CHAPTER 3

DEAD OR ALIVE

ANYONE WHO DOUBTS the value of studying a dead language should tune in to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which is broadcast live on ESPN, like an Olympic event, with color commentary by lexicographers and up-close-and-personal interviews with the contestants. I thought I knew some Greek, but these elite athletes of orthography routinely spell Greek-derived words that I didn’t even know existed, much less what they meant or how to spell them. The 2018 competition tapped a reservoir of Greek-derived words: ephyra, pareidolia, ooporphyrin, lochetic, ecchymosis, ochronosis, gnomonics (the art of making sundials), propylaeum (which means something like “foregate,” as in the ceremonial entrance to the Acropolis of Athens). Pareidolia turns out to mean the all-too-human tendency to discern an image in some unexpected place, as “the face of the Virgin Mary on a toasted cheese sandwich,” in the citation from Webster’s Unabridged. Ooporphyrin I figured had something to do with an egg (ω’όν in ancient Greek) and purple (porphyry, the deep-red stone): a reference to some fabulous creature that lays purple eggs? Close. It is the characteristic pigment of brown eggshells.

The champion won on the word koinonia. This I had a bead on, because I knew that Koine was the word for biblical Greek. Koine means the common tongue, like lingua franca. So koinonia is the shared spirit in a community of believers. The bee pronouncer, Jacques Bailly, a former champion himself, offered alternative pronunciations of koinonia, one with the “oi” of classical Greek and the other with the “ee” of the modern language. Bailly won the bee in 1980, on the word elucubrate, from the Latin for “compose by lamplight,” or study late into the night, burn the midnight oil. He is now a classics professor at the University of Vermont.

One boy progressed to the next round on Mnemosyne (Ne-moz-e-nee)—Memory, mother of the Muses, who gave us the mnemonic device. Mnemosyne ought to be the presiding deity of spelling bees. These kids had clearly burned some midnight oil as they trained in combining forms. There were a lot of polysyllabic German-derived words (Bewusstseinslage) in the bee, too, as well as impressionistic French words (cendre) that English has adopted. These borrowings bear the earmarks of their mother tongues: the German tendency to agglomerate, the French to nasalize. Like Bailly, the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee may build a career out of words.

The study of any language—Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Taino—opens the mind, gives you a window onto another culture, and reminds you that there is a larger world out there and different ways of saying things, hearing things, seeing things. It always distresses me to hear someone say, “I’m no good at foreign languages,” or demand “English for me, dear.” In learning a foreign language, you have to humble yourself, admit your ignorance, be willing to look stupid. We learn a language by making mistakes. Or anyway I do.

Spelling Greek-derived words in English is difficult enough, but spelling Greek words in Greek is like necromancy. And even though it is a phonetic language, pronunciation is problematic, because of the way stress hops around in Greek. In English, if you put the accent on the wrong syllable, people will usually understand you (though they may laugh at you, to your face or behind your back), but many Greek words are practically unrecognizable to Greeks if the stress is wrong, or they have a completely different meaning from the one you intended. I sometimes wonder what my beloved teacher Dorothy Gregory thought when she saw me off to Greece that first time. She didn’t think it was a good idea to go at Easter, and it did make me feel alienated. Easter (Pascha) is a big family holiday, and I was a total stranger, a xéni. Dorothy would have cringed if she had heard me trying to keep up my end of the Easter greeting: “Christ is risen,” a person says, and you are supposed to respond, “Truly He is risen,” but I got the ending on my adverb wrong and said, “Really? He is?”

Of course, no one in Greece expects an Irish-looking American to speak even a little bit of Greek. Most of them speak English so much better than I speak Greek that it’s hard to find someone to practice on. At a farmers’ market on Rhodes, I was excited to see artichokes for sale. “Aγκινάρες!” I said to the wizened old man at the vegetable stand (agkináres). In response, he said—in English—“Just tell me what you want.” But as I was leaving with a couple of his long-stemmed beauties, I heard him say, in Greek, “How are they called in English?” I stopped, turned around, and said, “Arty choke.” He repeated it: “Άρτι τσοκ.” If I couldn’t get them to teach me Greek, I would help them with their English.

In Piraeus once, investigating the marinas on the opposite side of the peninsula from the huge docks where the ferries come and go, I was invited by a restaurant owner to sit at a prime table, across the street from the restaurant’s kitchen, overlooking the picturesque horseshoe-shaped harbor with yachts from all over the world. He started off in English, and I was feeling beaten down that day, so I ordered in English. After my meal, I crossed the street to use the WC, which was in the basement, and coming up the stairs I noticed a landing along the staircase that had been turned into a terrarium for tortoises. The Greek for tortoise is one of the words that has stuck with me, because I once heard a little boy, spotting a tortoise in the grass in Panorama, a suburb of Thessaloniki, shout “Χελώνα!” It was as if until that moment I did not really believe that Greeks called a tortoise a chelóna. Delighted by the tortoises, I counted them in Greek: mía, dúo, treis, téssereis, pénte, éxi, eftá, októ—októ chelónes! On my way out, I passed my waiter and said, in English, “You have eight tortoises!” “No!” he said, horrified. “We do not eat the tortoises!”

