If you like detective work, you can learn a(n) (ancient) language — How I’m teaching myself Ancient Greek (3)
A walkthrough looking at four (4) lines from The Odyssey (I.7–10)
Do you like a riddle?
Then you can learn a language.
Learning languages is like detective work. You get a riddle, gather what you know, find out what you don’t know, and piece everything together.
Let’s try solve a case together
This article is in a slightly unusual format.
Whether you’re a language learner or not, I hope this will give you an idea of how language learning likens detective work.
You get given the riddle, and you have to gather the clues given by the riddle.
I’m going to look at the next bit in The Odyssey.
The last two bits were:
- Book I.1–2 The occasion for the book.
- Book I.3–5. A three-line summary of the story.
I’m coming to this passage cold, but let’s try to “solve” lines 7–10 of Odyssey Book I together.
And see what we get to at the end.
Text
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.
Riddle 1: αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
The longest phrase catches my eye.
I immediately notice that σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν are in the plural dative, but I don’t know the verb at the end.
I’ve just looked ὄλοντο up and it means ‘perished’. So the dative phrase above is probably describing the manner in which they did so.
σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν means ‘their follies’.
αὐτῶν is a genitive pronoun meaning ‘of their own’, so it’s emphasising the follies were theirs.
So this comes to:
“For they perished through their very own folly”.
Riddle 2: νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο
“Fools, which according cows of the sun God …”
That didn’t make sense.
Turns out κατὰ is an adverb here (looked it up), and it means ‘utterly’. An adverb here.
The main verb is still missing so I need the next line to make sense of this.
Riddle 3: ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.
Ate.
The main verb for the last line, ἤσθιον, means ‘ate’.
So together with the last line, what I’ve got so far is:
“Fools, who ate up the oxen of Hyperion [the Sun-God]”.
(The word “bous” is where we get the word “bucolic” from, e.g. bucolic poetry. It is the kind of poetry that deals with idealised, idyllic country scenes.)
The rest of the line, αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ
“yet he ἀφείλετο to them the day of return”
ἀφείλετο means took away.
So it comes to:
“yet he took the day of return from them”.
Riddle 4: τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.
I looked up ἁμόθεν from the lesson notes, and it means “from some point”.
The notes also said εἰπὲ takes τῶν to mean ‘tell of’ [something].
So the phrase comes to:
“tell us about these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, from some point.”
Gathering the Clues
The translation comes to:
for they perished through their very own folly
Fools, which according cows of the sun God …
yet he took the day of return from them.
tell us about these things, goddess, daughter of Zeus, from some point.
References
I’ve been using Homeric Greek — Book 1 edited by Leslie Collins Edwards.
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