[bjornedstrom]

This is a good thread to ask: Who reads Homer in your country, and why?

I'm currently learning ancient Greek as my "Corona project": purely for fun, and mainly because I'm interested in Greek philosophy and culture.

That said, I feel a bit lonely in my country in pursuing this. Sweden has no strong history of classical studies. Some high schools may offer a course in latin, but it's getting more and more rare, and as far as I know there are not even courses in university because the interest is too low. I don't know anyone and I don't know _of_ anyone in Sweden who actually reads/knows the language.

When I talk to friends in the US, the UK and the Netherlands on the other hand, Greek and the classical Greek works (including Homer, of course) seems to be much more popular and also part of normal young adult education. One of my friends, an American in his late 20:s, had to read the Odessey in high school. My fiance from the Netherlands was offered either latin or greek in high school as well. Most of my textbooks in greek are written by American, English and Dutch authors. So these nations seem to have a stronger tradition in classics.

Can anyone care to elaborate the situation where you live? I'm very curious what motivates people to learn dead languages and read books thousands years old.

[justin66]

> Who reads Homer in your country, and why?

In the US, pretty much everyone with a high school education reads at least some Homer in translation.

> I'm very curious what motivates people to learn dead languages and read books thousands years old.

You're conflating learning Ancient Greek with reading Homer, but most of us read Homer in translation. Having read at least a little Homer is very common in the United States, having learned Ancient Greek or Latin is more unusual.

The two obvious reasons for reading Homer: it's a good story, and it's foundational to our culture. I guess you could dive into what makes it a good enough story to keep it around for thousands of years, or why knowing anything about culture is important... you don't believe you're going to get an adequate explication of those matters in a short HN comment, do you?

[stevesimmons]

Here are some personal data points from Australia and The Netherlands:

Australia:

* My high school in Melbourne had one class (15 people) learning Latin to year 12 level. Funnily enough, almost all of us also studied advanced math, and more than half were left-handed. By the end, we were reading the Aeneid, Catullus and Cicero.

* Why did I pick Latin? Well, at my school, two foreign languages were compulsory for years 7-10, and optional for years 11 and 12. In year 7 and 8, everyone had to do Latin, and either French or German. In year 9, around half switched from Latin to Mandarin.

* Two of my friends also did Ancient Greek. They were taught by the school headmaster, who was a Classics scholar.

* That year, in the whole state of Victoria, the total number of year 12 students taking Latin and Ancient Greek were 70 and 6 respectively.

* At university, my engineering school required us to take one subject in a non-technical faculty. I chose Ancient Greek, to complement my Latin from high school. That class had around 60 students. 2/3 of them were of Greek descent and already spoke modern Greek.

* The only Greek word I remember now is κῠβερνήτης (helmsman). You may recognise it as Kubernetes :)

Netherlands:

* My partner, who is Dutch, studied Latin at high school there.

* His school was a "gymnasium", a category of very academic high schools which traditionally taught Latin and Greek. Check out [1] for the background to these gymnasium schools in the Netherlands and various countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)

[thisrod]

My school experience sounds exactly like yours—including the gay and Catullus bits—except it was Adelaide so the state had 10 Latin students instead of 70.

I first read the Illiad (Fagels) by torchlight, in a tent by a campfire in a muddy field, next to a cliff where I was risking my neck each day to impress the other boys in the university mountain club. As everyone should.

[throwaway894345]

My American education touched on the Greeks and the Romans, and we did read the Odyssey; however, as I recall, we quickly jumped to late-Medieval (post-Norman-conquest) England. I always wondered what was in England before these medieval kings and queens. I began learning about the Norman conquest, the Viking invasion, the Anglo-Saxons, the Roman invasion and Romanization of England, the native Celts and so on. Then I began to inquire about those people; what were their homelands like, how did they arrive in their homelands, how were their languages interrelated, and so on. The etymology in particular fascinates me (and I highly recommend the podcast "The History of English"), notably how one language family spread throughout most of Eurasia (from Britain in the North-West to India and Western China in the East). I also highly recommend Jean Manco's books (https://www.amazon.com/Jean-Manco/e/B0034P5S3C?ref=sr_ntt_sr...) as her histories incorporate the latest information from many fields including history, archaeology, and the rapidly evolving field of ancient genetics. I haven't read many ancient texts yet, but I really want to if only to get a sense for how ancient people saw themselves and their world. Some day...