You’re probably wondering if I ever get anything right.

In my first class I learned the Greek words for food and for numbers and for the seasons. The words for the seasons are especially beautiful in Greek. Spring is ánoixi, from the verb ανοίγω, open, uncork—the year opens. Summer is kalokaíri: literally, “good weather.” Phthinóporo is the fall, suggestive of the last harvest and overripe fruit (the consonant cluster at the beginning, phth, at first seems rude to an English speaker, as if you were spitting out a cherry pit). Winter, kheimónas, is a time of scraping by.

From then on in, it’s nouns and verbs, verbs and nouns. Nouns come first: naming things. Then verbs: going places and doing things. Soon enough you have to separate your verbs into tenses, and that’s when it gets complicated and I move along to another language. In Spanish, I never got out of the present tense, forming the past by hooking my right thumb over my shoulder and the future by waving my left hand in front of me to indicate forward motion. I played the simpleton in Mexico, but I managed to eat and drink and buy Band-Aids.

My New Yorker boss Ed Stringham taught me the Greek for “yes” and “no,” and we commiserated over the confusion that reigns between them. The German ja and nein have a clear resemblance to “yes” and “no.” The French oui and the Italian sì and Spanish sí come easily enough, and all the Romance languages—even Portuguese—rely on the basic sound of “no”: no, non, não. But the Greek for “yes” is nai (ναι), which sounds like “no” or “nah,” a negative, while the word for “no” is όχι, which sounds like “OK,” meaning “yes.” Why must life be so cruel? Sometimes when I’m traveling I can’t seem to get out the right word for “yes” in the country I’m in and I cycle through the whole litany: Ja, oui, sì, nai, yes. Όχι is fun to say, once you get used to it. A child sometimes draws out the first syllable—óooχι, on a falling note—in protest. Greek Americans sometimes call October 28th, the day Greece entered the Second World War, Όχι Day, for the refusal by Metaxas, the prime minister, to let Mussolini’s troops enter the country from Albania. Later, the Nazis would not take όχι for an answer.

Greeks often say “yes” twice—“nai nai”—like “yeah yeah,” conveying an attitude, sometimes reassuring, sometimes impatient. The gesture that accompanies nai, equivalent to our nodding, is a single gracious tilt of the head, down and to the side. Όχι is accompanied by a sharp upward stab of the chin, which sometimes seems unnecessarily abrupt. At the newsstand, a taciturn newsagent will sometimes give you the chin flick to indicate that he is out of whatever you wanted. Sometimes he will add, “Feenees,” meaning “Finished” or “All gone.”

The Greeks also have their own way of saying “OK”: entáxei (εντάξει), which means, literally, “in order” and brings us back to the classroom. Τάξη (the nominative in modern Greek) means “class,” as in classroom, where one expects order and discipline. The tricky thing here is to remember that although the stress is on the alpha in εντάξει, when you want a taxi you have to put the stress on the last syllable: ταξί. Otherwise, you are standing on a street corner like an idiot calling out “Class, class!” or “Order, order!” How is anyone supposed to know you want a cab?

Because I could not go back to infancy and learn Greek from the cradle, I made the best of it: I used English to help me learn Greek. There is a lot of Greek in English. Like those first words I learned in order to be polite, parakaló and efkharistó, other words stuck with me because of their echoes in English. When I arrived at the Hotel Achilleus in Athens, and the receptionist pointed me toward the elevator—one of those tiny European hoisting cages that make you think too much about weights and pulleys—I tried out my Greek, asking “Λειτουργεί;” (Leitourgeí?) “Does it work?” (The question mark in Greek looks like a semicolon.) This word had stuck because of its connection with “liturgy”: the rituals and prayers that are the work of the Church. The receptionist, who moved easily from Greek to German, English, and French, said nai—of course the elevator worked. I found it a little rickety and had the urge to pray when I was in it.

Dorothy Gregory gave me a lot of vocabulary—I have a box of Greek, some of it in her handwriting—but the words that stuck are the ones she used conversationally, in direct address, bringing the word out of the dictionary and into the moment, like the time she said, “Διψάς;” (Dipsás?), and I understood that she was asking, “Are you thirsty?” I knew that a dipsomaniac was someone with an insatiable thirst, but to hear Dorothy use the verb διψάω in the second-person singular present tense and to match it with my parched throat was a revelation. Ναι, διψάω. What are we going to do about it? Is there a water fountain out in the hallway? I wonder if this is why I feel moved whenever I see a Greek man watering a plant or setting out a bowl of water for a dog. To give someone water is to care.

