Plato's Apology of Socrates: A Commentary (Ancient Greek)

"So for someone who falls into the intermediate expertise category—so you’ve read and worked your way through Reading Greek or Mastronarde’s textbook. I’d say at least two-thirds of it. So you know not only what all the different tenses look like, and what all the different noun forms look like, but you’ve also met some different grammatical constructions. So you’re intermediate, you’re a little bit more than half way through. Go and read Plato’s Apology in ancient Greek. It’s excellent for many reasons but in terms of improving your Greek, it’s really good for two reasons. One, it’s not as hard as a lot of the other so-called seminal works of classical Greek literature. It’s no Thucydides for example, which is widely regarded as excellent Attic, which is the Athenian dialect, but also very highfalutin, quite sophisticated and often quite difficult. Plato writes and therefore we read him in the vernacular. It’s almost colloquial, in parts very colloquial—which for someone coming to the language for the first time, can be a bit weird to encounter. It’s as if you’ve learnt French in a classroom and then you go to France and try and hang out with cool kids and they’re saying all these things and you suddenly realise that your textbook was published in the 1940s and you don’t have any idea what anyone’s talking about. There’s maybe a slight learning curve. It’s not quite every man’s Greek but it’s real Greek. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So Plato’s Apology of Socrates , which was his defence speech in 399 BC, at his trial for impiety, is one of the watershed moments of Western civilization, whatever you think about Western civilization or teleological constructions of it. Depending on what your motivation is for learning this language, I think probably you’re going to want to read Plato’s Apology at some point in time. It depends on how much time you have. If you’ve got a couple of hours every day to spend on Greek—as indeed of course you should—then I’d say at the very least, probably a couple of months. And then get cracking with Plato’s Apology , I would say. If you’ve got less time than that, obviously just extend it out. There’s an easy way to check if you’re ready which is to buy a copy of the Apology and try and read it. See how many of the forms you recognise and if you’re not quite ready yet, then dive back into the grammar textbooks. But keep having a crack and just keep checking back in with Plato. He enjoys that. I find Socrates a fascinating and bizarre character. Obviously Socrates, via Plato, occupies this monolithic place in the Western canon of thinkers. It’s the beginning of Western philosophy, Socrates’s dialectic is the beginning of the scientific method. He looms large as this arch-expert, which is potentially an unpopular thing to be at the moment. But, on the other hand, he’s described by Plato, at some temporal remove, as this old bloke who didn’t wear shoes, who would stop people as they’re walking through the central square in town and say, ‘Hey you, what’s colour?’ ‘I don’t know. Here are some colours.’ ‘No, but what is colour?’ He’s this nuisance. Somewhere between Socrates himself and 2018 in the UK, he has been reconstructed as this intellectual when actually he was both. He was an intellectual in his own context but he’s also just a bloke who was fascinated by the world and wanted to know and wanted to push the boundaries of what knowledge was and how to get it, and how to keep it, and how to transmit it, and what education was about. And these questions are still really fundamental to us. Every generation thinks they’ve solved them but the next generation after them reopens these questions. In many ways Socrates is the beginning of that for us, certainly in the classical Greek tradition."