Hellênikê / ἑλληνική: an open-source introduction to ancient Greek

Encounter a historical language and culture, and engage with how that language and culture continue to shape structures of power today.

This open-source textbook is one part of a project to develop a new two-semester introduction to ancient Greek at the College of the Holy Cross in 2022-2023. It is modeled on work by several members of our department over the past three years rethinking our introductory Latin courses. Like that project, our curriculum is based on these principles:

• the course emphasizes authentic examples of language, and is organized around a target text (in this textbook, Lysias, Oration 1: On the Murder of Eratosthenes). Instead of composing made-up Greek, we draw on the target text as much as possible.
• we follow modern principles of language pedagogy in presenting first those features of language (syntactic, morphological, lexical) that are frequent in Greek, are inherently complex, and are most different from English forms of expression and thought.
• we determine the sequence of content on the basis of computational analysis of the features needed to read authentic content.
• throughout the curriculum, we link the study of Greek to reflection on contemporary issues.

Like the Latin project before us, our work at Holy Cross is taking place through the college’s Scholarship in Action program, and we gratefully acknowledge its support.