Ebook A First Greek Book

This book does not pretend to offer a short and easy intro duction to the Greek language. For Greek is not easy, and any short introduction can only prove inadequate. Even the one year's work which this book contains must postpone many subjects, which properly should be mastered before the stu dent should be set to reading a Greek author. A man must sow before he can reap. Discipline in a language cannot be got at the same time with the pleasures of its literature. They are mutually destructive, and discipline must precede. That impatient haste, therefore, which opens at once with the first page of Xenophon's Anabasis with little or no prelimin ary hard labor reaps invariably its whirlwind of quick ennui, despair, and vain regret.