This site is based on A Greek Reader by Charles Anthon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1840, with slightly adjusted reprints up through 1854). This work is itself a selection and reworking of Frederic Jacob’s 4-volume behemoth, Elementarbuch der griechischen Sprache für Anfänger und Geübtere, published in many editions in the early nineteenth century. If you believe the long, hostile, and anonymous review in the Boston-based North American Review of 1840, Anthon largely plagiarized his selection and translation of Jacobs from the 1829 Boston edition published by Hilliard, Gray & Co. But this is unfair. Anthon’s notes are new and extensive, and very useful to beginners. The review eventually admits this, but then roasts Anthon for giving too much help in the notes, a flaw that will, it asserts, utterly destroy standards of scholarship in the United States. Student friendly, this Anthon, our kind of guy. Stephen Newmeyer’s appreciation in Classical Outlook 59.2 (1981–2), pp. 41–44, gives a good summary of his remarkable career at Columbia College.
The book contains two “Courses.” The shorter, first course contains brief sentences exemplifying specific morphological features, such as declensions or conjugations. The longer second course consists of short to medium-length passages thematically arranged: Aesopic fables, anecdotes of philosophers, anecdotes of kings and statesmen, and anecdotes of Spartans. There is a section “natural history” (i.e. interesting critters), a section of mythology, mythological narrations, mythological dialogues (from Lucian), and a long section on geography. Then there is a series of extracts from Plutarch (“History and Biography”) mostly about Athenian statesman. There follow several poetic extracts from Homer and Anacreon, among others.
A group of students and professors from Dickinson and the University of New Hampshire, ably led by Professor R. Scott Smith from the University of New Hampshire, digitized most of the work in the summer of 2023 using Bruce Robertson’s web-based application Lace: Visualizing, Editing and Searching Polylingual OCR Results. The digitized text was then edited, equipped with running vocabulary in DCC style, and endowed with hyperlinks to Goodell's Grammar of Attic Greek. We cut down somewhat on the geography section, which gets a bit dull, and omitted the Homer selections, since we already have a growing edition of Homer’s Odyssey on DCC, as well as Books 6 and 22 of the Iliad.
The work is substantially Anthon-Jacobs (via Hilliard and Gray). But we adjusted some of the grammatical explanation to conform with modern standards, updated by taking out some of the gendered language in the notes, and we include some extra passages that compensate for the reader’s masculine and Atheno-centric biases, which go back to Jacobs. This is an old work, and a resurrected Anthon will certainly not suit the needs of every teacher or student. The goal is to put a large amount of relatively easy Greek in the hands of readers with full running vocabulary lists. This will hopefully go part way to rectifying the imbalance between the sorts of lower intermediate resources available for Latin and the much smaller amount of such material available for Greek.
There are many such Greek readers from the 19th century, Greek Learner Texts Project is working on some of these. Our group consists of students . We’re very excited about this project. It’s a little different than what we have been publishing so far on DCC, but I trust that it will find a niche on our site. In the long term we could augment with other material from other Greek readers into a kind of super mega Greek reader. But for now we’re going to focus on Anthon, since his notes are so helpful for beginners.
Chris Francese, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, June 21, 2023