Greek grammar
Word order
Greek order is free because the endings carry the grammar. Writers use the freedom for emphasis and, in verse, for the metre.
What to expect
- The first word is often the one that matters most: Ἄνδρα, the man, opens the Odyssey; Μῆνιν, wrath, opens the Iliad.
- An adjective can stand far from its noun: in Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, πολύτροπον agrees with Ἄνδρα, four words back.
- Some small words have fixed places. δέ, γάρ, μέν and οὖν come second in their clause, and the article comes before its noun.
How to read it
Keep an adjective that has no noun yet in mind until a noun of the same case, number and gender arrives. In the reader, its arc shows where it belongs.
In the texts
Real lines from the graded passages, as the reader shows them, with an arc from the word to the one it agrees with.
Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν·
Tell me, O Muse, of the much-traveled man, who wandered very much, after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.
Πολύτροπον, of many turns, agrees with Ἄνδρα at the head of the line.
Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς…
Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, a destructive wrath, which placed countless pains upon the Achaeans, and sent forth many valiant souls of heroes to Hades, and made their bodies a prey for dogs and all birds—and the will of Zeus was accomplished—from the moment when first the son of Atreus, lord of men, and godlike Achilles, stood apart in quarrel.
Οὐλομένην, ruinous, agrees with Μῆνιν across the end of the first line.
ἀναβαίνει οὖν ὁ Κῦρος λαβὼν Τισσαφέρνην ὡς φίλον, καὶ τῶν Ἑλλήνων ἔχων ὁπλίτας ἀνέβη τριακοσίους, ἄρχοντα δὲ αὐτῶν Ξενίαν Παρράσιον.
Cyrus therefore goes up, taking Tissaphernes as a friend, and he went up having three hundred hoplites of the Greeks, and Xenia the Parrhasian as their commander.
Τριακοσίους, three hundred, agrees with ὁπλίτας, with the verb ἀνέβη standing between them.
Adjectives to watch
Adjectives from the library’s analysed texts: each page shows the nouns they were read with.