Ancient Greek Scholarship

Book excerpt: Ancient greek sholarship constitutes a precious resource for classicists, but one that is underutilized because graduate students and even mature scholars lack familiarity with its conventions. The peculiarities of scholarly Greek and the lack of translations or scholarly aids often discourages readers from exploiting the large body of commentaries, scholia, lexica, and grammatical treatises that have been preserved on papyrus and via the manuscript tradition. Now, for the first time, there is an introduction to such scholarship that will enable students and scholars unfamiliar with this material to use it in their work. Ancient Greek Scholarship includes detailed discussion of the individual ancient authors on whose works scholia, commentaries, or single-author lexica exist, together with explanations of the probable sources of that scholarship and the ways it is now used, as well as descriptions of extant grammatical works and general lexica. These discussions, and the annotated bibliography of more than 1200 works, also include evaluations of the different texts of each work and of a variety of electronic resources. This book not only introduces readers to ancient scholarship, but also teaches them how to read it. Here readers will find a detailed, step-by-step introduction to the language, a glossary of over 1500 grammatical terms, and a set of more than 200 passages for translation, each accompanied by commentary. The commentaries offer enough help to enable undergraduates with as little as two years of Greek to translate most passages with confidence; in addition, readers are given aids to handling the ancient numerical systems, understanding the references found in works of ancient scholarship, and using an apparatus criticus (including an extensive key to the abbreviations used in an apparatus). Half the passages are accompanied by a key, so that the book is equally suitable for those studying on their own and for classes with graded homework.