Ancient Greek Alive

“Faculty in colleges and secondary schools considering a new textbook for beginning Greek are well advised to look at Saffire and Freis. In a way they give the best of both worlds, being traditional but with some innovations and some attention to oral work. The story-telling and reading emphasis are excellent and attractive. Saffire and Freis’s enthusiasm for Greek and joy in teaching it bubble through each page.” — Scholia Reviews

“This textbook is nicely laid out for classroom study. . . . Appropriate for either high school or college use.” — Bryn Mawr Classical Review

“Ancient Greek Alive is an innovative approach to learning Greek involving extensive reading and even some oral exercises. At the same time, the content is as rigorous and linguistically sophisticated as any traditionalist could ask for. This book should help teachers reconsider their teaching strategy and contribute to the health of our discipline.” — David Kovacs, University of Virginia

“The distinctive feature of this text is that it uses as readings not texts which come from classical Greek authors but instead Saffire’s own translations of folktales from the Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, Russian, and Chinese traditions. A Greek ”Thesauros“ at the end offers the student coordinated readings from Greek literature itself, and any student who has worked through the two sets will be on the way to success in the language.” — Timothy Long, Indiana University

“An introductory Greek text that is more than a text. It is an excitement, an enticement to learning. . . . I admire the clarity of the morphological presentation, which manages to slip in a little linguistics in a painless manner, and the force and simplicity of the syntactical explanations. . . . The readings offered are full of humor and intelligence. This will surely bring more students to enjoy the pleasures of Greek.” — Joel Farber, Franklin and Marshall College

“Ancient Greek Alive is a good venture for any young-at-heart teacher who is disenchanted with traditional texts which leave students cold. [The book] has wonderful, witty stories of various origins, including the Far East, yet all in good classical Greek. These stories can be read swiftly by students of even average ability.” — Eliot Youngman, Mercer University

“This book sparkles. It is challengingly thorough, and the reading selections are not only lively and entertaining but very effective. The students find themselves reading Greek before they are aware of what is happening.” — Elizabeth Lyding Will, Amherst College