ALL THESE WORDS are modern Greek, which is very much alive. When the English-speaking world needs to name something, it turns to the ancient language. Many words from the natural world come from Greek: ocean, dolphin, hippopotamus, peony, elephant, pygmy. Some of the words that come from ancient Greek (and survive in modern Greek) are for exotic creatures. Octopus is from the Greek: οκτώ (eight) + πους (foot) = eight-legger. (Having learned of its intelligence, I no longer order grilled octopus in restaurants.) Like the octopus, the medusa, or jellyfish, is one of the original sea monsters. So is the hippocampus, or seahorse. The elephant may go back to our old friend the Phoenician aleph, ox.

Some words that look as if they came directly from the Greek turn out, on further study, to have followed a more circuitous route. For instance, the eucalyptus—ευ (good, well) + καλυπτος (covered) = well-covered, as in a hooded blossom—is native to Australia; the word’s first recorded use was in 1788 AD. Of course, it’s also ευκάλυπτος in modern Greek, from English, through ancient Greek. In the Peloponnese once, when somebody identified a fragrant tree that looked to me like wild white wisteria as aκaκίa, acacia, I wondered briefly if the Greek aκaκίa was a transliteration of the English. Which came first, the word or the tree? The thorny acacia is native to Africa and the Middle East, not a transplant from the New World, so aκaκίa came before acacia, but the tree itself no doubt preceded the word.

The names for natural phenomena, like flowers and insects, are often local. For instance, when I was a child, our word for the gnats or midges that swarmed all over Cleveland on muggy summer nights was Canadian soldiers. I picked this up with no idea that it might be interpreted as a slur against our neighbors on the opposite shore of Lake Erie—I just thought it was the bugs’ name. My grandmother used to decorate the narrow strip of land between the house and the driveway with a nasty, shrubby little plant called live-forever. I didn’t like it as a child and I don’t like it now, though I allowed a friend to plant some in my garden under the name sedum. It is a dull plant, though I must admit that its common name is highly descriptive: it does seem to live forever.

Some Greek flower names are actually pre-Greek: they derive ultimately from people and languages that predated ancient Greek. For instance, narcissus (nárkissos) was the original Greek word for the flower, native to southern Europe, we commonly call the daffodil. The myth of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection, is the timeless personification of the flower, accounting for its existence. The word narcissus is related to the Greek nárke, or torpor, numbness, a narcotic quality. Daffodil seems to be a corruption of the Greek asphodel, the flower of Hades and the dead. Jonquil is a Frenchier name for a species of the same flower. The hyacinth is another flower with a myth attached: Hyacinthus was a Greek youth beloved of Apollo who was accidentally killed by the god, who then turned him into a flower.

Greek actually has two words for flower, the ancient ánthos and the frivolous modern louloúdi. For The Greek Anthology, a collection of the best work of the Greek lyric poets, poems were selected as if they were flowers: a word bouquet.

George Orwell lamented the tendency to overlay Greek names on common English flowers. He writes that “a snapdragon is now called an antirrhinum, a word no one can spell”—much less pronounce—“without consulting a dictionary,” and that “forget-me-nots are coming more and more to be called myosotis.” Orwell adds, “I don’t think it a good augury for the future of the English language that ‘marigold’ should be dropped in favour of ‘calendula.’ ” I agree that something is lost when pinks are called “dianthus” and foxglove gives way to “digitalis.” The point is that flowers bloomed before people had books to look up their names in, and in the places where the flowers bloom, people tend to have their own names for them.

It is mainly words for things that were imported to Greece in modern times that have been transliterated into Greek from other languages. For instance, the Greeks did not have beer worth mentioning until the great powers of Europe installed Otto von Wittelsbach, of Bavaria, as their king, in 1832, and he brought along a brewer. The Greeks drafted their word for beer, μπίρα, from the Italian birra.

Many medical words are from the Greek, possibly because much of what we think of as medicine began in Greece. Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath, named for Hippocrates, but the notion that it begins with “First, do no harm” is a myth. Hippocrates is generally regarded as the first to treat illness as a natural phenomenon rather than a punishment from the gods. The symbol of the caduceus on the back of an ambulance—a staff with two snakes wound around it—is derived from Greek mythology: it resembles the Rod of Asclepius, the healer and son of Apollo, which has a single snake climbing up it. Greeks gave entirely too much credit to snakes, in my opinion. But I suppose they’re better than leeches.

For a long time, I went around thinking that words like otorhinolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat doctor, diminished in English to ENT), ophthalmologist, and orthodontist were of Greek origin, and they are, but not in the sense that ancient Greeks consulted such specialists or wore metal braces on their teeth. Demosthenes the orator did not consult a speech therapist; legend has it that he filled his mouth with pebbles and addressed the sea, so that when he removed the pebbles and spoke to an audience his voice was clear and powerful. Those English words were put together from Greek parts—little linguistic Frankenstein’s monsters—as the specialties came into being.

