Thrasymachus' Catabasis: An Introductory Greek Reader to Accompany Thrasymachus (Patreon)

Dear Patrons,

For my students this semester at ALI I have begun making the Thrasymachus book by Peckett & Munday into a much more comprehensible novella. I call it Thrasymachus' Catabasis, meaning a journey into the Underworld.

It's only is a work in progress as I write each chapter week by week for my students, but if you would like to start to learn Ancient Greek right away, this will definitely get you off to a good start.

This novelization of the Thrasymachus graded reader by Peckett & Munday is the genesis of an idea proposed by my colleague Jonathan Roberts, co-founder of the Ancient Language Institute.  Since the original Thrasymachus provides a combination of entertaining retellings of various classical myths in good Attic Greek, and, among the various grader readers available today, has perhaps the most charm, it seems a good basis for a curriculum.

Despite these strengths, the weaknesses of the Thrasymachus book include the lack of pictures, glosses, or other ways of immediately understanding new vocabulary, and, more critically, the lack of a coherent narrative thread.  Indeed, numerous scenes, events, and actions are incomprehensible or highly illogical, since either too much is left unexplained (due to lack of vocabulary or grammar available to the authors for a given chapter), or a deep knowledge of the original mythology on the part of the reader is taken for granted.  Thus, to render the original Thrasymachus comprehensible to a much wider audience, executing fully the idea proposed by Jonathan Roberts, I have supplied the narrative tissue that turns the Aristophanic play of the early chapters into a simple novella.  I use this very text with my beginner Ancient Greek students.

Moreover, I have added images and graphics (mostly found via Google Images) along with captions in the style first pioneered by Logan Kilpelä, another colleague from Ancient Language Institute, with considerable collaboration from Raphael Turrigiano.  In this paedagogical style, the images with captions and grammatical notes are placed before the item appears in the narrative, thus pre-teaching the new information right when it will be most useful, thus making the text entirely comprehensible.  It cannot be stressed how important it is to center the paedagogical experience around the narrative, making it comprehensible above all else.

The novelty and utility of this approach inspired me to adopt it here.  In Logan Kilpelä’s honor, the style is named Kilpelätion.  This stands in contrast to the Ørbergization of texts, that is, to supply marginal notes with informative images and captions in the style of Ørberg’s LLPSI.  The reason that Kilpelätion is vastly superior to Ørbergization, is that an Ørbergized text necessitates an unnatural dislocation of the reader from the main body of text to the margin, and readers must compel themselves to constantly look there for the new or unknown term, something that, as experience has shown us teachers, students rarely do, and so they find themselves confused or at a loss for an unwarranted amount of time; a Kilpeläted text, meanwhile, has no interest in wasting your time, and moreover understands what new terms or items you need to comprehend, and, through supplying them in the body of the main text, ensures that you will see and learn the new information, gluing it at once to the narrative: that narrative is the sine quā nōn, since the context of the scene permits you to remember the vocabulary for the long term.

Where certain words are introduced in the original Thrasymachus and I could not think of any clever way to introduce the term without a direct calque to English, I have inserted footnotes.

Since I use this document with my students in the classroom, I have inserted questions at regular intervals in the reading.  As you come to these questions, do you best to ask yourself aloud each of them, and respond in Ancient Greek.  This will lead to increased reading proficiency, as demonstrated in the YouTube series Reading Greek with Luke.

How to use Thrasymachus’ Catabasis

Thrasymachus’ Catabasis is meant to be used to conjunction with the original Thrasymachus by Peckett & Munday, which may be purchased at this link on Amazon.  After reading any given chapter of this Thrasymachus’ Catabasis, read the corresponding chapter in the Thrasymachus reader.  There are two important reasons to do this: 1) whereas the Thrasymachus reader is almost entirely incomprehensible to a beginner, after having read the corresponding chapter in Thrasymachus’ Catabasis, the original Thrasymachus chapter will not just be comprehensible, but will serve to create extensive reading for the student, which is an essential tool in comprehensible input theory for one to gain reading fluency; and 2) the Thrasymachus reader appears to the beginner as an unfriendly wall of text, without any pictures or glosses at all; yet, after having read any given chapter of Thrasymachus’ Catabasis, the student will be able to follow everything in the corresponding Thrasymachus chapter with ease, and readily form a positive relationship with what would otherwise be an intimidating block of pure Greek text, lowering the affective filter and greatly increasing confidence.