient texts outside the Bible confirm this rule?

I'm a retired community college physics teacher, and my retirement project has been learning ancient Greek and writing software for ancient Greek. I think my wife is happy that it was that and not model railroads.

In college textbooks, my experience has been that everyone bemoans the fact that the book has a volume of several liters, and yet publishers have an irrestistible set of economic incentives not to publish shorter books. Part of it is that different professors have different opinions about what should be cut, and different opinions about what would be absolutely unacceptable to cut. But I think there's also just the fact that classes on X get taught by people who are massive geeks about X, and who therefore outrageously overestimate how much about X their students are really going to learn and retain.

A funny example I just came across is the spelling of the present infinitive of ἐράω. Does it have an iota subscript, or not? OK, time's up, put down your pencils and check your own answer: >!ἐρᾶν!<

Major and Laughy present this fact, with an explanation. But the truth is that apparently even the best Byzantine scribes, as well modern editors, were not completely sure about this, because you see both spellings in the wild, with and without the iota subscript. The thing that's amusing to me about this is that even though experts do it both ways, a text like M&L thinks that every undergraduate taking first-semester Greek really needs to know the right answer and the reason why.

Well, I'm just some random amateur, so maybe I wouldn't feel so confident about my evaluation that this is silly, except that I've spent a couple of years of my life writing a large software project that handles this kind of thing, and only today have I come across this issue. Seriously, is some guy studying to be a minister really going to do a better job at comforting grieving widows because he knows whether this word has an iota subscript?

For those who don't care about textbooks and just want to geek out on Greek, here is my understanding of why it is this way, which may not even be right:

!I think the ειν in infinitives is a contraction of εεν, which makes it a spurious diphthong. The contraction εει is supposed to produce α when it's a spurious diphthing, ᾳ only when it's genuine.!<

what are recommendations for the most affordable summer schools for beginners ancient greek- preferably online?

Hello, i study ancient history and i came across a drawing of a tombstone drawn by someone in a previous class and i was wondering if anyone could translate this as i cant seem to figure it out!

I think I've got this worked out, but wanted some external validation. I am trying to work out a single word to describe an image of a woman laughing and am investigating the alternatives in Attic Greek. I'd be grateful if anyone can verify whether I have conjugated these correctly and whether my translations are correct.

Thanks in advance

Brendan

Present tense
Base verb: I laugh – γελάω

Formation: present stem+ ει => γελά+ει and α+ ει = ᾳ,

So:
γελᾳ

Translation:
she laughs

Imperfect ἐγελα
Formation: augment + present stem + ε(ν)

ἐ+γελα+εν and α+ε = α

So:
ἐγελα(ν)

Translation:
she was laughing (continuously)

Aorist ἐγελάσε

Formation: augment + present stem + σ+ε(ν)

ἐ+γελά+σ+ε(ν)

So:
ἐγελάσε(ν)

Translation:

She laughed (and completed laughing)

Present Participle

Formation: present stem (γελά)+ουσα and a+ου = ῶ

So:
γελῶσα

Translation:
she is laughing

Aorist Participle

Formation: aorist stem (γελάσα) + σα

So
γελάσασα

Translation:
she was laughing (and she completed laughing)

Hello everyone,
I am an intermediate leven student of ancient Greek looking to improve my reading ability in it via this technique I found (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTWKpNy96EM&t=533s).
But it requires there be audio of the language, of which I can hardly find any. What are some good audiobooks or recordings of ancient Greek texts, especially attic? I have found these (:https://ancientgreek.eu/index.html), but they are all horribly expensive?

Hi, Im dabbling in a bit of greek pronounciation and im pretty confused i heard that attic has 2 major pronounciations erasmian and reconstructed with reconstructed supposedly being the one that is the most accurate and that koine also has 2 variants of one pronounciation, early reconstructed koine and late reconstructed koine. Okay so is the info i have thus far even right or not, for example when reading plato and herodotus you pronounce the greek differently then you would when reading the new testament no? Thanks I'd appreciate some clarification

Hi all. In Athenaze, it says that you should immediately add all accents/breathing marks/etc. to a letter when you write it, rather than waiting until you've written the word - "because you might forget it". I assume that is general best practice. I actually find it more natural to first write all the letters, and then go back and add the diacritical signs. Just like in English, where I would first write the word, and then dot all the i's and cross the t's. Maybe I should just do what comes natural.

Any thoughts? Thanks,

Markus

Hi i've been planning to learn ancient greek and the only videos of spoken ancient greek i heard was of koine so I wonder are the pronounciations of the two the same or not if they arent can someone link me to a sample of spoken attic greek. Thanks

Hi guys, Lately, I discovered existence of series called Patrologia Graeca by J.P. Migne. As I've been reading about it, 2 questions emerged. Maybe some of you have more info/experience and know the answers:

1. is Patrologia Graeca still a valuable series? I mean, it was published ~150 years ago. Is it still used as a reliable text source in modern scholarship (or at least in some private study for expanding exposure to Greek literature?
2. according to Wikipedia, there's a republication by the Centre for Patristic Studies. Did anyone purchased any volume from them? I would like to know more details about it - is it just a reprint of pdfs available in public domain (or maybe it was retyped again in better quality)? is it hardcover? maybe one can upload an exemplary page how it looks like.

Thanks a lot.

For anyone learning with this book and are tired of flipping back and forth.

I'm learning off of the study book "Introduction to Attic Greek" where they mention that though the Dual declensions are listed they are not used in the Exercises.

I was wondering if it's worth it to learn them for when I start reading original Attic Greek texts in how frequently one would encounter the use of the Dual forms of nouns and their declensions?

Hi everyone,

I'am trying to assess the use of the Aorist in the Lysistrata 16-19:

χαλεπή τοι γυναικῶν ἔξοδος.

Ἡ μὲν γὰρ ἡμῶν περὶ τὸν ἄνδρ’ ἐκύπτασεν,

ἡ δ’ οἰκέτην ἤγειρεν, ἡ δὲ παιδίον

κατέκλινεν, ἡ δ’ ἔλουσεν, ἡ δ’ ἐψώμισεν.

It cannot be tragic Aorist, since this is only found in the 1. pers. singular with some verbs. In my opinion, it cannot be gnomic Aorist either, since the pronoun ἡμῶν clearly situates the action in a particular setting (hic et nunc). What do you think? Thanks for replying!

Achilles Tatius (koine) habitually uses the pluperfect γεγόνεσαν, without the augment. I don't own a specifically koine grammar or know a good public-domain one online (suggestions?), but this web page describing NT Greek says, "In the pluperfect, the augment is often omitted."

Obviously it's optional in epic Greek, and I suppose in lyric poetry, etc.

I can't find anything in Smyth about the augment's ever being optional in the pluperfect, although I don't think he generally talks about koine at all.

Is the augment for the pluperfect mandatory in Attic prose, and optional in all other cases?