Bloomsbury (2016) 504pp £25.64 (ISBN 9781474266024)
This book is every teacher’s dream. It is a one-stop shop with all the texts anyone needs to take Greek to A level between 2017 and 2019. One (fairly fat) volume contains the texts of all the prose and verse texts set for AS/A2 in a clear readable font, with introductory essays to each author, commentary on the text helping the student make sense of the language, the style and the contextual background, and a targeted vocabulary for each text. The book is excellent value as it replaces the need to buy several separate volumes—and it does so in spendidly attractive style.
The volume has been put together by a team made up of teachers of the subject in schools and universities: some of them relatively new to the business, some of them old hands, but all of them writing in a remarkably homogeneous house style which makes you forget that they are different writers. The commentary is primarily aimed to explain the meaning of the Greek and does so by a mixture of linguistic analysis and translation. Some comments may seem superfluous, but then we all know that schoolteachers cannot always assume much knowledge in their charges, and it is better to be told what you already know than to be left in the dark. The commentary also links these texts to other texts without overburdening the student with a plethora of ‘cf.’ parallels. The background is deftly filled in (e.g Marathon on p. 493) and there is rightly repetition of some material; nobody apart from this reviewer will be expected to read all of it, and so each commentary has to stand alone.
The book opens with Thucydides (Pylos and Sphacteria) with an introduction by Malcolm Campbell and commentary by John Taylor, complete with useful maps and a splendidly clear introduction setting the text in its historical context. Plato’s Apology has an introduction by Steven Kennedy and a commentary by Ben Gravell, both of whom strike the right balance and tell us both what Plato says and also what he means. Socrates reappears in the text of Xenophon’s Memorabilia with introduction and notes by Charles Paterson. On the verse side there is Homer Odyssey 9 and 10 (with a single introduction by Frederica Daniela and separate commentaries by Claire Webster and Rob Colborn respectively), Sophocles Antigone (with introduction and notes by Matthew McCullough) and finally Sarah Harden gives us a section of Aristophanes’ Acharnians.
It would be invidious to select any one of these scholars for special treatment: suffice it to say that their notes and introductions are all tailored to the text and the target audience for the book. Where Aristophanes is filthy, the notes match him in obscenity: where the language of these authors is elevated and moving, the appreciation shines through in the notes. The editors tell the reader what they need to know but not what they should think: and the publishers have produced a full set of website materials (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ocr-anthology-for-classical-greek-as-and-a-level-9781474266024/) which has resources for both students and teachers. This marks a real advance on the way in which students can be encouraged to develop skills of independent learning—and is a boon for teachers too.
This is a book which is written for a specific examination and yet it is also a κτῆμα ἐς ἀεί in that the texts it contains will be useful reading for anybody who has mastered GCSE and will be useful in university courses for years to come. I spotted a couple of typos (p. 280 the reference to Dowden’s article has the word ‘History’ inserted wrongly: and p. 105 there is a missing accent on διελέγχω), but the book is otherwise immaculately proof-read and copy-edited, and it is to the enormous credit of the publishers that they have invested in a book so rich for what is a comparatively small constituency of readers.
John Godwin