The Iliad Before Bed: An Ancient Greek Journey with my Daughter

Sing To Me O’ Muse

For the past few years I’ve been on an Ancient Greek kick. Knowing full well that it’s practically useless to learn a dead language, I’ve tried my best to curb my appetite, but to no avail. While I am aware that as a cybersecurity researcher I should be spending my spare time learning the ins and outs of topics like XML canonicalization in SAML login flows, I often unwittingly find myself wrapped up in a blanket on my comfy couch chair, parsing symbols written 3000 years ago, totally divorced from reality at large.

It all began with learning the alphabet, then a few simple sentences. Next was guided readers, often accompanied by passages from actual texts. Following the footsteps of Greek learners from Ancient Roman times, Xenophon was my first real solo endeavor. When that wasn’t enough I moved to Plato, then Homer, the playwrights, lastly Thucydidies (my absolute favorite).

A sample of the many learning texts I've worked through over the years.

While I had learned and mastered both Chinese and Japanese in my 20s, the feeling studying Ancient Greek gives me is different. Learning the two East Asian languages was a mix of curiosity and ambition. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something difficult, determined not to spend a life monolingual after several failed attempts to learn French in high school. Both languages also offered tangible benefits – my Chinese ability got me into a Yale PhD program, Japanese landed me my first software engineering job in Tokyo.

Greek on the other hand is more of an escapism. While reading, I get transported to a place so far outside my own mind that it feels almost like a form of meditation. The body relaxed, the mind clear. I can feel the cool air flowing from the mountains as I stand in the Athenian agora on a warm summer’s day, my toga gently gliding over the tops of my sandals.

I thought this was all totally crazy until I listened to an Egyptologist remark on almost the same thing in one of his lectures. He even went so far as to say that when he was having a bad day he would often just go to his office and copy out Ancient Egyptian symbols as a form of relaxation. I guess all of us classicists have this same nutty trait.

Needless to say, this utter absorption isn’t always appreciated around the house. There’s been many a time where I’ve put off taking out the trash in favor of another passage from Euripides. My wife has had to endure my endless rants over the Peloponesian War and the tragedy of Pericles. I don’t mean to do this, but at times I just feel utterly excited about a topic and have no one else to ambush.

Corrupting the Youth

With no one else to turn my sights on, I decided recently to try to rope my 4 year-old daughter into my obsession. She would often come by and ask me questions about the pictures in the books I’m reading, and seemed to enjoy my explanations.

My daughter’s first introduction to Greek was through bedtime stories via myths: Odysseus and the cyclops, Theseus and the Minotaur, Jason and Medeia, the island of Circe, etc. She responded really well to these, often asking to re-enact the stories through role-play.

With her interest piqued, I then decided to purchase a picture book to supplement the stories. After some scouring online I came across this absolutely beautifully-illustrated work – D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. My daughter immediately loved it, and I soon discovered that she was as interested in the gods and their personas as much as the actual myths themselves. Note though that the content of the book is probably not suitable for young children, so when reading stories I did have to modify them a bit. This became our go-to reader for a few months.

Once the myth book was finished, I decided our next target would be Thrasymachus, a fictional Ancient Greek reader that was a personal favorite of mine when learning the language. It tells the story of a young boy named Thrasymachus that is taken on a tour of the Underworld and has conversations, often humorous, with various Greek gods and heroes. As the story is written entirely in Ancient Greek it was a bit tiring to sight translate but perhaps for non-Greek speakers there’s a teacher’s edition somewhere with a full translation.

It was here during this time that I began teaching my daughter some basic ancient Greek vocabulary. After she mastered a word, I would from then on replace the English equivalent of the word she learned with the Greek.

For example, the Ancient Greek word for home is οἶκος (oikos). It’s where we get the term economics (oikos -> home, nomos -> management), although I’m not sure why the spelling was changed for the English.

After teaching my daughter this word, I will read off sentences like:

Thrasymachus went back to the οἶκος.

Given that she already knows the characters’ names in Greek (Thrasymachus -> ὁ Θρασύμαχος), I can replace that as well:

ὁ Θρασύμαχος went back to the οἶκος.

With each step I gradually replace English with Greek.

Pretty soon she could understand some basic passages delivered entirely in Greek, and we could also conduct basic conversations.

We eventually finished all 30 lessons of Thrasymachus, during which time I noted some of her favorite stories to be Achilles, Hector, and Agamemnon. From this I concluded that the Iliad would naturally be the next step in our Greek reading adventure, although it did sound a bit crazy to me to be reading this to a 4 year-old girl wearing princess pajamas.

We started at Book 1 (Lattimore translation) and would read a small passage every night before bed. I would often have to censor / structure the language in a way that a young child could understand, but for the most part I kept faithful to the original intent. I would also occasionally throw in an untranslated Greek sentence or two if I thought she could handle it (or sometimes if the Homeric Greek was odd I’d give her an Attic Greek reconstruction).

What was interesting to me was that my daughter’s favorite part of the book was the involvement of the gods in the battle. As an adult reading the Iliad, my primary interest lies in the complexity of the characters: Hector’s commitment to defending the doomed city despite knowing the consequences for his family, Achilles’ hatred of his commander tempered by his desire for glory. I typically just gloss over the parts where a god swoops in and changes the course of battle. But for my daughter, she just loves the idea of the gods picking sides and each having their own special powers to offer – it’s almost the equivalent of what other kids must feel when watching Marvel movies. Her perspective even changed my own view of the story, and now I have even come to enjoy those parts.

Over the course of a few months, we made our way through the book, with the typical ups and downs. She loved Achilles’ standoff with Agamemnon, from which she learned her new favorite insult (you wine sack! with a dog’s eyes and a deer’s heart). She couldn’t understand why I was crying when reading aloud Hector’s farewell to Andromache. She always roots for Aphrodite even though she’s usually the goddess causing the most trouble. By the time we got to Hector’s burial at the end of Book 24, it had felt like we’d gone on a real adventure.

So that pretty much summarizes my daughter and I’s Greek journey up until now. While I’m not sure where we’ll go from here, nor whether it will have any utility for her in later life, I do know that as a parent there’s nothing better than taking some useless hobby that irrationally consumes you and imbuing your kids with the same passion.

I think the next steps for us will be heading to Greece this spring to get her familiar with the geography. In the meantime we’ll probably move on to the Odyssey. I will continue to post updates as we go along.