Prerequisites: Dialects and periods
Next: Homeric forms
This section goes beyond Attic. Ancient Greek was never a single language, and its great authors wrote in dialects shaped by their genre and their region. The Homeric poems use an artificial literary language, built on Ionic with Aeolic elements and older forms, whose forms, syntax and metre must be learnt as a unit. The section also treats Ionic, the dialect of the Histories of Herodotus, the Koine, the common Greek of the Hellenistic and Roman world, and the metres of epic and elegy, the dactylic hexameter and the elegiac couplet, which are the key to reading Homer, Hesiod and the elegiac poets.
The base of this grammar is Attic, so the pages of this section record only the differences from Attic. A reader who has studied the Attic forms can use them as a starting point: a form of Homer or Herodotus is understood by saying how it departs from the Attic form, and the pages give the changes in tables. The map of the dialects and of the periods is on the page Dialects and periods, and the section builds on it.
Doric and Aeolic have no pages of their own, and they are mentioned on the dialect overview. New Testament Greek is not treated in a page of its own: the Koine overview describes the language in which it is written.
| Page | Contents |
|---|---|
| Homeric forms | the sound changes, the noun, pronoun and verb forms of the epic dialect |
| Homeric syntax and formulae | the use of the article, the moods and tmesis, and the formulae, epithets and similes of oral poetry |
| The hexameter and the elegiac couplet | quantity, the feet, the caesura, elision and the scansion of a line |
| Ionic (Herodotus) | the prose dialect of the Histories |
| Koine (overview) | the common Greek after Alexander: sources, sounds, forms and syntax |
A reader of Homer will find it useful to take the pages in the order of the table, and to read the page on the hexameter beside the page on the forms, since many epic forms exist for the sake of the metre.
Next: Homeric forms