Should I even bother trying to learn ancient Greek?
This has been a pretty good thread so far, and I second the recommendations made by Inerlingua for texts. But as a fellow amateur classicist, let me address the point he makes in his last paragraph concerning maintaining motivation, particularly as it looks he’s joined MetaFilter to answer your question. And welcome, Inerlingua. Reading ancient Greek as a hobby is something taken up in earlier times, as recently as the Victorian age, by thousands. Like model railroading, or telescope making, it is eminently “doable,” but it is an avocation that will draw the determined, and weed away in short order the dilettantes. The trick as Inerlingua says, is maintaining motivation. The model railroader or medium sized telescope maker faces this too, but as hobbyists, they have the physicality of their efforts before them always, as both encouragement and reward of effort, and as recrimination and reminder for lack of work. So you may find it helpful to make your study of Greek like a model railro
(Warning: Long, but hopefully also Helpful.) I studied ancient Greek for approximately three semesters in College. This was at St. John’s College, which has only the “Great Books” course of study. We studied Homeric Greek, for obvious reasons; and Attic to read most of the rest of the classic texts; and implicitly Koine, in which the New Testament is written, a lingua franca dialect of Greek which is very simple. By the end of the first semester students are translating Aristotle; second semester students are translating Homer; and third semester, books of the New Testament, which most were able to simply be read without too much trouble. I was very bad at Greek, probably because I am lazy and resist memorization, but even I could read some of the NT books with no trouble at all. The reason that folks above questioned studying Greek for the purpose of reading Plato is because Plato’s Greek is for the most part uncomplicated, being what are presented as relatively casual conversations.
Everyone should learn ancient Greek. It does take motivation and discipline—if you can afford the time and money (and if, preferably, you have some decent background in grammatical concepts like participles and direct objects), the intensive summer workshops can be great. They do require 100% life commitment for 10 weeks or so. There are programs at CUNY, Berkeley, U of Chicago, and elsewhere. Of course regularly paced Greek at the nearest college or university should be considered. Miscellaneous comments: Wilding’s Greek book, mentioned above, is a fine beginning, but in my opinion you’d need to then supplement with some study in a more advanced book to be ready for reading. Athenaze, which I have not liked teaching from, is however worth mentioning here as fairly painless and inductive (focus on readings), having an answer key available, and building up to a nice presentation of some unadulterated Aristophanes, which you’re interested in. Actually, even though for my different purpos
