occasional Greek

[ursula]

eller and I were chatting about trying to read some ancient Greek (I studied it in undergrad but am very rusty; eller has learned a bit on her own.) I'm nominating Procopius' scurrilous sixth-century Secret History, since I'm interested in late antiquity. You can find a Greek text on Perseus; I also recommend this English translation transcribed from the Loeb Classical Library edition, with its associated notes.

The nice thing about Perseus texts, if your Greek is as rusty as mine, is that you can click on every single word to bring up a list of the possible grammatical forms and a link to a dictionary entry (the standard choice here is LSJ, which stands for Liddell-Scott-Jones). You do have to know some Greek grammar words to interpret the results, though you might be able to get by with Latin grammar, a basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet, and the fact that aorist is a past tense. It's also convenient that Greek, unlike Latin, has definite articles, so you can often figure out what role a noun is playing using the definite article.

The beginning of the Secret History is full of rhetorical flourishes, so let's pick up at line 11, where the plot seems to start:

[11]. Ἦν τῷ Βελισαρίῳ γυνή, ἧς δὴ ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν λόγοις ἐμνήσθην, πάππου μὲν καὶ πατρὸς ἡνιόχων, ἔν τε Βυζαντίῳ καὶ Θεσσαλονίκῃ τὸ ἔργον τοῦτο ἐνδειξαμένων, μητρὸς δὲ τῶν τινος ἐν θυμέλῃ πεπορνευμένων.

My very rough and literal translation is:

Belisarius had a wife, of whom previously in accounts I have recalled, and of a grandfather and father being charioteers, this work being exhibited in Byzantium and Thessalonica, and of a mother of the prostitutes in the theater [literally, altar].

Dewing (Loeb classical library) makes it:

Belisarius had a wife, whom I have had occasion to mention in the previous books; her father and grandfather were charioteers who had given exhibition of their skill in both Byzantium and Thessalonica, and her mother was one of the prostitutes attached to the theatre.

Let's chat about individual words and grammatical constructions in the comments?

Comments

[landofnowhere]

I knew a bit of Greek once, though I'm finding it hard going even with the lookup tool! (Though I do at least recognize the μὲν ... δὲ construction, I think.)

Am I correct that there there are no verb equivalents to "had/were/was" in the original, but they are instead implied by the grammar?

[ursula]

Basically! The passage starts "There was to Belisarius a wife," which is the standard way of phrasing this idea in Greek, but in the rest of the sentence "to be" is implied by apposition.

[landofnowhere]

Ah, I'd missed that the "Ἦν" at the beginning was a form of "εἰμί" (I learned out of Hansen & Quinn, which introduces "εἰμί" late, so it was one of the last things I got to and didn't really stick.)

[landofnowhere]

Also I'm happy to learn that "πάππος" means grandfather here, because "Poppa" is what I called my classics-loving grandfather. (He was a librarian, not a charioteer, though.)

[grayduck]

Holy crap, it's the Perseus Project! I studied Latin (Classical Civ) in college from 96-00, and we were heavy users of the Perseus Project site. I can't believe it's still up and running...and looking a lot more current than the one I used on Netscape Navigator a zillion years ago!

I loved the Loeb Classical Library. Of course, the ones I was interested in were Red Covers for Rome (as opposed to your Green Covers for Greek). I'm glad that they're still in use...they probably will be for a long time. They're great translations.