An educated medical professional in Victorian times probably studied Latin and Greek, though not all doctors were classicists. Still, when it came time to name things, they fell back on Greek, possibly because it was the oldest, most stable, most dignified source. There might have been a mystification factor: fancy words impress people. Old English had its own words for body parts: lungs, blood, kidney, gut, elbow, knee. We don’t need the Greek words, but the language is the richer for them: we have two ways of saying the same thing. Perhaps the Greek words create a comforting distance between us and our bodies. Would you rather have tennis elbow or epicondylitis? Water on the brain or hydrocephalus? A doctor might call someone a hemophiliac where a mother would bemoan a bleeder. The Greek terms ennoble the ailment, even if they don’t make it go away. Liver disease is hepatitis. Nephritis afflicts the kidneys. Arthritis—what my mother used to call Arthuritis—refers to the joints and is somehow more abstract than joint disease (though I’d rather not have either).

Greek casts a spell of importance over the body parts and the doctors, a spell that a physician might be tempted to exploit. I had some green spots on my toes one summer—I’d been spending a lot of time barefoot on the beach—and I asked my doctor about them. “That’s just pigment,” he said. All he did, in his diagnosis, was use the fancy word for color. If surgeons knew that the word surgery comes from the ancient Greek cheirourgía—χειρ (hand) + έργον (work)—meaning “handiwork” and could apply as well to needlepoint as to brain surgery, they might not be so arrogant.

We are all still humans, in pursuit of the same dreams that inspired our remotest ancestors. Igor Sikorsky, the father of the modern helicopter, built on the work of Daedalus, the original inventor, who made wings out of feathers and wax, which he and his son, Icarus, used to escape Crete. Everyone knows what happened: Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he dropped into what is now called the Icarian Sea. The word helicopter combines helix (spiral) and pteryx (wing, as in pterodactyl, the prehistoric bird with leathery-looking finger wings). In plain English, we call it a chopper.

Or take the telephone, patented by Alexander Graham Bell. It makes use of the Greek stems for distance (τηλε) and voice (φωνη): voice from afar. The Irish word for telephone is guthán (goohawn), loosely translated as “voice box,” made by adding a suffix to the Irish word for voice. In English, we sometimes refer to the telephone as the horn (“Get him on the horn!”), but the inventor wanted a new word for his revolutionary invention, and “telephone” stuck. Why do we lean on dead languages for new things? Perhaps expressing these things in the language that is oldest, in words that we have in common with many other languages, gives us a touchstone.

THE AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE on ancient Greek words is Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, first published in 1843. (Most classicists pronounce the name Liddell.) Its origins are somewhat mythical: in one version, a publisher approached a student named Robert Scott with the idea for a Greek-English lexicon, and Scott said he would do it only if his friend Henry George Liddell would share the work.

Liddell was said to be the epitome of an Oxford don. Tall, white-haired, and aristocratic, he was ordained in the Church of England and was chaplain to Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. He and his wife had ten children, one of whom was to become “the most famous little girl in English literature”: Alice Liddell. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson used to watch her and her sisters playing in the deanery garden as he worked in the library. She inspired him, as Lewis Carroll, to write the stories that turned into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. An early adopter of the camera, Dodgson photographed Alice in different costumes and poses. These days, he would be summoned before a committee on sexual miscondunct. Alice was also pursued by John Ruskin, but, unimpressed with her literary suitors, she married a cricketer named Reginald Hargreaves.

Liddell and Scott began work in 1834, basically translating a Greek-German lexicon by one Franz Passow, who in turn had based his work on a dictionary begun by Johan Gotlob Schneider earlier that century.

To classicists, a lexicon differs from a dictionary in being a collection of words occurring in the work of a given group of authors, with citations and definitions. Passow had begun with Homer and Hesiod and started on Herodotus; Liddell and Scott picked up with Herodotus and Thucydides. Liddell’s biographer describes their method: “The uses of each word were traced from its simplest and most rudimentary meaning to its various derivative and metaphorical applications. . . . [E]ach gradation was illustrated as far as possible historically, by apt quotations from authors of successive dates.”

Scott’s career took him to Cornwall, where he was not well situated to continue work on the lexicon. (No email.) Liddell became dean of Christ Church, Oxford. In July 1842, he wrote to Scott, “You will be glad to hear that I have all but finished Π”—pi—“that two-legged monster, who must in ancient times have worn his legs a-straddle, else he could never have strode over so enormous a space as he has occupied and will occupy in Lexicons.” By the time Liddell published the eighth edition, in 1897, fifty-four years later—a year before his death—the volume included vocab ulary from the dramatists and philosophers. It was later enlarged by Henry Stuart Jones, and the 1968 edition, with supplement, runs to more than 2,000 pages.

