Introduction to Attic Greek »

Donald J. Mastronarde is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of Euripides. Phoenissae (Teubner 1988) and author of The Textual Tradition of Euripides' Phoinissai (with Jan Maarten Bremer) (California 1983), and Contact and Discontinuity: Some Conventions of Speech and Action on the Greek Tragic Stage (California 1979).

This thorough presentation of Attic Greek assumes that college students learning the language deserve, from the beginning, full exposure to all the grammar and morphology that they will encounter in actual texts. Each of the forty-two chapters is a self-contained instructional unit, with challenging exercises carefully tailored to reflect the vocabulary and grammar learned to date. The units gradually build up the student's knowledge of declensions, tenses, and constructions by alternating emphasis on morphology and syntax. Readings become progressively more complex and, in the second half of the book, are largely based on actual texts and include unadapted passages from Xenophon, Lysias, Plato, Aristophanes, and Thucydides. Logically organized and remarkably lucid,
Introduction to Attic Greek provides students with a strong grounding in the essentials of Greek grammar as well as a substantial body of vocabulary, enabling students to read, on completion of the course, a continuous text with commentary and dictionary.

Included are a concise introduction to the history of the Greek language, a composite list of verbs with principal parts, an appendix of all paradigms, Greek-English and English-Greek glossaries, and a detailed index. The book is also a useful reference work for more advanced students who discover that gaps in their knowledge of basic Greek grammar prevent accurate reading of texts.