Monthly Muse

             The study of Attic Greek for most students consists almost entirely of reading.  Writing is known to show up occasionally in drills and speaking in declamation exercises, but production in any form is rare and absolutely forgotten is listening.  Naturally then, a program offering instruction in “conversational” Attic Greek would catch my eye and seemed a wonderfully weird experience and one made all the more weird and wonderful by being populated with the sort of people who would join a program offering instruction in “conversational” Attic Greek. Fortunately, the Colgate Classics Department and Lampert Institute agreed and so, funding in hand, I took part in the Paideia Institute’s Living Greek in Greece program.  

            After a first night in Athens, the bulk of the two weeks was spent in Selianitika, a small town right on the southern coast of the Gulf of Corinth.  A little tourist getaway, restaurants and hotels spanned the seaside, bookended by the town’s only club on one side and the fairgrounds on the other.  Our lodgings were at the Hellenikon Idyllion, founded “for the culturally and artistically inclined”, where, I believe, more money is spent on the garden than the rooms themselves.  After all, the garden, with its abundant flowers and fruit trees, does take up most of the plot connecting all the bungalows to each other and to the main house and is supposed to be the meeting grounds for the resident intellectuals.  Accordingly, it was our classroom.

            Classes occurred twice daily in the morning and afternoon for an hour and a half with the group split into upper and lower sections and seminars following each class time.  The upper spent it's time summarizing the texts (Herodotus' Histories and Plato's Euthyphro) in Attic Greek or sharing original compositions while the lower split between straight translating (just the Euthyphro) and doing speaking drills. The progression in each was palpable: the uppers went from prepared summaries to free flowing discussion and the lowers too albeit with a bit more haltingly. How quickly people picked up speaking and listening astounded me, but where people really let loose were the seminars. When I thought I had difficulty understanding the instructors during class, I was sorely unprepared for their seminar speeds. Even some participants were managing to jump in. An intimidating amount of intelligence hid in these folks, so relaxed and unpretentious (well, as unpretentious as you can be while studying conversational Attic Greek).

              Laid-back was the operative word of the program. Nothing really was required of us: one could attend the upper or lower section as they pleased, do or not do assignments. Of course we went to class, we prepared for class: that sort of freedom compels one to best expectations. Otherwise, the resort atmosphere would have reduced us to mush. Saying the beach was a stone’s throw from the hotel would be an overstatement. The beach, all ten feet of it, rocky as it was, drew us consistently, if not for swimming then for loafing in the gentle waves. When our expeditions didn’t lead into the water, we were exploring Selianitika’s restaurants, at least, we were until we found the place with 2€ gyros and 1€ beers. The rest was spent in the garden, loafing on land and getting to know each other.

             As was the hope, these were some impressive people. Varying in age from 16 to 60, despite the common interest of the Classics, the group had great diversity. The primary group was undergraduate students with a just handful of graduate and PhD students and a touch more high school teachers, but across it all, each amazed above and beyond their knowledge of Greek. That 16 year old had just spent the summer living in Bologna teaching Italian to students her age. One first-year at Stanford had been following her father's footsteps and free climbs buildings for fun and had already hit a few of the larger buildings on campus tying red bandannas to the tops. One high school teacher from the Boston area has held the Yale record for javelin for the past twenty five years (and second place is not close). The most high profile case was that of one undergraduate who somehow accidentally swam across the Gulf of Corinth one day between classes, a dangerous feat most often completed with a boat or plane accompanying the swimmer. After getting a ride back on some random Greek's jet-ski, the news spread and soon Selianitika's paper wanted to interview him. He was crowned at a swimming competition that happened to be scheduled later that week and there is currently a Greek article or two online about him.  Unfortunately, despite being such a hero that a random Greek woman gave him a pie, he was never able to get us free drinks.

            It was an absolutely unbelievable experience. Even without mentioning the idiosyncrasies of the rest of the students (and of the instructors as well), the trip to Delphi and the Meteora monasteries, the other lodgers at the Idyllion, the welcome and farewell parties, or (I couldn’t make this up) the rock opera, it was absurd.  But after all that, how’s my Attic Greek?  Better.  Can I speak it conversationally? Not really.  So, what did I learn? οὐκ οἶδα.