[ravingraven]

In Greece it is of course mandatory reading in junior high-school but not in ancient Greek. There are other ancient Greek texts though which are mandatory reading and learning ancient Greek is mandatory as well.

[dr_dshiv]

I love reading classics because there are still so many mysteries. It's not like we've figured everything out!

Here is a project I'm involved in to help support people learning classical languages:

https://alpheios.net/

I'd love to know what you think.

[HuShifang]

As someone who always means to learn a bit of Latin and Ancient Greek, this is a very cool looking site -- the inflection tables and diagrams are an especially nice touch. One addition that I'd love to see (if technically feasible) would be some sort of drilling or practice mechanism, e.g. a cloze-completion generator (a la Clozemaster or Lingvist, or the I think quasi-defunct Readlang).

By the way, if you're ever considering classical languages further east, I'd call your attention to ctext.org -- it doesn't do anything particularly fancy with its UI, but it has a lot of classical / premodern Chinese texts, and classic English translations (largely Legge) of some of the major ones.

[idoubtit]

In France less than 4% of high school students learn Latin or ancient Greek, 3 hours weekly. Only one high school out of four has a teacher available for one of these languages. It has strongly receded over the last decade.

The schools follow a chronological program which means youngsters will study Antiquity while in middle school and recent centuries while in high school. Those who specialize in humanities will also go back in time while in high school. So I suppose a large majority of students reaching eighteen have absolutely no memory of reading or studying Homer.

I've enjoyed very much reading Homer. I found the Odyssey very moving and beautiful — not all translations are equals, I read two and you should find the one that suits you. Another obvious pleasure with reading classical works is the myriad of references to them in our culture. Apart from this, I like traveling in space and time through these texts. For example, the Iliad is very different from the Odyssey, and it looked older to me; at a times were gods were among people and human heroes could fight them, like Gilgamesh insulting Ishtar or Jacob wrestling with Yahve. In the Odyssey, the main gods have retreated from the world, and the focus is on human torments and fabulous encounters.

[Mediterraneo10]

Sweden has certainly produced an immense amount of classical scholarship and saw a lot of Latin teaching. I think that the decline in classical studies is due to the drastic social changes of the mid 20th-century that completely changed Swedish society and education. But if you just visit a university library, you’ll find plenty of evidence for the tradition that existed up to the first several decades of the last century.

[mc32]

I was fortunate to have gone to a good high school at a time when the family was poor. It offered Latin and Greek (I don’t recall if it was ancient or not) intro courses. I don’t believe the HS offers that any more and those teachers were old then and now retired or dead.

Unfortunately as many a Highschool student are wont to do, I sadly ignored the opportunity to learn as it would help my curiosity now.

[memling]

> Can anyone care to elaborate the situation where you live? I'm very curious what motivates people to learn dead languages and read books thousands years old.

I'd guess religion is one driver. My impression of Sweden is that it's not a terribly religious country, so interest in languages like Latin or Koine Greek might be less compared to countries where religion has a deeper hold like the US.

It could also simply be a question of population size: more people suggests more people might share those interests.

It might also have to do with foreign language learning. I don't know about Sweden, but my impression of the Netherlands is that they teach foreign languages very early (e.g., my Dutch professors all sounded mostly American). It may be that if you have early language learning, the barrier to entry is lowered for subsequent languages.

[barry-cotter]

> I don't know about Sweden, but my impression of the Netherlands is that they teach foreign languages very early

I don’t think this is the case. I believe it’s all Dutch, all the time through primary school. They don’t dub anything though, everything is subtitled whether it’s in English, French, German or something else. And Dutch is the closest living language to English unless you count Scots. Dutch people speaking great English is as surprising as Portuguese speaking great Spanish, except English is a great deal more useful.

[Mediterraneo10]

"And Dutch is the closest living language to English unless you count Scots."

