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Herodotus' Histories Book 1: Greek Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary
Facing each of the 119 pages of Karl Hude's Greek edition of Herodotus' Histories Book 1 (originally published by Oxford University Press in 1908) is a single page of corresponding vocabulary and intermediate level grammatical commentary. Once readers have memorized the core vocabulary list, they will be able to read the classical Greek and consult all relevant vocabulary and commentary without turning the page.
254 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 21, 2011
Mr. Steadman has rendered a great service for those who wish to read Herodotus in the original Greek. It is, to my knowledge, the only available text of a complete book of Herodotus with a running vocabulary facing each page of text. For beginning or intermediate Greek students who are anxious to make a serious encounter with one of the greatest of Greek writers, this text is indispensable. There are occasional mistakes which I will not bother to elaborate upon here; some are trivial and some a little more serious (e.g., mistranslations in the notes), but the author recognizes the inevitability of such errors and welcomes corrections. The mistakes, moreover, are not so frequent as to undercut the immense value of this remarkably helpful edition.
I sometimes wonder how time consuming it must have been to be a student of the classics in the day before textbooks with running vocabulary became more widely available. I believe Clyde Pharr's Aeneid may have been the first such school text. Apart from that chestnut, there were no others available when I was an undergraduate majoring in classics a few decades ago. Today there are many in this format, superb editions of Horace, Lucretius, Catullus, Homer, and other classical authors. Steadman has also authored an Odyssey (Books 9-12) and Symposium of Plato in the same format as this book.
As for Herodotus, he is is a delightfully absorbing writer. Like many a classical author, he can be read over and over with increasing enjoyment. To call him a "historian" is a misnomer of sorts, because what he writes and how he writes are very different from what we usually think of as "history" from our vantage point in the 21st century. Herodotus is a traveller, a storyteller, an ethnographer, a reporter, a bit of a sociologist. He possesses considerable curiosity about other cultures and has a very open mind when comparing the customs of different peoples with those of the Greeks. Like other Greek writers, he does believe in the superiority of Greek over "barbarian" civilization, but is fascinated by how others live and is always eager to share with readers what he has come to discover about the cultures of other peoples (e.g., Egyptians, Medes, Persians, Thracians, Babylonians).
Herodotus writes in the shadow of Homer, in a world where orality and oral "literary" traditions are still very much the norm. The influence of Homer is unmistakeable, which is to say that the way in which epic conventions have shaped Herodotus' approach to his craft is often very striking. He is the first prose author in Greek, and his style, like that of Homer, is "paratactic," meaning that clauses are "tacked on" one to another with very little subordination. This makes for easy reading, and certainly one of the great pleasures of reading Herodotus is the clarity, simplicity and directness of his Greek. In striking contrast to the extreme objectivity of Homer, he injects himself into the narrative in places too numerous to count, and this accounts in many ways for his charming style. You feel as if you are in the presence of an experienced tour guide, someone who has really been around and has an engaging, informative way of sharing what he knows with you.
I am currently using this text in a high school Advanced Greek class and students have found it to be very useful.
I sometimes wonder how time consuming it must have been to be a student of the classics in the day before textbooks with running vocabulary became more widely available. I believe Clyde Pharr's Aeneid may have been the first such school text. Apart from that chestnut, there were no others available when I was an undergraduate majoring in classics a few decades ago. Today there are many in this format, superb editions of Horace, Lucretius, Catullus, Homer, and other classical authors. Steadman has also authored an Odyssey (Books 9-12) and Symposium of Plato in the same format as this book.
As for Herodotus, he is is a delightfully absorbing writer. Like many a classical author, he can be read over and over with increasing enjoyment. To call him a "historian" is a misnomer of sorts, because what he writes and how he writes are very different from what we usually think of as "history" from our vantage point in the 21st century. Herodotus is a traveller, a storyteller, an ethnographer, a reporter, a bit of a sociologist. He possesses considerable curiosity about other cultures and has a very open mind when comparing the customs of different peoples with those of the Greeks. Like other Greek writers, he does believe in the superiority of Greek over "barbarian" civilization, but is fascinated by how others live and is always eager to share with readers what he has come to discover about the cultures of other peoples (e.g., Egyptians, Medes, Persians, Thracians, Babylonians).
Herodotus writes in the shadow of Homer, in a world where orality and oral "literary" traditions are still very much the norm. The influence of Homer is unmistakeable, which is to say that the way in which epic conventions have shaped Herodotus' approach to his craft is often very striking. He is the first prose author in Greek, and his style, like that of Homer, is "paratactic," meaning that clauses are "tacked on" one to another with very little subordination. This makes for easy reading, and certainly one of the great pleasures of reading Herodotus is the clarity, simplicity and directness of his Greek. In striking contrast to the extreme objectivity of Homer, he injects himself into the narrative in places too numerous to count, and this accounts in many ways for his charming style. You feel as if you are in the presence of an experienced tour guide, someone who has really been around and has an engaging, informative way of sharing what he knows with you.
I am currently using this text in a high school Advanced Greek class and students have found it to be very useful.
October 4, 2013
Another wonderful text for students. I read through the death of Croesus, about half-way through Book 1, and enjoyed it immensely. I was even able to read some of this on a plane. Imagine trying to puzzle through a text like this on a plane, juggling a lexicon, a grammar, the text, and a 5 dollar Coors Light. Inconceivable! Yet Mr. Steadman makes all this possible. Hats off, once again!
January 19, 2014
There are useful things about this edition, but its self-published, self-edited nature betrays it on every page. Too many errors and the commentary has no comments on the content, so you really need two editions in order to take advantage of what Steadman does provide. But the content is Five Stars!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews