As if they were just reading an equation on a backboard. But when texts are read aloud by teachers, you often get the Boris Johnson Eton mumble when he flamboyantly quotes Classical texts – “maynin ayay-day the-aa peleyade-ow Achilley-os”. We forget that Greek tragedies were not plays, but musicals (although maybe the last thing you want to hear after learning you married your mom is a song). The Greeks were word-musicians – how they sounded was as important as what they said.
It always frustrated me how both Greek and Latin seminars put no emphasis on the pronunciation of ancient Greek – the altering tones, the dance of long and short syllables, the flow of vowels punctuated by the crispness of the consonants. What a typical Greek reading class never conveys, however, is the underlying music of the texts, the idea that these texts were read aloud, to gather an audience. To be fair, my view of him comes from Dennsion’s wonderful “Greek Prose Style”, which emphasizes that we read Greek works in translation or in tedious seminars, where the focus is on identifying and synthesizing grammatical puzzles. Herodotus was one of the first works I read in ancient Greek – and maybe I can offer a different perspective from what was a profoundly moving experience.
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