Ancient Greek Easy Reading
Below are some extracts from my correspondence with Constantine Hadavas. It starts from his edition of Daphnis and Chloe, which contains an introduction, running vocabulary and grammatical support, rather like the texts from Reading Greek.
–I’ve now–as of yesterday– worked through to the end of the end of Daphnis and Chloe on my own, and indeed with input from your edition which I got from Amazon UK.
I thought it was very good, and it opened a whole new word of Intermediate Greek Readers to me. I do come across people wanting something comparatively easy to read in Ancient Greek, and I would value your opinion as to which of these texts they as grown-ups are likely to find most interesting.
—Of the Greek texts I’ve written for students, the order of difficulty from easiest to most challenging would probably be:
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Cebes’ Tablet + Prodicus’ “Choice of Heracles”
An Ephesian Tale (more pulpy and “fun” than Daphnis and Chloe, but not as “great” literature-wise)
Lucian’s On the Death of Peregrinus
Commentaries not my own that I’d recommend:
Cashman Kerr Prince (what a great name!), Chariton’s Callirhoe Book 1 (alas, just book 1, but it will give you a good sense of the different flavors of the ancient Greek Romance novel when compared to Xenophon of Ephesus’ and Longus’ respective works).
I’m not a big fan of Stephen Nimis and Edgar Evan Hayes’ commentaries (sometimes their vocab is off, and they offer little or no help with historical, cultural, and literary questions), but I do love Lucian, especially when he is parodying Herodotus, so their edition of Lucian’s On the Syrian Goddess is worth reading.
Speaking of Herodotus, a classic text of selections with an excellent student commentary (even though it is nearly 100 years old!) is: Amy Barbour, Selections from Herodotus.
And of course you should check out Steadman’s commentaries (he’s a machine!). Best for vocabulary help and grammatical review, they are freely available as PDFs on his website (nice!) and cover many major authors, including Plato and Homer.
I think the most interesting thing here is that this material exists! It used to be that you had the established peaks of Homer, Aeschylus and so on with advanced undergraduate level notes or the New Testament or things like the Ancient Greek translation of Harry Potter. On this subject, Wikipedia has a list of modern literature translated into dead languages (not being Latin).
I was also taken by the printable translation sheets on Steadman’s site. I would be even more taken by texts in double-spaced pdf for annotation rather than translation so that one didn’t spend time downloading and double-spacing texts from Perseus.
Referring to Kosta’s suggestions above, my question would be which of these apart from Daphnis and Chloe would be most interesting to grown-ups, since to my mind there’s something very studenty about Lucian. Maybe the Cyclops since everyone has heard of satyr plays but knowledge tends to extend no further.
As for getting these texts from other sources, I think Steadman says his hard-copy versions are only available from Amazon, though you can also download them from his site. The others you can try looking for on something like https://www.bookfinder.com/. (Blackwell’s seems to have some but not all of the texts edited by Kosta Hadavas.)
Updates
As at 22 December 2023, I have now come across a very interesting posting by Jenny Teichmann that suggests a rather different selection of materials; and from Jenny’s site, I learn that the Amy Barbour Selections from Herodotus is online here.
Constantine Hadavas writes (on 1 January 2024): I’m currently working on a version of Chariton’s novel, Callirhoe (the first surviving novel in literary history). It precedes Longus’ work by 1-2 centuries and is twice as long. It is not as sophisticated a text as Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, but it is very readable (and contains some interesting proto-feminist elements). It also evinces the (sometimes creaky) underpinnings of all future narrative projects that later coalesced into the modern novel. In some ways, it is more novelistic than Longus’ text in terms of plot design, setting, and characterization. I expect to be finished with it (it’ll probably end up being 500-600 pages) sometime in fall 2024.
Notes of an idealist 