Ancient Greek Language and Literature
This domain tests Greek as a language system and your map of its literature: dialect, accidence, syntax, particles and metre, plus genre, performance context and transmission from Homer to the Hellenistic scholars. Expect parsing and translation items, scansion, and questions that place a text in its dialect and genre.
Dialect and genre
- Epic: Homer and Hesiod compose in an artificial Ionic hexameter Kunstsprache with Aeolic and older layers; τοῖσι, ἔμμεναι and the iterative -σκε- are epic markers.
- Choral lyric and tragedy's stasima show Doric colouring: ᾱ for Attic η, -τι for -σι.
- Attic prose (Thucydides, Plato, Demosthenes) contrasts with Ionic prose (Herodotus, the Hippocratic corpus), where -σσε for -ττε and uncontracted forms are diagnostic.
Accidence and syntax
- Aspect drives the Greek verb: present/imperfect are imperfective, aorist perfective, perfect a completed state.
- Aorist middle -σάμην versus passive -θην, but some -θη- forms are active in sense (ἐβουλήθην 'I wished').
- The oblique optative replaces the indicative in indirect discourse after a historic main verb.
- οὐ appears in statements; μή in wishes, prohibitions, conditional protases and final clauses.
Metre
Dactylic hexameter is six feet of dactyls (−uu) substitutable by spondees (−−); the last foot is normally a spondee or trochee, and a strong caesura (often after the third trochee) shapes the line. Iambic trimeter is x − u − | x − u − | x − u −, with resolution allowed in the first five positions.
Worked example
ταῦτα ἀκούσας ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐθαύμασεν. Reasoning: ἀκούσας is the aorist active participle of ἀκούω, masculine nominative singular, and ὁ βασιλεύς is the subject of ἐθαύμασεν. Because the participle's subject is identical with the main verb's, this is a conjunct participle, not an absolute one: 'having heard this, the king marvelled'. Change it to ἀκουσάντων τῶν στρατιωτῶν ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐθαύμασεν and the participle with its noun stands in the genitive with a different subject - a genuine genitive absolute.
Traps
- Labelling a genitive absolute when the participle shares the main subject.
- Rendering every aorist as a simple past and losing aspect in infinitives and participles.
- Assuming -θη- always carries passive meaning.
- Treating the final foot of a hexameter as a full dactyl.
- Reading Herodotus as Attic; the dialect questions turn on Ionic forms.