ὁ Φάρος (The Pharos): A Thematic Guide to Ancient Greek Vocabulary and Set Phrases Paperback – May 31, 2024

I first learned about this book on Polymathy (YouTube) and I knew I wanted to buy it. This type of thematically arranged glossary is excellent and the author surpassed all expectations in this a monumental and extremely careful work. It feels like one of those DK Visual Dictionaries insofar as the words are presented in context, which makes my learning much easier and more meaningful. It is obviously different than the DK dictionaries because it has no pictures and includes lots of abstract concepts (which visual dictionaries don’t and probably can’t ). Excellent work and extremely useful for professional and amateur classicists.

I believe this to be the most important and useful book to the study of Ancient Greek released in our time: Adrian Hundhausen has so impressively and exhaustively analyzed the corpus of Ancient Greek literature, with emphatic focus on Koine and Attic, to have finally produced for us a tool that allows us to enter into the idiom of the prose authors like never before.Ancient Greek presents numerous obstacles to those of us wishing to master it, and not least among those is the difficulty of finding the vocabulary for self-expression (such as for those of us interested in speaking Ancient Greek, which is a highly effecitive way to make us better readers), and the challenge of figuring out which words are truly normal and common, and which are more exotic: imagine attempting to appreciate a modern novel or poem in English, but having no ability to judge if a word is unusual or plain.Whereas most textbooks and especially dictionaries display a dizzying array of word choice from disparate Greek dialects including Epic or Homeric Greek, Aeolic, Doric, Ionic Greek, and others, Hundhausen thoroughly demystifies usage and word frequency in a way useful both to the beginner student and advanced scholar. He achieves this through a rather innovative technique of writing large the words of highest frequency in the corpus and thus of the greatest importance to learn, and backs this up by citing every single entry in the authors of the corpus, such that one may find for oneself the texts where these words may be found in the ancient writings.In the attached photos, you can see I have taken the time to label each section, an exercise I highly recommend since it permitted me to familiarize myself with the enormous range of content that the book covers thematically. I most emphatically recommend this book to every person, whether beginner student or university professor or hobbyist scholar, with any interest in Ancient Greek.

When this resource was released, I suspected that I had found that I didn’t yet know I had been looking for. When I read its contents, my suspicions were confirmed. There is nothing like this book. I have used it to make labels all over my house, to write in various kids books, and to ensure that I am using authentic Koine phrases as I speak this with my 3 year old son and my wife.

This book has several advantages: 1, it has a lot of set phrases which are quite difficult to find in the LSJ dictionary. 2, it tells you the frequency of the word by putting frequent words in large font. 3, it alerts you to verbs and nouns of irregular declension and conjugation. 4, most important of all, this book recognizes that words are more easily remembered if they are situated within a network. This book divides words into 38 networks and then further subdivides them again into usually between 10 and 20 categories. It is far easier to remember words when you see them coalesce within a group.

This lexicon is what I wish I had 1 1/2 years ago when I started studying Ancient Greek. The next step would be to make it available in electronic form. I don't know if the author plans to do that but that would be wonderful to have it available as an app. I already paid for the hardcopy. I would be willing to pay again for the app.

This is a Greek to English lexicon organized by topic rather than alphabetically (in that it is similar to Louw-Nida). It is carefully designed to be helpful. Some features that I like include: it is very comprehensive, it includes a wide range of Koine source material, it includes useful phrases to know, it is easy to see which words are more common and who used them, and it is very easy to navigate. This will be a great resource for speaking and composing Ancient Greek, or to learn vocabulary by related content rather than by frequency.

Product arrived in excellent condition and is exactly what I expected.

Tremendously rich with information, and organized with an economy and efficiency that should be emulated. I believe my odds of making it into a Classics graduate program have greatly been improved.