μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος - Iliad 1.1 RAGE! sing, goddess, of the [rage] of Peleus' son, Achilles ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ - Odyssey 1.1 the MAN... tell me, Muse, of the [man] of many-turns, who so many ... The first word introduces our theme. The first line frames the stage. The first surviving epics (there were more!) 'root' us in the soil of culture and history. If you're here, you likely already believe this and care about this. I'm new to Skool, so I need a few days to figure out how best to leverage the platform. I'll be uploading materials, linking to tools, probably relying on a mix of documents, video, and apps...and communicating so you can all keep up. Hopefully this can be built in such a way that lets people progress fully asynchronously if need be. The community is currently set to 'free'. If it gets crowded, I may end up gating it a bit. The process will hopefully result in a full curriculum and some useful tech, but the TAM on Homeric Greek is likely terrible, so monetization is unclear at the moment--although most universities would charge you thousands of dollars for access to my time. I have a PhD in Greek and Latin (Classics) from The Ohio State University, and have taught Greek (and other things) for many years. Homer is one of my favorite things. At Baylor I occasionally taught an accelerated Greek sequence where we would cover 2 years of content in 10 weeks! (Mostly to PolySci grad students.) The best part was always when we did Homer at the end. We're going to flip this upside down, and START with Homer, and frankly I think it will be much easier and faster to get up to speed...although don't expect to be able to suddenly go and read Plato or the New Testament afterwards (the language changed a lot in 500 and 1000 years!).

I need to get the next bit up, on doing the full hexameter lines. But first, it would be awesome to know if things are making sense so far, what is still seeming tricky or confusing, etc. so I can patch that in before we get to the fun of building up the ability to 'sight read' meter. I've also just about got a web app ready for vocabulary acquisition... Getting a few hundred very high frequency words memorized is powerful, and I've got a beta build for some fun ways to go about that.

Larger type please in lesson three. Letters are unfamiliar and difficult to distinguish

The new lesson takes what you have learned and shows you how to use it to start 'performing' the Homeric line. (we will get to grammar and translation, but first the fun stuff). The goal is to be able to do it 'live', so follow the directions carefully. We're building a skill, step by step. Trust the process--I've taught many students to do this over the years, and they are always surprised that it 'works'. Remember, we read traditional English poetry left to right without needing to pre-puzzle out the stress accents (think rhyming couplets, limericks, etc.). You can learn to do it with Homer.

1.5 is up. learn how meter works when dealing with 2 or 3 words next to each other. The full line of verse will be the next step.