GREEK 1104 - Beginning Homeric Greek

Spring. 4 credits. Letter grades only.

Forbidden Overlap: due to an overlap in content, students will not receive credit for both GREEK 1101 and GREEK 1104.
Co-meets with GREEK 5114.

A. Nussbaum.

This course offers a ground up introduction to the vocabulary and grammar of Homeric Greek with the goal of reading Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as soon as possible. Once students learn the language of the Iliad and Odyssey, they can move on to other works written in roughly the same formulaic diction, ranging from Hesiod’s Theogony to the early philosophical verses of Empedocles and Parmenides. Teaching Beginning Homeric Greek at Cornell, affectionately known as ‘baby’ Greek, harkens back almost 100 years to the influential and popular courses of Professor Harry Caplan. In fact, this course uses an updated version of the same textbook used in Caplan’s beginning Greek courses.