¹ancient Greek texts with innovative student aids

Texts

Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon

Aesop, Illustrated Myths

This is an illustrated book in a different format.

Heliodorus of Emesa, Aethiopica

Herodotus, Histories

Homer, Iliad

Homer, Odyssey

Longus, Daphnis and Chloe

Lucian of Samosata, A True Story

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

New Testament, Gospels

Plato, Republic

Plato, Plato on Socrates (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo)

pdf, with light aids (preliminary version)

Plato, Euthyphro

pdf, with heavy aids (preliminary version)

Plato, Apology

pdf, with heavy aids (preliminary version)

Plato, Crito

pdf, with heavy aids (preliminary version)

Plato, Phaedo

pdf, with heavy aids (preliminary version)

Xenophon, Anabasis

Xenophon, Cyropaedia

Xenophon, Hellenica

How the aids work

Ransom is an open-source software project that creates presentations of texts in ancient Greek with innovative aids for students. The main focus of the project is on producing pdf files, and using the links on this page you can either download these or buy them as bound books using print-on-demand. Each book is produced in two different versions, one with more aids and one with fewer. I refer to these as "heavy" and "light." There are three different ways that these can be used, depending on your level as a learner of the language.

Beginners. The image shows how the heavy version is laid out. You first go through the vocabulary page and try to "preload" your brain with the meanings of whichever words are unfamiliar. This is the first page of a four-page group. Next you flip the page and you have a two-page spread in which the left page is the unadorned Greek text. (If you're reading on a computer, you want to set your PDF application to display a two-page spread with even pages on the left and odd pages on the right.) The idea is to let yourself be drawn into the words themselves as in the ordinary and pleasurable experience of reading -- contrasting with the approach used in the Steadman presentations, where you're looking at the text through a keyhole on a page that consists mostly of aids. Now as you read the text you will undoubtedly encounter some words that you either can't identify in their inflected forms or are failing to recall from the "preload" step. This is the purpose of the right-hand "ransom note" page, which provides glosses for a certain number of the least common words, geometrically positioned at the same location on the page as the Greek word. You can access these quickly and easily, without having to flip back to the vocabulary page. Finally, if you flip the right-hand page you will see the final page of the four-page group, which is an English translation.

Intermediate level. As your language skills improve, you can use the heavy presentation in a slightly different way, skipping the preloading step and using the vocabulary page only when you can't remember the meaning of a word that wasn't uncommon enough to be on the ransom-note page. My own experience was that it was about a year after I first started studying Greek that I began to be able to do this without undue frustration.

For the reader who is not preloading, it might seem that there would be no point in having the vocabulary pages, since you could just look up the words in a dictionary. However, for someone who is reading from paper, this would mean either flipping through a printed dictionary or typing the word into a computer, both of which are very time-consuming things to do. And suppose, for example, that the mystery word is ἀμφιλελειμμέναι. It may not be obvious what dictionary head-word to look under for this word, whereas flipping back to the vocabulary page, we will probably find that ἀμφιλείπω is the only entry that even begins with ἀμφι-.

Advanced level. The format with heavy aids uses up a lot of pages for a given amount of Greek text. For readers who don't need as many aids anymore, there is a format with light aids, which is roughly three times more efficient in its use of pages. The light format breaks the text down into 10-page groups, consisting of 2 pages of vocabulary, 4 pages of single-spaced Greek, and 4 pages of translation. A small number of the most infrequent words are glossed in footnotes at the bottom of the Greek pages.

Open-source stuff

The Ransom texts are made with open-source software using open-source software called Ransom, which is built on top of the Greekware open-source toolchain. The contents of the book, such as glosses and notes, are under the same license as Wikipedia, as described on the copyright page of each PDF file. The printed books are sold at cost.