Before Liddell and Scott, the only way for an English speaker to learn Greek was through Latin. As Liddell and Scott wrote in a preface to the lexicon, they intended the work to “foster and keep alive . . . that tongue which, as the organ of Poetry and Oratory, is full of living force and fire, abounding in grace and sweetness, rich to overflowing . . . that tongue in which some of the noblest works of man’s genius lie enshrined—works which may be seen reflected faintly in imitations and translations, but of which none can know the perfect beauty, but he who can read the words themselves, as well as their interpretation.”

ONE OF THE THINGS that make a language a language, that give it currency, is the small, indefinable, not strictly necessary words that connect you to the person you’re talking to. They might be slang, they might be idiom, they might be baby talk. Linguists dryly call them “function words”; in Greek grammar they are known as particles. They rope you in. In English we use them all the time and are almost helpless not to use them. If we become self-conscious about them, we are tongue-tied. Some people deplore the extra words as loose and repetitive, and complain that kids today are lazy and inarticulate and that they are destroying the beauty and precision of the language. But we have relied on such little words since antiquity. They enrich the language as they help us get along with one another.

I overheard a young woman on the street say to her companion, “And then I like flipped out last week actually?” What was she saying, with those extra words and the interrogatory intonation? Stripped to its essentials, her sentence would be “I flipped out last week.” The conjunction “and,” the adverb “then,” the ubiquitous all-purpose “like,” and the intensifier “actually” combine to smooth out the utterance, tuck it into a larger story, and appeal for understanding. The question mark, for upspeak, lends piquancy, as if to substitute for “you know?” at the end and signal that the woman is not finished, that there were consequences to her flipping out.

English is loaded with particles, words and expressions that float up constantly in speech: like, totally, so, you know, OK, really, actually, honestly, literally, in fact, at least, I mean, quite, of course, after all, hey, fuck, sure enough . . . know what I mean? Just sayin’. And it’s not only the young who use them. Some particles function as sentence adverbs: hopefully, surely, certainly. Some are conjunctions with attitude (“and furthermore . . .”), conjuring a shaken fist. They keep the conversation going. Although they have no content, they are the soul of the language.

Particles are used to ingratiate, to engage. I once heard myself say in the locker room at the pool, “Is there like no hot water?” To someone my own age or older, I might have said, “Isn’t there any hot water?” But I was speaking to a younger person. My choice of words was not conscious manipulation; I was making a spontaneous effort to blend in (difficult at a public pool). Similarly, in conversation, I might say, “So, you know, I was like totally blown away,” but in writing I might edit it to the more contained “I was impressed.”

Writing has its own fillers—“as it were,” “as one does,” “be that as it may,” “without further ado”—some of them more formal and stilted than others. Orin Hargraves, in It’s Been Said Before: A Guide to the Use and Abuse of Clichés, tracks the frequency with which writers (especially journalists) use such phrases, which are perhaps better described as idioms than clichés but are nonetheless formulaic. As a copy editor, I have often been tempted to strip them out. “Truth be told,” as a transition, is way overused.

Particles define the speech patterns of friends, especially when they are poets or writers with idiosyncratic language habits, overwhelmed with the need for self-expression. A poet friend often stammers “and and and,” until I want to scream, “Spit it out!” Another friend is partial to the construction “didn’t I just,” as in “Didn’t I just leave my phone on the park bench.” This has a slightly self-deprecatory tang, as if to comment on typical self-sabotaging behavior. There are people who bob their heads up and down while they’re talking to you or offer significant eyebrow action, which is intended to get you to agree with them. (Resist!) “Yada yada yada” is another version of the poet’s “and and and.” A friend used to pronounce it “Yada yada yada.” Some of these speech patterns are lovable. I think of William F. Buckley, Jr., stammering and flicking his tongue in a debate, or David Foster Wallace repeatedly using “And but so” to great effect, like a trademark, in his essays.

And how did we ever get along without OK? OK is a pivot point (OK, now I’m going to write about OK); it elicits a response from the listener (I’m going to talk about OK, OK?); it announces the beginning of the end of the discussion (So that’s all I have to say, OK?). OK has become such a feature of informal speech that we play with it, texting the single letter K, or affecting an Australian accent, Kye?

English has a sack load of these sometimes charming, often indefinable turns of phrase, and guess what: so does ancient Greek. It is because of the particles in Plato that Socrates has such a warm presence. Particles give personality to his language. Without them, it might be an automaton speaking. I was amazed, in reading Plato’s Apology of Socrates, how much nuance these syllables give to Socrates’ speech—they act like nudges, winks, facial expressions. You can almost see Socrates poking his listener as you hear his confidential “don’t ya know,” a folksy expression from a sage older generation. Herbert Weir Smyth, of Harvard University, devoted 40 pages of his 1920 Greek Grammar to particles. Another scholar, J. D. Denniston, published a 600-page book titled The Greek Particles, devoted solely to the subject, in 1934. Smyth (whose name rhymes with “writhe”) writes that particles “often resist translation by separate words, which in English are frequently over emphatic and cumbersome in comparison to the light and delicate nature of the Greek originals.”

