Learn Ancient Greek

Introduction

The resources below are by no means comprehensive, but are a very good start indeed for anyone wanting to learn Ancient Greek. For Ancient Greek queries, you can use the fora.

A typical inhibition is the different alphabet, but this should not be an issue as one can master it in one lesson. After all, the Greek letters are fewer than the Latin ones and most of them are the same.

Moreover, Greek is much easier to read than English, or French for that matter, since it is read as it is spelled.

It should be noted that you probably already know a hell of a lot of Greek. How is that possible?

Earlier, when the Romans had conquered the East, Greek continued to be spoken there. Indeed, from the second century BC it had a great influence on Latin and consequently, directly or through Latin, on practically every other language. This was a long process, as a result of which today many of our languages can be seen as a kind of semi-Greek or crypto-Greek.^[1]

Here is a small list of Ancient Greek words you already know.

Ancient Greek Grammars and Textkbooks

PDF books

The First Year of Greek, James T. Allen
Greek Grammar, William W. Goodwin
First Greek Book, John Williams White
From alpha to omega, A Beginning Course in Classical Greek, Anne Groton (2013)
A Brief Introduction to New Testament Greek, Samuel G. Green
Grammar of New Testament Greek, Friedrich Blass
Greek, an Intensive Course, Hardy Hansen and Gerald M. Quinn download from kupdf
Answer Keys to H. Hansen and G. Quinn, Greek: An Intensive Course, 2nd revised ed. Fordham UP, 1992.
Greek Prose Composition, North and Hillard
Greek Grammar, Herbert Weir Smyth
A First Greek Course, Sir William Smith
First Greek Grammar Syntax, W. Gunion Rutherford
First Greek Grammar Accidence, W. Gunion Rutherford
Homeric Greek – A Book For Beginners, Clyde Pharr
A Greek Reader: For the Use of Schools, Cornelius Conway Felton
A Greek grammar for schools and colleges, Herbert Weir Smyth
The Eton Greek grammar, G. N. Wright (5MB)
An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach, C.A.E. Luschnig
Syntax of Classical Greek, Basil L. Gildersleeve html on Perseus
Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans, An Intermediate Greek Reader, Greek Text with Running Vocabulary and Commentary, Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis (more free books from Faenum Publishing)
Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus Greek Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary and more resources from the Greek summer school (including video lessons)

Web sites

Ancient Greek for Everyone, Essential Morphology and Syntax for Beginning Greek, Wilfred E. Major and Michael Laughy
A school grammar of Attic Greek, Thomas Dwight Goodell (pdf version)
Hellenistic Greek lessons, Micheal Palmer
A Digital Tutorial for Ancient Greek based on John William White's First Greek Book
Wiktionary: About Ancient Greek, Ancient Greek dialectal declension
Wikipedia: Ancient Greek, Ancient Greek accent Ancient Greek enclitics, Ancient Greek appendices
Greek Lexica for Students and Readers (a repository of dictionaries for readers of Ancient Greek Texts so that while reading a text they have the words readily available)
Greek resources, by Stephen M. Trzaskoma
Ancient Greek Tutorials, AtticGreek.org
Ariadne: Resources for Athenaze
Classics Tuition, resources for students and teachers of Classics, Vocabulary Lists, Specimen Papers
Particles in Ancient Greek Discourse: Five Volumes Exploring Particle Use across Genre, Anna Bonifazi, Annemieke Drummen, Mark de Kreij

Material in Modern Greek

Γραμματική της αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας - Γυμνασίου/Λυκείου | html
Αρχαία ελληνική γλώσσα - Α' Γυμνασίου
Μαθήματα πολυτονικού
Ανθολόγιο αττικής πεζογραφίας, Χρήστος Χριστοδούλου (50 θέματα • 120 παρατηρήσεις γραμματικής & συντακτικού • ασκήσεις εμπέδωσης • θέματα πανελλαδικών εξετάσεων • κατάλογος 230 ανώμαλων ρημάτων)
Odyssey with comments and clickable translations

Material in French

Précis de grammaire grecque, html version Anne-Marie Boxus
Grammaire portative du grec ancien, Fontaine Didier
Grammaire de grec ancien, J.L. Burnouf
Cours de Grec, Alessandra Lukinovich
Textes grecs et traductions

Material in German

Griechische Grammatik pdf book (Karl Brugmann, Leopold Cohn, Albert Thumb, 1913)
Hermidion, Eine kleine Begleitgrammatik für den Start ins Griechische
Graecum-Grammatik, Universität Wien
Online-Kurs Altgriechisch
Sprachkurs für Altgriechisch, E. Gottwein
Materialien für den Sprachunterricht
Altgriechisch für Philosophie-Studierende
Griechisches Lesebuch, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

Dictionaries

Meta-Dictionaries on the Web

These are portals which provide search results from multiple sources.

