Reading the Odyssey in Koine Greek This Fall

This fall I'm teaching a course at Institutum Antiquitatis built around a text I find irresistible: Neophytos Doukas's prose paraphrase of the Odyssey.

Doukas, a scholar of the Greek Enlightenment, retold Homer's epic in clear Koine prose: no Homeric dialect, no verse to untangle first. That makes his paraphrase a remarkable bridge for intermediate readers: you get the whole sweep of the Odyssey (Polyphemus, the Sirens, the homecoming) while reading a lot of Greek rather than a little. It is one of the best-kept secrets in the living-Greek world.

As always, the course is conducted entirely in Ancient Greek: we read, we retell, we discuss, the way a text like this was meant to circulate.

Details and enrollment are on the course page. And if you'd rather work one-on-one, private tutoring is what I do here.

Image: John William Waterhouse, "Ulysses and the Sirens" (1891), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Public domain.