One of the first particles a student of ancient Greek learns comes in a pair: μέν and δέ. They are traditionally translated as “on the one hand . . . and on the other hand . . .” In English, this has always seemed to me, on the one hand, heavy-handed, predictable, and boring. On the other hand, there is no denying that it works as a rhetorical device. At The New Yorker, someone could not write “on the other hand” if he had not already written “on the one hand,” or we’d point that out. Greek was not so stern. People fall in love with μέν and δέ, swooning over the way their habitual use demonstrates something about the Greek character, as if the notion of antithesis were baked right into the language.

One of the simplest particles, still in use in modern Greek, is καί, a conjunction meaning “and” and an adverb meaning “even, also, too.” When the Greeks rolled out a list—a series—they would repeat καί between the items, and this repetitive “and” would have no more weight than a comma. They never had to think about the serial comma. Kαί εγώ is translated as a modest demurral, “I on my part”; colloquially, we might be tempted to render it ΙΜΗΟ. Kαί has also been translated as “pray,” to stress the word that follows, as in “Pray, you try to explain particles.” In combination with other particles, καί “often has an emphasis which is difficult to render,” Smyth writes. Τι καί (literally “what and”) can mean, in polite terms, “What on earth?” or, in saltier terms, “What the fuck?”

WTF, Socrates?

Unfortunately, as Smyth says, these untranslatable verbal inflections often get translated anyway, laboriously or to antiquated effect. Shakespeare can get away with “forsooth” and “methinks,” but Socrates was not an Elizabethan. Jesus says, “Verily I say unto you,” but Socrates was not a New Testament figure, either. He was a real person who said the sorts of thing a Jewish grandmother might say, like “Alright already.”

So what are we supposed to do? On the one hand, a stiff translation will not gain Socrates any followers, and, on the other hand, an informal approach can sound glib. Rossellini, in his film Socrates, has Socrates part with his followers by saying “A presto” —“See you soon.” Smyth specifies one use of μέν δή, which is slightly different from δέ, in an expression that he translates as “So much for that,” an idiom that the translator Robert Fitzgerald puts into the mouth of Odysseus when he has finished off Penelope’s suitors. This made me burst out laughing, but apparently it is exactly the sort of thing the Greeks said to one another when they wrapped something up.

As a copy editor, accustomed to pointing out clichés and repetitions and, you know, extra verbiage (writers still sometimes get paid by the word), I am alert to and often averse to space fillers in written English, though I am aware that these things serve a purpose. If I were Plato’s copy editor, would I edit all the juice out of Socrates? There are things in Greek that are more delicate than anything in English, and the particles are the connective tissue not just in conversation but in formal prose and poetry. For instance, the librarians of Alexandria could, with the flick of a pen, distinguish the particle νν, with a circumflex accent, meaning “now, as the case stands, as it is,” from νυν, meaning “now” in the inferential sense, marking, as Smyth ably puts it, “the connection of the speaker’s thought with the situation in which he is placed.” At The New Yorker, we had our own solution for differentiating the force of “now”: in the temporal sense, meaning “at this moment” (“Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,” the line that ancient typists traditionally used to test a typewriter), “now” stands alone, but in the rhetorical, stylistic sense (“Now, you’re not going to like this”) we would set “now” off with a comma, a cue of punctuation intended to bring the reader along with ease.

Smyth attributes another such subtle effect to a particle he calls the “untranslatable τέ.” This is a connective—a conjunction like “and”—that introduces a clause and “has the effect of showing that its clause corresponds in some way to the preceding clause.” Oh my God, it’s a semicolon! Perhaps this is why ancient Greek didn’t have a lot of punctuation—it didn’t need it. The punctuation was built in.

AMONG CLASSICISTS, of course, ancient Greek is far from dead. It is alive and wide open to interpretation, an object of fascinated speculation. One of the things I most love about Homer lives on as a source of endless controversy among classicists: his use of epithets. That there is still so much to be said about the Homeric epithet, a poetic device that is supposedly frozen in time, like the 5,000-year-old mummy found in the Alps, seems to me proof that ancient Greek is alive and well. Individual epithets continue to be reinterpreted and to inspire fresh translations. How can something that keeps unfolding possibly be dead?

In modern Greek, “epithet” simply means “adjective,” but Homeric epithets are loaded. An epithet, in its simplest form, identifies a character, endows him with individuality. For instance, I might refer to “my garrulous mother” or “her with the gift of gab.” Homer might be the source for the advice given to aspiring fiction writers: label a character with a defining feature or bit of business and reinforce it now and then to remind the reader. “Crooked-minded Kronos” never lets us forget the harsh nature of this god.