Dutch is from a different branch of Germanic than English. The "closest relative" is typically held to be Frisian, which is part of the same Germanic subgroup as English.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Frisian_language

[noodlenotes]

In the US. I took Latin in high school and translated classics like Ovid and Catullus. I wouldn't be surprised if Latin was less popular now even though it's only been a few years. It seems like the feeling is that so few Americans who have been here a few generations speak a second language that it's a waste to learn a dead language.

I will say that having to use Latin conjugation really improved my English grammar and understanding of sentence structure. I don't know if this is a typical effect of studying a second language from an outsider perspective (instead of just going by what sounds right in your native language) or if the simplicity of an older root language like Latin helped.

[cafard]

Hard to say. I read Homer when in college in Robert Fitzgerald's translation. After college, I learned a little bit of classical Greek, then worked my way through Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek, which takes one through Book I of the Iliad, then later worked through the Odyssey and the Iliad.

My impression is that a fair number of people who went through liberal arts programs in college have read Homer in translation. But I've never taken a poll.

A classics professor I know says that all her department's graduates have job offers, because Latin has made a modest comeback. One child on my street attends a Latin charter school.

[convFixb]

Howdy neighbor!

Here in Denmark, at the turn of the century, I took a 'classics' class in our equivalent to high school.

A bit of Plato and Socrates, a bit of ancient Greek / Roman architecture (different types of columns?), a smidgen of archeology review.

I imagine it was some kind of condensed and simplified remnant of the broad set of classics courses that would have been compulsory in 'high school' before the democratization of secondary education here (i.e. ~50 years ago our 'high school' was mostly populated by future academics and the children of the upper-middle classes).

[vkazanov]

In my Russian school back in Lithuania we had a very limited course covering classic literature as a part of a bigger generic literature course: I remember reading Odyssey, Iliad, etc

My colleague from Austria had a course in Latin back in school, and he mentioned that he read /Commentarii de Bello Gallico/ in the original language.

Oh, and I study Ancient Egyptian right now. Not too many - none - people support me in this endeavor. But in general it feels that in UK it is relatively easy to find people interested in those things.

[bookofjoe]

Yes! I recall reading "Commentaries on the Gallic Wars" (Commentarii de Bello Gallico) in Julius Caesar's original Latin in high school and being thrilled to be able to actually understand his account nearly 2000 years after he wrote it. 56 years after encountering it in Miss Shaw's Latin class, I can still recall the beginning of the first sentence:

>Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres...

[082349872349872]

Totane? Minime! Vicus quidam a gallis invictis habitatus invasoribus resistere adhuc non desinit. ...

[DonaldFisk]

I studied Latin to Ordinary Grade and (Classical) Greek to Higher Grade at school in Glasgow decades ago. This included reading, in Greek, Odyssey 9 and Iliad 6. Other set texts included works by Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Euripides. Latin and Greek are still taught at the school.

I have the Loeb Classical Library version of the Odyssey, which has the Greek on one side and a prose English translation on the other.

[haunter]

Hungary, Europe. Homer is standard in high school (Odyssey and Illiad) along with Sophocles (Antigone and Oedipus Rex). And there are more obviously too

[edgarvaldes]

>Who reads Homer in your country, and why?

In México, both Homer works are standard readings in high school. Latin and Greek authors are well known in academia here.

[john-aj]

Hi, also from Sweden. Yes, in högstadiet/high school I think it is rare to offer classical Greek or Latin. Even Italian is rare. But there are definitely Latin and Greek courses at universities. I studied 7,5 points of Latin last semester. I know Uppsala University offers a 30 point course. I'd recommend looking at antagning.se, if you want to make it more than a fun side project :-)

[danans]

> When I talk to friends in the US, the UK and the Netherlands on the other hand, Greek and the classical Greek works (including Homer, of course) seems to be much more popular and also part of normal young adult education.

In the US they are all read in translation unless you are in a classical studies University program, which is an area few pursue, or attend an old elite private primary or secondary school.

[umanwizard]

In the US, knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek is about as rare as what you describe in Sweden. It might be taught at a few private schools but it is definitely not mainstream. However, the Odyssey (in English translation) is commonly read in schools.

[TylerE]

My public high school here in the US offered Latin in the mid-90s when I was there. Not a particularly good school, either, frankly.