This edition of Chariton’s Callirhoe is the latest in a series of Greek and Latin readers produced and self-published by Constantine Hadavas. These print-on-demand (POD) books are aimed at individuals who have had a basic survey of the language and who are looking for authentic material with sufficient grammatical and lexical help to make learning Greek more enjoyable and interesting.[1] They are thus aimed at a different audience than scholarly commentaries, which generally do not provide the kind of vocabulary or general grammatical commentary an intermediate student would require. Instead these intermediate readers are modeled more on Clyde Pharr’s classic school edition of the Aeneid, which presented text, vocabulary and commentary on the same page in three distinct panels. This format is reproduced in Hadavas’s Callirhoe and makes it easy to read through the Greek and to consult these resources when necessary.
Hadavas begins with a brief introduction about why Callirhoe is interesting: the sophistication of its narrative techniques, its characterization, particularly in the handling of its heroine, its exploration of power relations, its generic experimentation, and its place in the novel tradition. There are also some brief remarks about the Greek text and Chariton’s language. All this and the bibliography seem pitched correctly. Then comes the text itself, based on Herscher’s 1859 text, but updated according to more recent editions. The text is completely reset in a large and handsome Greek font, with line numbers introduced on each page which are referred to in the annotations below. Below each section of text is the vocabulary for that page, and below that is the commentary.
The annotations at the bottom of each page contain morphological and syntactic information about troublesome words, a few textual notes, and cultural information, including rhetorical figures and allusions. The scale of the textual notes and cultural commentary is appropriate for intermediate readers. There is also a good deal of morphological information about difficult words, but the syntactic information is in general rather modest, eschewing a lot of grammatical explanation for references to Smyth’s Greek Grammar. The terse grammatical detail is reflected in the very short list of rhetorical/literary figures and grammatical terms: there are actually only three grammatical terms defined there, apposition, crasis and periphrasis. Of course many more grammatical terms are used that are not listed there, and most of them will be passingly familiar to Hadavas’s target audience, but a longer list with summary explanations might have been helpful.
Much fuller than the grammatical commentary are the alphabetic vocabulary lists that are placed directly beneath the text on each page. Hadavas includes every word on each page in these lists, ceasing to repeat more common words after they have occurred in these lists five times. There are exceptions to this rule, since many words have more than one meaning and so appear more often than five times with different specific meanings. As the novel progresses, common words will disappear from these page-by-page lists completely, but can still be found in the total glossary at the back. At the same time, the number of lines of text per page increases slightly from 8 or so per page to 13 or so by the end; but the number of corresponding glosses per page stays about the same. All this is to say that there is plenty of lexical help. Although no one will have to look up every word, any word they want to look up will usually be there.
In evaluating the achievement of Hadavas, we can pose the question: What does an intermediate student of Greek need to read a text like Callirhoe? Related to that question is another equally important one: What can an intermediate reader expect to get from reading such a text in the original?
For Hadavas, the answer to the first question is mostly lexical. That is to say, the aid that he provides resides mostly in the form of translations of individual words in the page-by-page glossaries. Vocabulary is a huge issue in learning any language, but to know the English equivalent of words is only part of the problem. Other crucial parts are morphology and syntax. In many cases Hadavas provides some essential syntactical information in his glosses, such as the following:
προπίπτω, fall down before X (dat.)
φέρω, carry, bring (mid. + τὰ δεύτερα) win and hold the second rank.
Sometimes these can become quite complicated:
ἐπίσταμαι, (dep.) know (that X [acc.] is [part.] Y [acc.].
Here one encounters the limits of this approach and might wish to see some fuller grammatical explanation in the annotations. Hadavas frequently cites Smyth for a number of topics (genitive absolutes, conditions, etc.), which can easily be accessed on Perseus. But why not give an overview of these grammar points in some kind of appendix which uses examples from Callirhoe itself? My guess is that Hadavas is purposely avoiding a lot of grammar terminology as part of a more general contemporary language-learning tendency to allow students to have a more natural experience with reading foreign languages. Traditionally students have been taught to read Greek “inch by inch,” “studying” Greek rather than “reading” it in the way intermediate students of French or Spanish, say, would be expected to read appropriately curated texts in those languages. But studying Greek and Latin is different in that they are primarily experienced as a fixed corpus of very sophisticated texts. The point of learning Greek is to be able to experience this corpus in a more intense way than can be achieved by reading a good translation, and this involves a certain amount of studying rather than reading.
Many of Hadavas’s annotations consist of full parses of verb forms—verbs being the bête noire of Greek—consisting of tense, mood, etc., and often its dictionary form, which can then be consulted in the glossaries, as in: τρωθεὶς: aor. pass. part. masc. nom. sing. < τιτρώσκω
Although verbs get the fuller treatment they deserve, both in the glossaries and in the notes, Hadavas’s approach does have its limitations. So for example, on page 49 the text reads:
Ὁ δὲ Θὴρων ἔνθεν ἑλὼν “ἑωράκατε” φησι “τὸν χρυσὸν ….”
