Romilly and Trédé - Petites leçons sur le grec ancien

[Originally this was part of a single long post on February 2026 reading.]

Jacqueline de Romilly and Monique Trédé. Petites leçons sur le grec ancien

This book mounts a passionate case for the value of reading Classical Greek literature and philosophy in the original. It begins with particular features of Classical Greek (particles, gender, the formation of certain classes of nouns) and closes with discussion of broader language-related themes like metaphors and literary tropes characteristic of Greek literature (and their enduring influence on European literature).

The authors illustrate their general claims about Classical Greek by riffing on a wide variety of texts, and the treatment is masterful in its range and acuity. Although both highly distinguished scholars, the book is clearly not intended as a contribution to scholarship—there is no attempt to position claims within areas of academic discourse, even where this might have been welcome (to me). Their target seems to be rather an educated but Greekless public. And so they don’t assume any knowledge of Classical Greek—not even the alphabet, since all the Greek in the book is transliterated. I suppose the use of transliteration has the advantage of highlighting cognates for people who don’t know the alphabet, but it is a little clunky in my opinion to have no actual Greek in a book devoted to rhapsodizing about the language!

One of the goals with this target audience of educated but Greekless readers is simply to stimulate an interest in learning Greek. The authors make a solid case that there is a large quantity of high quality literature in Greek, and if you ever wanted a careful explanation of what was missing in your translations, what is lost in texture or nuance, then this is your book.

They also believe that Classics belongs in the curriculum. So although the focus is Greek itself the book is also clearly intended as an entry into the long-running debate about how educational resources and cultural attention should be allocated: “une crise touche les études classiques”! So: “Il faut donc lutter, et lutter fermement!”

And struggle they do! Now, since I abandoned my academic ambitions two decades ago, I have spent a big chunk of my limited spare time deepening my understanding of Classical Greek (and finally picking up a bit of Latin, though it’s a distant second), simply because I love reading authors of classical texts in the original. My own learning has depended heavily on the availability of high quality learning material, which itself depends on the existence of a significant community of people with similar interests. It’s such a drag to try to pick up a language for which there are scant resources for beginners and intermediate learners. Thank goodness, then, for Steadman and his editions of the classics. Thank goodness for Legentibus, for the Perseus Digital Library, for SeumasU, and the many podcasts in Latin and Ancient Greek that now exist, etc., and etc., and etc. But at the risk of appearing ungrateful, a lot of the arguments in favour of the classics that I’ve seen floating around over the years have struck me as cope.¹

As an intervention in favour of keeping classics on the curriculum, this book supplies the material for one solid line of argument but the authors also overreach and underargue along the way. I’ll get to the material for a solid argument after doing a bit of kvetching. First, underarguing: A subject can be valuable without deserving a place on the curriculum—to figure that out you need to weigh it against other valuable subjects. The authors don’t attempt this at all, appearing to assume that if a subject is valuable then of course we will teach it. But the real challenge comes at the moment we have to decide between one subject and another, with necessarily limited time and resources and attention. Sanskrit² or Arabic or more and better math instruction or any number of other subjects are also valuable. Why Classical Greek and not these others?

The main form of overreach is the claim running through the book that Greek is somehow superior to other languages. The Greek language, they say, itself offers “aux poètes et aux prosateurs un instrument sans pareil”—though to show that a language is “sans pareil” you’d surely want to compare it to more than French or Latin. Never mind: “Nous pensons que les particularités – la précision, la subtilité nuancée – du grec ancien peuvent expliquer en partie les réussites intellectuelles des œuvres de la littérature grecque”. In the Greek language they see “des qualités particulières, une clarté, une netteté, une précision, qui contribuèrent largement à développer ce goût et dont ce livre a pour objet d’explorer la nature exceptionnelle.” Their claims for the Greek language really are exceptional: “Ainsi, dès le départ, la langue grecque ancienne semble prête à mettre sous nos yeux, sous une forme simple, directe et vivante, les sentiments les plus variés. C’est là une différence notable avec les épopées des autres peuples.” They make this sweeping claim without even mentioning the epics of other peoples! (Too bad for the Mahabarata, I guess, that it was written in a comparatively inferior language!) None of these claims are set in the context of translation theory or any rigorous treatment of life at the linguistic interface.

