Donald Mastronarde's text assumes that college students learning Ancient Greek deserve, from the beginning, full exposure to the grammar and morphology that they will encounter in actual readings. Accordingly, he presents as many fundamental features of the language as possible, and provides full explanations of both common and more esoteric constructions. Self-contained instructional units include challenging exercises that gradually build the student's knowledge by alternating emphasis on the parts of speech and by concentrating in turn upon morphology or syntax. Readings become progressively more complex and, in the second half of the book, are largely based on actual texts, including passages from Xenophon, Lysias, Plato, Aristophanes and Thucydides. Included are a concise introduction to the history of the Greek language, a composite list of verbs with principal parts, an appendix of all paradigms, Greek-English and English-Greek glossaries, and a detailed index. The book is also a useful reference work for more advanced students who need assistance in the accurate reading of texts.

Author Biography

Donald J. Mastronarde is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of Euripides. Phoenissae (Teubner 1988) and author of The Textual Tradition of Euripides' Phoinissai (with Jan Maarten Bremer) (California 1983), and Contact and Discontinuity: Some Conventions of Speech and Action on the Greek Tragic Stage (California 1979).