Greek Prose Style
Home Page for Greek 701 at CUNY
Last revision: 1/08/07
All rights reserved
The syllabus
has direct links to almost all the materials assigned in the course:
Greek texts, bibliography, ancient criticism, an essay on Loose and
Periodic Style, and more.
Contents
About This Page
This is the home page for Greek 701, Greek
Rhetoric and Prose Style, a course in Greek prose style and prose
composition taught by Hardy Hansen at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. Students from CUNY, Fordham University, and New
York University are enrolled as part of the consortium in Classics
among the three schools. In spring 2007 the class will on Wednesdays from
4:15 to 6:15 p.m. in the CUNY Graduate Center at 365 Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan. The first class meeting is on Wednesday, January 31.
The website for this course (which is now being updated for the spring 2007 semester) is intended as a resource which will be
useful for anyone interested in reading and appreciating Attic prose.
Everyone can access directly most of the materials of the
course.
The materials posted here will remain available; they will be
periodically updated, supplemented, and corrected. This web site, and
not any paper handouts, now contains the version "of record".
Permission is granted to download materials posted here for your own
personal use or for use in teaching, provided that the authorship of
such materials is properly acknowledged.
Comments are welcome. Just e-mail me at hhansen@gc.cuny.edu.
---Hardy Hansen
Syllabus
| Bibliography
| Criticism
| Essay on
Style | Style
Scoresheet
Plan and Goals of the Course
In General
Greek 701 is a course for those who are beginning their graduate
studies. Its aim is to improve students' ability to read and understand
Attic Greek.
Reading
We read selections from Greek prose authors of the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C.E., ranging from Hekataios to Demosthenes. Assignments
are fairly brief (about five Oxford pages a week) so that we can
translate and analyze each selection closely as we follow the
development of Attic prose style. In particular, the course seeks to
examine the nature and development of periodic sentence structure in
Attic Greek. Most of the selections assigned are available, via the
Perseus web site, by clicking on the course syllabus.
We spend the first several weeks on Lysias, in order to review Attic
morphology and syntax and to establish a "baseline" for discussions of
loose and periodic sentence structure and of prose style in general.
Writing
The weekly written assignments consist at first of English sentences to
be rendered into Greek in order to review certain basic points of
syntax such as conditional sentences, indirect statement, and
correlatives. There are also verb synopses.
Later in the course the students are asked to compose short
paragraphs of connected prose in order to enhance their understanding
of the varied and elegant ways in which writers of Attic prose
structured their thoughts.
Finally the students, while continuing to compose Greek, compare the
styles of various authors, first in informal "sketches" and later in a
formal term paper.
Syllabus | Bibliography | Criticism | Essay on
Style | Style
Scoresheet
Course Materials On Line
Most of the materials which students use in Greek 701--Greek texts,
introductory sketches of various authors, translated excerpts from
ancient critics, bibliography, written assignments, an essay by the
instructor on loose style and periodic style, and a "style scoresheet"
highlighting notable points of style--are available on line. Either go
to the syllabus
and click in the appropriate place or just click on the "selection
bars" which appear throughout this site.
Woodhouse's English-Greek dictionary is now available online at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/Woodhouse/. Click here to connect.
Syllabus | Bibliography | Criticism | Essay on
Style | Style
Scoresheet
Graphics and Greek
For technical reasons it was not practical to embed Greek font in
on-line documents distributed in "text" form. So I have had recourse to
three other ways of presenting Greek:
- For most authors read in Greek 701, you can click on the
assignment in the syllabus and go directly to the Greek text as
provided by the Perseus Project. This also gives you access to superb
morphological and lexical tools, thanks to Perseus.
- In other materials for the course, I provide links to scanned
images of Greek text or even present the entire document as an image.
In doing so I have tried to strike a balance between file size and
image quality. If your browser sizes the images to fit the screen, you may need to disable this feature and show the image at full size.
- For brief Greek quotations embedded within English text, I have
used a simple and self-explanatory system of transliteration (not TLG
beta code, with which most students in the course are not familiar).
Syllabus | Bibliography | Criticism | Essay on
Style | Style
Scoresheet
Classics at CUNY
For information on the Ph.D. Program in Classics at the City University
Graduate Center, click here.
For information on the Latin/Greek Institute, click here.
To learn about Classics events in the New York area, click here.
To return to the top of this document, click here.
Syllabus | Bibliography | Criticism | Essay on
Style | Style
Scoresheet