Summary: These tasks are called "unseen", but if you read plenty of Thucydides and Euripides the style of the passages in the exam will feel familiar!Thucydides' prose can, for example in the speeches that he records, be some of the most difficult. The task of translating a passage from Thucydides requires more literary sensitivity than do any of the other language tasks in A-Level Greek. The only way to become comfortable with his style is to read some Thucydides with a solid grasp of Greek grammar and vocabulary (though the examiners will gloss obscure words and usages for you). You will probably have noticed from your study of set texts that many authors' styles seem impenetrable at first until you get an instinct for how they like to shape their sentences. Something that always used to throw me off was the distant separation within a sentence of agreeing words. This rarely happened in GCSE, and so suddenly having to search to find which word agrees with which could be a struggle. These separations will cease to trouble you once you have spent some time with Thucydides. It will become second nature to find the participle that comes twenty words after the noun that it describes. This preparation can be especially enjoyable as a change from the prescribed nature of the course. Thucydides wrote a history of the entire Peloponnesian War, covering events of over fifty years and much of the rise and fall of the great Athenian Empire. You can select passages from all over this incredible work, dipping in wherever takes your fancy in his often exciting narrative. I would reiterate finally that all this will be much more fruitful and pleasurable if you have first learnt to recognise all the different endings that Greek words can take. Once you have learnt these, reading texts such as Thucydides will cement them into your memory.Euripides is an easier choice as a verse writer than Thucydides as a prose writer. However, Greek verse poses its own difficulties, especially when we are used to reading a certain type of prose Greek. Whereas Thucydides, though very difficult, does not vary far from most of the rules that you will have learnt, Euripides will use the occasional unfamiliar verb form and seem to miss out words much more often than you expect. Fortunately, the grammatical differences between Euripides' Greek and the Greek that you have learnt are not massive. Also helpful are the line breaks that occur in verse, which often coincide with syntactical breaks such as the end of a clause or sentence. The easiest passages of Euripides, where verse can become easier than prose, are the conversations between characters that take the form of "stichomythia". Here characters speak one line at a time in a rapid exchange of usually quite emotional sentences. Needless to say, when each sentence is about five words long our job as translators becomes a lot simpler! To prepare for this "verse unseen" part of the exam, the plan will be the same as for Thucydides. The difference will be that we might make even more effort to note where Euripides does something with his Greek that we have not seen in prose.Because it is somewhat intangible, not enough emphasis is placed on the instinct that is gained from reading Greek. In fact, this instinct is just as important as the learning of tables when it comes to translating authentic passages of Greek.

Testing a question

Related Classical Greek A Level answers

Consider this passage: Homer, Odyssey 11.467-567

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