Robert Groves, University of Arizona
As the list of quality options available for intermediate Greek instructors continues to expand, even beyond those highlighted by Trzaskoma (2011), this is perhaps an opportune moment for those of us who teach intermediate Greek to reconsider our options. This short paper will briefly outline some of the challenges facing the student of intermediate Classical Greek and articulate some of the ways that using prose fiction (the “Ancient Greek novels”) as the primary text(s) in those courses can address those challenges. In addition to making the case for the novels as excellent choices, I will also briefly discuss my own experience in implementing two of these texts (Lucian’s True History and Chaereas’ Callirhoe) with intermediate students.
The challenges of intermediate Greek courses, usually students’ first courses focused on reading, are many. It is incumbent upon the instructor to help students solidify morphological paradigms and syntactical structures, expand their mental lexica, and develop the habits of mind and familiarity with relevant tools to tease out the ambiguities and complexities presented by ancient authors. Beyond these obvious factors, students must also grapple with the new ways of articulating and organizing thoughts inherent to any encounter in a second language. Moreover, many of the most common options for intermediate Greek prose readings challenge students to read in one or more unfamiliar genres, leaving them with less context upon which to ground their other analytical work.
While not all Greek novels are well suited to intermediate students, the more accessible ones (including those of Lucian and Chariton) present students with Greek that is accessible, but not overly simplistic. Plot-focused narratives with strong forward impulse and fantastical and melodramatic action combine with students’ unfamiliarity with the texts to create incentives for students to read to find out what happens. In their more formulaic moments, the repetition of vocabulary helps students read more confidently and faster, while obviously playful neologisms—think of Lucian’s ἱππόγυποι—help students develop linguistic intuitions and recognize the way the language can be the site of play. Moreover, the episodic nature of these texts helps ensure that intermediate students reading at an appropriate (i.e. often, slow) pace maintain a sense of progress. The content itself (whether we think of Lucian’s whirlwind journey to the moon or Callirhoe’s difficult consideration of a potential abortion) engages college-aged students directly, even as it opens productive academic discussions on questions of genre, allusion and intertextuality, gender, sexuality, slavery, and identity.
No one text is ideal for every intermediate Greek reading course or every group of students. Reading the novels means passing by more canonical texts, and to be sure there are real trade-offs made in the choice. But this paper will detail some of the benefits and open up discussions of those trade-offs for the subsequent workshop discussions.