In the Iliad, nearly every minor character has some distinctive feature, especially at the moment of death. Epithets of the major characters conjure some personal quality, often thrillingly ambiguous, and that quality often acts as a catalyst for drama. Achilles is invariably “swift-footed,” and the reminders of this trait increase the terror of the scene in which he chases Hector around the citadel of Troy. Pol´ytropos, the epithet most often given to Odysseus, contains the word for many and the word for turn and has been translated in countless ways, everything from ingenious and resourceful to wily and manipulative. The epithet both inspires and eludes translators and gives Odysseus a mercurial character, which colors his adventures and suggests that our hero may have been something of a sneak.

But the epithets are not always distinctive. In search of Homer, the classics scholar Milman Parry studied oral poetry in Yugoslavia in the 1930s. Building on his dissertation of 1928, he formed the radical conclusion that epithets, which come in different metrical lengths, were largely a device that oral poets relied on to fill out a line or give them time to think of what came next. In other words, Homer vamped. Epic poetry was an oral tradition, and as such it relied on repetition. The rhapsodes and their audiences were illiterate. They had no sense that there was anything wrong with being repetitive.

Our culture is a written one. We document everything. We like variety; repetition bores us. So do we have any use for the same Homeric tricks? Translators, depending on their bent, faithfully follow Homer by using the epithets whenever he does (Richmond Lattimore), deploy the epithets judiciously (Robert Fitzgerald), vary them for the modern reader (Emily Wilson), crack them wide open (Christopher Logue), or do without (Stephen Mitchell).

But repetition has its uses. Before the invention of writing, it was the only way to remember things. In the Odyssey, the rams and ewes of the Cyclops are repeatedly described as fat and fleecy, and the Cyclops’ routine of bringing them in at night and milking the ewes in rigid order begins to seem a little labored: OK, Homer, we get it—Polyphemus may have his flaws, but he is good with animals and his system for cheesemaking cannot be beat. But then it turns out that whether or not he brings the rams inside along with the ewes is crucial, because Odysseus uses those rams, which need to be fat and fleecy, tied in threes, to make his escape, slinging his men under them (and saving the biggest ram for himself), so that in the morning the Cyclops, blind now, will not feel the stowaways as he pats down his livestock on their way out. The repetition is like theme music that builds suspense.

“Gray-eyed Athena” is one of Homer’s most famous epithets, and something that drew me to Athena from the beginning. I have my mother’s gray eyes (but not her gift of gab), so it pleased me to think I had something in common with Athena. Homer doesn’t describe just anyone’s eyes. Hera is “ox-eyed,” meaning, I suppose, that her eyes are wide set and a deep liquid brown, with a suggestion of strength and stubbornness. If Athena’s eyes are so important, the epithet “gray-eyed” must convey something ineffable about her character.

The word that Homer relies on for Athena is glaukópis (γλαυκώπις), with that op familiar from “optic”—of the eye—and even from Cyclopes, and glaukós carrying a range of meanings, one of them traditionally “gray.” He also uses glaukós to describe the sea—I picture gray-green—but, like “wine-dark” (oinóps), glaukópis may refer to a quality instead of a color. In this case, it would mean not the sea’s profound depths but its glittering surface. Gray-eyed is the traditional translation of glaukópis, used by both Lattimore and Fitzgerald. The variant spellings—gray (American) and grey (British)—shouldn’t make any difference, but they do. I know a copy editor who refused to change “grey” to “gray” in a poem, per New Yorker style, because he insisted there was a difference. (He was also a poet.) Grey, with the “ey,” suggests the spelling of “eye,” perhaps giving it more luster. The original Loeb translation, “flashing-eyed Athena,” comes with a footnote acknowledging the translation “grey-eyed,” but adding “if colour is meant it is almost certainly blue.”

We think of Greeks as having olive complexions and dark eyes, like Latinos, but some of the ancestors of the ancient Hellenes originally came from the north, and even today you often meet Greeks who have startling pale-blue eyes, as if lit from within by the Mediterranean. There are surely as many shades of blue as there are of gray/grey: cornflower, sapphire, royal, navy, aquamarine, cobalt, cerulean, indigo, Wedgwood, powder, metallic, cendre. There is Delft blue, the blue of chicory blooming wild along the interstate, the heavenly blue of the morning glory, hyacinth and hydrangea blue, robin’s-egg blue, the ravishing blue of the Tasmanian superb fairy wren. There is Alice blue, swimming-pool blue, and gas-jet blue, and the dusty blue of blueberries. And don’t forget forget-me-not blue. The blue of Windex, the primary blue of Marge Simpson’s hair. There is the memorable blue of my father’s eyes, the true blue of my younger brother’s eyes tearing up on a morning of acqua alta in Venice. My older brother has clear blue eyes with more gray in them. People sometimes insist that I have blue eyes, but it isn’t so. My eyes, like my mother’s, are gray with a yellow ring around the pupil that shades into green, depending on the light. When I’m angry or when I’ve been crying and my eyes are red-rimmed, they are indisputably green. I would gladly step up to the epithet of Athena, but the form for a driver’s license does not have a box to check for the eye color “glaucous.”

