Back in the day, when Greek and Latin were still mainstays of a good liberal education, students were expected to produce a lot of Latin and Greek, as part of the close study of the style of particular authors. More remarkably yet, a surprising number of Greek and Latin verse books were published. Prose composition is still regularly a requirement for classics students at the college level, but verse composition has fared less well.
In response to recent enthusiasm of a few on the Textkit forum for composing verses I produced a guide to writing elegiac couplets. Since that brings to three the number of local documents about how to compose verse in Greek, I've decided composition should get its own place on Aoidoi.org.
Local Guides
- First, you might want to try your hand at Haiku in Greek.
- The Greek Elegiac Couplet: A Writer's Guide
- How to Write Greek Iambics, by Chad Bochan. He presents a word-shape approach to composing iambics which complements Sidgwick and Morice's book.
- Iambic composition notes, by Chad Bochan. Worked exercises for Sidgwick's comp book, a precis of Moorehouse's Syntax of Sophocles, and localization table summaries from both Schein and Dik.
- Again by Chad Bochan, Writing Sapphics, which includes dialect and grammar notes on Lesbian Aeolic, as well as localization tables for the Sapphic strophe.
Modern Versifiers in Ancient Greek
If you write verse in Ancient Greek yourself, but have no public place to put them - and you want to do so - please contact me. I'd love to add to the collection.
- By Jan Křesadlo, the opening to his modern Epic in Homeric Greek, the Astronautilia.
- Politian (Angelo Poliziano), Italian humanist: Selected Classical Greek Verse of Politian.
- David Sansone
- William Annis (who runs Aoidoi.org)