new lesson is up. we're getting close to being able to start working on how to do 'scansion'...reading lines from the Epics out loud in meter.

The 3rd lesson is now up. It finishes our introduction to the basic alphabet symbols.

The second lesson is up! For the first few updates, I'll let you know as I publish. Before long I'll probably move to only emailing once a week. A thought on the matter of πολύτροπον (polytropon) as describes Odysseus, a much described word at the moment: All Greeks generally had already heard all their myths before. Repeatedly. The only real spoilers are the changes poets and storytellers might make (add, remove, enhance, twist, etc.). They were always 'reboots'. What this means for us, and the tricky word, is that the Greek audience is expected to load EVERYTHING they ALREADY know about Odysseus into that single descriptor in the first line. Stuff it all in there... it sums him up, and serves as the 'best' label to introduce the main character of the story. As such, it's a tremendously loaded word being pushed to mean many things all at once. Moreover, it 'resonates' with another 'many' word in the same line, referring to his adventures (which they already know, and are stuffing into that word). The muchness is quite much, and causes immense difficulties for translators.

As this is an 'alpha' project, the lessons will trickle forth, probably somewhat irregularly, and there will be quite a bit of flux as I figure out the best way to use Skool to make the lessons as fast and hard-hitting as possible. At times the pedagogy will perhaps seem odd, and definitely non-traditional--that's purposeful. Hopefully it works? I guess we find out! Lesson 1.1 is up.

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος - Iliad 1.1 RAGE! sing, goddess, of the [rage] of Peleus' son, Achilles ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ - Odyssey 1.1 the MAN... tell me, Muse, of the [man] of many-turns, who so many ... The first word introduces our theme. The first line frames the stage. The first surviving epics (there were more!) 'root' us in the soil of culture and history. If you're here, you likely already believe this and care about this. I'm new to Skool, so I need a few days to figure out how best to leverage the platform. I'll be uploading materials, linking to tools, probably relying on a mix of documents, video, and apps...and communicating so you can all keep up. Hopefully this can be built in such a way that lets people progress fully asynchronously if need be. The community is currently set to 'free'. If it gets crowded, I may end up gating it a bit. The process will hopefully result in a full curriculum and some useful tech, but the TAM on Homeric Greek is likely terrible, so monetization is unclear at the moment--although most universities would charge you thousands of dollars for access to my time. I have a PhD in Greek and Latin (Classics) from The Ohio State University, and have taught Greek (and other things) for many years. Homer is one of my favorite things. At Baylor I occasionally taught an accelerated Greek sequence where we would cover 2 years of content in 10 weeks! (Mostly to PolySci grad students.) The best part was always when we did Homer at the end. We're going to flip this upside down, and START with Homer, and frankly I think it will be much easier and faster to get up to speed...although don't expect to be able to suddenly go and read Plato or the New Testament afterwards (the language changed a lot in 500 and 1000 years!).