Translators have tried all kinds of variants to give Athena’s eyes something that gets at her character. Caroline Alexander, the first woman to translate the entire Iliad into English, initially used “gray-eyed” as the epithet for Athena, following Lattimore, but, on looking further into it, she changed her translation to “gleaming-eyed.” Searching Liddell and Scott, Alexander told me, she found an instance in which glaukópis was used, by Homer, as a verb instead of an adjective to describe a lion’s eyes; eyes can shine, but they cannot gray (only hair does that). Besides, the big cats have green or amber eyes. Alexander thinks of Athena’s eyes, evocatively, as “the color of wet stones.”

For an entry in The Homer Encyclopedia, the classical scholar Laura Slatkin suggests “silvery-eyed.” Robert Fagles goes with “bright-eyed goddess,” which suggests enthusiasm. Christopher Logue, the master of anachronisms, experiments with “the prussic glare,” which sounds alchemical, and “ash-eyed,” which has a matte quality, as well as “Ringsight-eyed,” which might refer to the eyes of the owl. Pausanias, a Greek who documented his extensive travels during the early Roman era (mid-second century AD; he is often called the Baedeker of ancient Greece), describes an image of Athena near the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens as having gray-green eyes, in the translation of Peter Levi; in one version of the myth, she is the daughter of Poseidon and therefore has eyes the color of the sea. Levi notes the connection to “owl-eyed”—the word glaukós is similar to glaux, the ancient Greek for “owl”—suggesting that Athena sees in the dark. Watchful Athena.

The various editions of Liddell and Scott provide several definitions for γλαυκός, some of them to do with quality and others with color. In the Little Liddell, as the abridged version is called, the definitions begin with “gleaming, glancing, bright-gleaming” and go on to “pale green, bluish green, gray.” Liddell and Scott specifies that when eye color is meant the word means “light blue or gray,” adding that in Latin glaucus means “of the olive, of the willow, and also of the vine” (perhaps olive green is the color of the silvery leaves, not the appetizers stuffed with red pimientos). The epithet of Minerva, Athena’s Roman counterpart, is translated “with gleaming eyes.” But Lewis and Short, the Latin equivalent of Liddell and Scott, defines glaucus as “bright, sparkling, gleaming, grayish.” So gray-eyed Athena dates from the days when Greek was filtered through Latin.

I asked my Greek teacher, Chrysanthe, what γλαυκός means in modern Greek. She did not hesitate for long before replying, “Pale blue.” If you pursue blue (galázios) in a modern Greek dictionary, it expands into sea green and azure, the particular blue of the sky. Webster’s defines azure as the “blue color of the clear sky.” It’s hard to get away from the sky when you are talking about blue. The Greek galaxías (galaxy) means the Milky Way, a reference as much to the tinge of blue in milk as to the swath of white in the midnight sky.

Turning to the big American dictionary, Webster’s Second Unabridged, I found glauco- as a combining form meaning silvery, gray (like the leaves of the olive tree?). Glaucoma is traced to the Greek for light gray, blue gray (like cloudy eyes?). For the mineral glauconite, the Greek root is defined as bluish-green or gray; glaucous is “of green-blue hue” and “yellowish green.” Merriam-Webster’s unabridged online dictionary really has room to spread out. For color, under glaucous, it offers pale yellow, green, and light bluish gray or bluish white. Latin glaucus and Greek glaukós may be related to an Old English word meaning pure, clear. So the color associated with glaukópis has evolved, changing with the circumstances, the way eyes change color depending on what a person is wearing or her mood. Webster’s Unabridged Online goes on to offer separate, detailed definitions for shades of glaucous blue, glaucous gray, and glaucous green.

Surely Homer meant for Athena’s eyes to be beautiful—a poet would not dwell on the description of a goddess’s eyes to say they were as two thumbholes poked in a blackberry pie. These eyes are intelligent. They show purpose, they are expressive, they are sometimes complicit, conspiratorial. Emily Wilson, in her translation of the Odyssey, ransacked the thesaurus for Athena: she gives her “twinkling eyes,” “glowing eyes,” “shining eyes,” “glinting eyes,” “sparkling eyes.” The goddess is “clear-eyed,” “owl-eyed,” “bright-eyed,” “sharp-sighted.” Her eyes are “aglow,” “steely.” At one point, Wilson even has her wink. Athena looks mortals in the eye. She levels with them through her gaze. Maybe, like the rosy fingers of dawn and the wine-dark sea, the gray-eyed goddess is so called not because of what her eyes look like but because of their effect on whomever she is looking at. Whatever color these eyes are—I would go with pale-green bluish-green gray—they are engaging.

That all this speculation on shades of gray and blue and green and yellow and silver, with qualities as various as the moods of the sky and the sea, springs from a single ancient compound adjective, γλαυκώπις, describing a goddess who has our welfare at heart, seems to me proof of the vitality of words, their adaptability and strength and resilience. Good words never die. They keep on growing.