Lucian's The Ass

252 Pages·2012·5.59 MB·English

Lucian’s
The Ass
An Intermediate Greek Reader
Greek text with running vocabulary and commentary

Evan Hayes
and
Stephen Nimis
Lucian’s Lucius, or The Ass: An Intermediate Greek Reader
Greek text with Running Vocabulary and Commentary

First Edition

© 2012 by Evan Hayes and Stephen Nimis

Revised October 2012

All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book
may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond copying
permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by
reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

The authors have made a version of this work available (via email) under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. The
terms of the license can be accessed at creativecommons.org.

Accordingly, you are free to copy, alter and distribute this work under the
following conditions:

1. You must attribute the work to the author (but not in a way that suggests
that the author endorses your alterations to the work).
2. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
3. If you alter, transform or build up this work, you may distribute the
resulting work only under the same or similar license as this one.

The Greek text is based on the edition of C. Jacobitz, published by Teubner in
1907.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9832228-2-8
ISBN-10: 0983222827

Published by Faenum Publishing, Ltd.
Cover Design: Evan Hayes

Fonts: Gentium (Open Font License)
GFS Porson (Open Font License)

[email protected]
[email protected]
Table of Contents

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….…………..ix-xi
Abbreviations …………….………………………………………………………………..…………………….xii
Text and Commentary …………………………………………………………………………………. 1-147
Grammatical topics:
The different meanings of the word αὐτὸς……………………………………………………..5
The Conjugation of ἔρχομαι……………………………………………………..…………………….7
Defective Verbs………………………………………………………………………………………………..9
Future Conditions …..……………………………………………………………………………………..16
General Conditions and Temporal Clauses…………………………………………………….19
Indirect Statement: accusative + infinitive……………………………………………………30
Indirect Statement: ὅτι or ὡς + the indicative………………………………………………36
Indirect Statement: accusative + participle…………………………………………………..41
Potential ἂν.…………………………………………………………………………………………………..70
Indirect Statement in Secondary Sequence…………………………………………………..85
Apuleius’ Metamorphoses: Selected Passages……………………………………………...151-194
List of verbs ………………………………………………………………………………………………..199-207
Glossary ………………………………………………………………………………………….………….211-230

Acknowledgments
The idea for this project grew out of work that we, the authors, did
with support from Miami University’s Undergraduate Summer Scholars
Program, for which we thank Martha Weber and the Office of Advanced
Research and Scholarship. The Miami University College of Arts and Science’s
Dean’s Scholar Program allowed us to continue work on the project and for this
we are grateful to the Office of the Dean, particularly to Phyllis Callahan and
Nancy Arthur for their continued interest and words of encouragement.
Work on the series, of which this volume is a part, was generously
funded by the Joanna Jackson Goldman Memorial Prize through the Honors
Program at Miami University. We owe a great deal to Carolyn Haynes, and the
2010 Honors & Scholars Program Advisory Committee for their interest and
confidence in the project.
The technical aspects of the project were made possible through the
invaluable advice and support of Bill Hayes, Christopher Kuo, and Daniel
Meyers. The equipment and staff of Miami University’s Interactive Language
Resource Center were a great help along the way. We are also indebted to the
Perseus Project, especially Gregory Crane and Bridget Almas, for their technical
help and resources.
We owe special thanks to Carolyn DeWitt and Kristie Fernberg, whose
administrative support, patience, and good humor were essential for the
completion of this manuscript.
We also profited greatly from advice and help on the POD process from
Geoffrey Steadman. We are grateful to Joel Relihan for a number of corrections
that appear in this revised version. All responsibility for errors, however, rests
with the authors themselves.
v

φιλτάτῳ καὶ εξοχώτατῳ
Alex Robbins

Introduction
The aim of this book is to make Pseudo-Lucian’s Lucius, or The Ass
accessible to intermediate students of Greek. The running vocabulary and
commentary are meant to provide everything necessary to read each page. The
commentary is primarily grammatical, explaining subordinate clauses,
conditions etc., and parsing unusual verb forms. The page by page vocabularies
gloss all but the most common words. We have endeavored to make these
glossaries as useful as possible without becoming fulsome. A glossary of all
words occurring three or more times in the text can be found as an appendix in
the back, but it is our hope that most readers will not need to use this appendix
often. There is also a list of verbs occurring in the text that have unusual forms
in the back of the book. Brief explanations of allusions and proper names are
given, but this is not primarily a literary commentary.
The Ass is a great intermediate Greek text. The narrative is fast-paced
and funny, and the language is fairly simple and easy to follow. The reputation
of the story has suffered at the hands of critics due in part to an unfavorable
comparison to its more famous Latin relative, Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. These
two narratives share some similarities too close to be accidental, and their
complex relationship will be discussed below. But irrespective of that
comparison, The Ass is an unpretentious satirical text that tells a funny story in
a casual and light-hearted manner. There is little moralizing or didacticism in
the story, although modern audiences will no doubt find the mistreatment of
animals and other fellow humans by many characters in the story appalling.
The story is told entirely from the perspective of the main character, Lucius,
who is turned into an ass by magic. Unlike the Lucius of Apuleius’s version of
the story, also narrated in the first person , this Lucius does not seem to achieve
any religious or philosophical illumination from his adventures. The final
episode is a funny twist of events completely in tune with the tenor of the rest
of the novel. There is a hilarious love-making episode with lots of double-
entendre, and other episodes that portray the doings of various low-life
characters who are rarely present in ancient literature at all. Thieves, religious
charlatans, witches, millers, servants, soldiers and bakers all find a place in this
strange story of chance and magic.
As mentioned above, The Ass and Apuleius’ The Golden Ass have
numerous striking similarities in plot and expression. There appears to have
been another longer Greek version of the story known as the Metamorphoses,
ix