An annotation reads: ἑωράκατε: 2nd pl. perf. act. indic. < ὁράω. This takes us to the gloss of ὁράω from which it is possible to deduce the translation “you have seen.” All good. However, to understand ἑλὼν one would have to have noticed the gloss on ἔνθεν:
ἔνθεν, (adv.) from this point; with ἑλὼν, “taking up from this point.”
Perhaps Hadavas is right that this is all that is needed here. But it might have been better to have a note on ἑλὼν as the aorist participle of αἱρέω, εἷλον (which was glossed as such for the verb εἱλόμην occurring on the previous page), and perhaps mention that this is a Homeric tag, of which there are many in the text. And speaking of εἷλον, this “defective” verb is a case where it is not much help to an intermediate reader to have these verbs alphabetized by their present indicative form. Indeed, in the case of εἱλόμην on page 48, someone could only find the meaning of this word under αἱρέω. If the emphasis is on the lexical, then the glossary should reflect this by treating defective verb elements as separate entries. Similarly on page 32, for ἀνέλω, one would need to know to look under ἀναιρέω to find its meaning; but at the same time one would have to look at the lexical entry for ὅπως on that page—ὅπως, (+ subj.) so that, in order that—to realize that ἀνέλω is an aorist subjunctive in a purpose clause. Here it might have been appropriate to have parsed ἀνέλω in an annotation and identify it as a purpose clause.
Prepositions that take multiple cases with different meanings are also handled in the vocabulary lists. Thus ἐπὶ is glossed many times, in each case with the specific meaning appropriate to the context. Obviously, it would be clumsy (and useless) to list all the possible meanings of ἐπὶ the first five times it occurs, so Hadavas sensibly lists it regularly, specifying the contextual meaning in each instance. So also for the adverb ὡς, which is glossed as “when,” “as,” “in the belief that” or “that” depending on the context. These glosses make it possible to get the gist of the narrative, but do not provide much in the way of understanding the fine points of Greek of syntax. Particles like γε, δὴ or μὴν fare even worse (how many ways can you say “indeed”?)
Hadavas states in his introduction that grammatical explanations that are given multiple times at first will be cited less frequently or not at all as the text progresses. Grammatical terms that are named and specified with a Smyth reference many times in the first two books include genitive absolutes (28), hortatory subjunctives (17), dative of means (10), genitive of comparison (17), genitive of time (16) and articular infinitives (10). Subsequent books never mention genitive absolutes again, but other items not as ubiquitous are mentioned all the way to the end. At the same time there are some areas of syntax hardly touched on at all. There is only the briefest mention of indirect statement, result clauses and purpose clauses, relying in many cases on the translation in the glosses of introductory worlds like ἵνα, ὅπως, ὡς, ὅταν, etc. Participles are regularly parsed but rarely explained.
This leads to the second general question: What do intermediate readers hope to get out of reading a text in the original as opposed to reading an idiomatic translation? Reading a text with a lexical emphasis often means substituting an English word for a Greek word. But is this actually reading? For about the same price, one could buy the Loeb of Callirhoe with its excellent translation on facing pages, and flip back and forth between the two. But I think everyone would agree this is not really “reading” Greek; and of course a Loeb will not provide any grammatical explanation at all. Those interested in reading ancient Greek online have plenty of options these days, such as Perseus (mostly lexical help) or the Dickinson College Commentaries (both lexical and grammatical help), but for those who wish to have a physical book that has most if not all of what they need to make their way through a text, Hadavas’s Callirhoe is a good choice. At any particular point it is possible to be stumped by this or that sentence, but any reader can choose when to move on or when to consult a grammar or a translation. In this way readers can decide for themselves how best to serve their own goals for reading.
I noticed a few unproblematic typos here and there, and some of the references to Smyth are not correct (optative of wish is Smyth 1814, not 2070; future participle of purpose is Smyth 2065, not 2086). But overall the quality of the volume is very high. It is strongly recommended for those looking for an interesting story told in a straightforward manner in well-crafted Greek in a format that will make progressing through the work entertaining and useful.
Notes
[1] Physical copies of these books can only be ordered on-line. Similar volumes have been produced by Geoffrey Steadman and Faenum Publishing, who have websites where pdfs of all books are available for free. Also pitched to the same audience are the online Dickinson College Commentaries, and the pioneering Bryn Mawr commentaries, which are now available for free downloads once they have gone out of print. Full disclosure: Faenum Publishing consists of Stephen Nimis and Evan Hayes, assisted on numerous projects by others.