Now, because Greek is declined, it’s true that it has more freedom to play with word order for emphasis than other languages. This makes it “beaucoup plus souple, plus libre qu’en français” (and English, of course) in this respect. French does with syntax what a declined language will do with declination so translation from a declined language into French is always going to be tricky, at least when the exact literary effect is produced by play with the word order. Even if we get the sense right it’s often difficult or impossible to convey the sense using the same technique as the source language. Close readings, which often attend to nuances not just of sense but of technique, can never rely on translation. (Of course, even if translation gets some effect exactly right using a similar technique the reader cannot know this without access to the original.)

The same goes for linguistic density. Some languages convey meaning in fewer words.³ The authors make a very big deal of this. “Telle est la densité de ce style poétique que toute traduction tend à diluer.” Here is thirteen French words where six Greek words suffice! Here nine words are required instead of the original five! Here eleven instead of five! And yes, it’s true that if the literary effect in the original is partly tied to this kind of compression, it’s very difficult to convey that compression in a language that requires more words for the same thought.

And again, particles in Classical Greek really are a marvel and a serious pain for a translator struggling to render a Greek text into a language like French or English (though it seems to be easier with other languages—a Ukrainian acquaintance tells me that many of the particles in Classical Greek have good equivalents in Ukrainian and Russian). The standard example here (and one the authors themselves use) is the use of particles in the back and forth of a Platonic dialogue, where English or French is faced with a choice between flattening the subtle indications of mood and attitude in the responses of Socrates’ interlocutors or highlighting them too intrusively: “L’apparente monotonie de nos traductions, parfois leur lourdeur, ne doit pas nous faire oublier que ces particules, si légères, donnent au dialogue sa vivacité et soulignent les nuances les plus fines et les plus subtiles de la pensée.” That’s true enough.⁴

But the difficulty of translating from Classical Greek into French (especially in literary contexts, where ideally we also succeed in carrying over the way an effect is produced into the target language) doesn’t establish the superiority of Classical Greek over French. Anyone actually curious about this question would surely ask whether there are things that we can easily say in French that would be difficult to render in Classical Greek (again, ideally conveying the way the effect is achieved as well as the content). Since the answer is obviously yes, there is no good argument here for a claim about the superior expressiveness of Classical Greek.

So this thread running through the book struck me as wrong and irritating. I seriously doubt that having the neuter gender “permet en grec une clarté immédiate que notre langue ne possède pas.” The authors read something profound in the fact that in Classical, the neuter plural takes a singular verb, but even if this rule were consistently followed⁵, why not think it’s just a quirk of grammar? They believe that certain features of Greek permit “les divers aspects d’une situation se combinent en propositions quasi mathématiques . . . en une sorte d’algèbre linguistique” and that the ease of forming words with -sis and -ma and -ikos “fut étroitement lié au développement de la réflexion morale et scientifique.”

Lord love a duck. I can only roll my eyes. And although they are light by choice in their references to secondary literature from Classics when discussing texts (since the book isn’t intended as a contribution to scholarship), I couldn’t help wonder if they were light by necessity on references to the literature on translation theory, either because serious reflection on this literature would make trouble for so much of what they say or because they simply aren’t familiar with it.

So much for kvetching. The authors are on much stronger ground tracing the pervasive influence of Classical Greek on French (often via Latin). They expand the point beyond French to all of Europe, which provides a common bond between European countries. Here the argument is not based on the superiority of Greek to any other language, but simply to the fact that these roots are deep and pervasive to such an extent that ignoring them amounts to a kind of cultural amnesia and a profound lack of self-understanding. Why should a French (or English) speaker rooted in Western culture study Classical Greek and not Sanskrit or Classical Chinese or Arabic? Not because of some highly dubious claim about relative superiority, or even claims about the great value of the literature (though much of it is great), but just because otherwise you’re fated to remain profoundly ignorant of your own culture. It’s just because it’s ours, and we wish to understand ourselves, that we should retain a place for classics in the curriculum. That’s the beginning of a reasonable argument, though a lot more would need to be said to make it convincing.