LSJ.gr (containing English, French, Spanish, Russian, Modern Greek translations as well as Woodhouse's English to Ancient Greek dictionary in a wiki format with full, diacritics-insensitive text search)
Logeion University of Chicago multiple dictionary (and corpus) lookup tool
Eulexis Includes the big Bailly and an ancient Greek lemmatiser/inflection tool.
Lexilogos Dictionaries Search forms for various dictionaries from a single page and other resources.

Free PDF Dictionaries

Greek > English

An English-Greek Lexicon, C. D. Yonge
A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, R.J. Cunliffe
A Patristic Greek Lexicon, G. W. H. Lampe
A Lexicon to Aeschylus, William Linwood
Illustrated Dictionary to Xenophon’s Anabasis, John Williams White
A Greek-English School Lexicon, Thomas Dix Hincks
Schrevelius' Greek Lexicon, (Ancient Greek <> English)
A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology, William Smith
A new Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman partly based upon the Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology by William Smith, Charles Anthon (110 MB)
A Lexicon of the Greek Language: For the Use of Colleges and Schools, Rev. John Allen Giles, 1839

Greek > French

Grand Bailly, Dictionnaire Grec Français, 1935, (Ancient Greek > French, revised modern edition published in 2020, free pdf download, 2609 pages, 32 MB)
Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, Émile Boisacq (1916), 1123 pages
Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, Pierre Chantraine (1968), 1387 pages

Greek > Modern Greek

Λεξικό αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας α, β, γ, Γυμνασίου, 307 σελίδες, 4 ΜΒ
Ετυμολογικό λεξικό αρχαίας ελληνικής γλώσσας, Ευάγγελος Μαντουλίδης, 255 σελίδες, 2 ΜΒ
Ετυμολογικόν λεξικόν της αρχαίας ελληνικής, σε καθαρεύουσα, Johann Baptist Hofmann, Αντώνιος Παπανικολάου (1950), 543 σελίδες, 50 ΜΒ

Greek > Swedish

Hand-lexikon öfwer grekiska språket

Greek > Romanian

Golescu letter A, letter B, letter E,
Daniel Bărnuţ, Emeric Hubert, Jozsef Kovâcs New Testament Dictionary
Carrez, Morel, Badea New Testament Dictionary, 1991, same from kupdf

Print Dictionaries (not free)

The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, Franco Montanari, £61.21 or $110 from the US. The English translation of Montanari's Italian dictionary Vocabolario della lingua greca. This is by far the most authoritative and contemporary dictionary of Ancient Greek (the only one which is more recent is the Cambridge Greek Lexicon, see below) with example phrases translated. It brings together 140,000 headwords taken from the literature, papyri, inscriptions and other sources of the archaic period up to the 6th Century CE, and occasionally beyond. Read more about it, access reviews and download a 28 page pdf preview
Cambridge Greek Lexicon, issued in 2021 in two volumes, hardcover, £59.78 or $84.99 from the US. This is the dictionary that would be recommended for students for its modern lexicographical approach. The editors have re-examined the source material and provided translations in contemporary English. Read more about it.
A Greek-English Lexicon, Henry G. Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, Roderick McKenzie, P. G. W. Glare; £136 hardcover/£24 paperback or $187 from the US. This is the 1996 edition of the LSJ. The new Revised Supplement is a complete replacement for the 1968 Supplement containing nearly twice the size of the 1968 edition; with over 20,000 entries, it adds to the dictionary words and forms from papyri and inscriptions discovered between 1940 and the 1990s as well as a host of other revisions, updatings, and corrections to the main dictionary.
Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Robert Beekes, £88 (paperback version) or $125 from the US. Beekes takes full account of Mycenaean Greek, the best and most updated etymological dictionary of Ancient Greek.

Free Software

Diogenes is an environment for reading and searching through texts in Latin and Ancient Greek. It consists of two connected projects, the Diogenes desktop application, which has been in existence for nearly 20 years, and the new DiogenesWeb webapp.
Eulexis is a lemmatiser and multi-dictionary reference for Ancient Greek texts

Fora

Other

Digital Classicist Directory of Classics tools and resources in wiki format
Greek Polytonic Spelling Checker for Firefox
Polytonic keyboard driver for Windows, iPad, iPhone
Polytonic spell checker for Windows, Mac, Linux, Firefox

References

↑ Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, A history of the Greek language from Its Origins to the Present (Historia de la lengua griega)

[1] Francisco Rodriguez Adrados, A history of the Greek language from Its Origins to the Present (Historia de la lengua griega)

[1]