Day 9: On the Majesty of the Greek Language

I've reached Lesson XVIII of Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners and there is no section of the poem here. Instead Pharr is beefing up vocab and grammar skills for the coming spurning of Apollo's priest by Agamemnon.

Going through the Greek verb is something that I feel will either drive me completely into the arms of Achilles' mania or lead mind to someplace ethereal. The language is so nuanced and one can be hyperspecific or studiously vague depending on the situation. There are somewhere over 200 principle parts to the Greek verb. So many shades of meaning!! A Greek with excellent rhetorical skills must have ranked as a speaker like Van Gogh did as a painter. I am reminded of Gibbons observation about the Christological controversies of late antiquity: in the Greek speaking provinces of the empire the controversies were carried down to the lowest strata of society whereas in the Latin provinces the issues barely penetrated the popular mind because Latin lacked the words to describe them...