Reading and commenting in Ancient Greek

[Rogelio Toledo Martin]

Flavius Josephus in Selianitika, Greece:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q5InICqS4E&t=161s


Plato's the Ring of Gyges online:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQHCNPn1V4o&t=28s

[Jonathan Robie]

Very nice!

How do you go about preparing to teach this kind of seminar and bringing people up to the level that they can participate intelligently?

When and where do you teach?

[Stirling Bartholomew]

Rogelio,
I enjoyed watching the videos and then checked out the Polis Institute in Jerusalem; fascinating place. Look forward to reading and responding to your future posts.

I noticed comments posted several years ago about Erasmian use at Polis. I was able to follow most of the the reading in the videos. Erasmian is very flexible across international boundaries. The guys from Cambridge UK certainly don't sound like the guys from Dallas or Melbourne.

[Rogelio Toledo Martin]

Thanks!

I'm glad you both liked it. I really enjoyed the year I spent in Polis, Christoph Rico is truly one of the best.
Himself uses a Spanish, so to speak, Erasmian pronunciation, though he's French. When Modern Greeks speak with Erasmian pronunciation, they sound just like Rico. (n.b. It is not polite to ask this, if they do it is mostly to make fun of us )

All the people taking part in the "seminar" about Flavius Josephus are already very good philologists, and in general very advanced language learners. I did not have to prepare anything. There are two Germans and one friend form England that's making his Ph. D. in Switzerland. One German is an assistant Professor at Wurzburg, the other one a Gymnasium Teacher in Berlin. We were just chilling there after reading a passage of the Trachinae (the seminar was about Sophocles' Trachinae), and ex tempore began to read Josephus (this was the book that I had taken with me to Greece).

I teach Business Spanish at a school named Inlingua. I teach Ancient Greek mostly online; to one priest in Florida, and to one eleven year old kid in California. Face-to-face in Berlin I just teach to an Italian girl. Apart from that, my friend (the Gymnasium teacher) and I together with other people from Berlin read every week around 50 verses of Euripides' Hercules furens, and we comment it and explain it in Ancient Greek. In this case I would not say teaching, it's rather an anamnesis process, just about being patient with ourselves and others and remember what we have already learnt, perhaps also in the case with the priest and the Italian girl. Only with the kid I'm working from scratch.

The priest and I have been reading for almost one year now. We are reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and some passages that I select from Plato. He already knew the morphology and syntax of Ancient Greek, and now we can just read. Sometimes we do have problems understanding the texts philosophically, and we have to read commentaries, but we manage to explain everything in Ancient Greek, and even to express our own opinions.

This summer I'll be teaching in Poznan, Poland. I'm not sure if I'll have the time to go to Selianitika again, but my Germans friends will be there for sure. It would be great if you could come too!!

[Jonathan Robie]

I agree that Christoph Rico is amazing. I had a week with him in Kentucky this year, and learned a great deal. Of all the people I know who use a (modified) Erasmian pronunciation, he is the most fluent, expressive speaker I have met. He is a consummate teacher with an astonishing level of knowledge on so many fronts.

But I suspect I need more than a week with him ;->