An Ephesian Tale Book 1 Video Course

More than 10 hours of spoken Ancient Greek in 16 video lessons! 

The easiest and most thrilling of the Ancient Greek novels! Danger! Excitement! Romance!

Learn to THINK in Ancient Greek!

Welcome to Ephesus circa the 2nd century AD! In this city reside the two most beautiful people who have ever lived: Habrocomes and Anthea, teenagers, each of them a child of noble families. They are destined to meet: but will fate ensure their happiness, or are these star-crossed lovers forever doomed?

This full-immersion course is taught entirely in spoken Ancient Greek, and is ideally suited both for beginners ready to move into the intermediate stage, as well as advanced learners who are excited by the challenge of learning to understand Ancient Greek through listening alone.

An Ephesian Tale is one of the first novels in history, and is the shortest, easiest, and most ridiculous of the five complete Ancient Greek novels that have survived to us from antiquity. Written by Xenophon of Ephesus in the 2nd century AD, this action-adventure-romance is so over-the-top, its earnest, ill-fated characters so wrought by plight, that to properly conceive of what this novel is like, imagine Romeo and Juliet meets Pirates of the Carribean.

Ancient Greek literature is filled with some of the most important texts in history, such as Aeschylus’ tragedies, Plato’s philosophy, Josephus’ antiquities, Dio’s histories, Church Fathers’ letters — but on the way to the goal of reading those often difficult, advanced texts, we must build a strong foundation, and fall in love with the activity of reading and thinking in Ancient Greek, so that, once we arrive at those challenging texts, we will be well prepared: not only in your ability to read Greek, but in your understanding of common aspects of the world of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean which will further enrich your sense of the context of this vast body of literature. This course based on An Ephesian Tale will lay the next layer of brick in that foundation.

In this course, composed of 16 video lessons (one for each chapter of Book 1 of An Ephesian Tale), you will be trained to listen to Ancient Greek, both by the instructor (Luke Ranieri) guiding you through the book chapter by chapter, line by line, but also by the recitations of each part of the text in such a way that you will actually be able to understand most of it or all of each before your eyes actually read the written text.

Each lesson has been carefully designed to help you level-up in your comprehension and acquisition of the Ancient Greek language.

Prerequisite knowledge:

Ancient Greek alphabet, reading, writing, and pronunciation (video 1 on how to sound it out, and video 2 on how to write it)

Basics of Ancient Greek grammar and vocabulary, such as what can be learned in a traditional grammar/translation textbook, such as Ancient Greek for Everyone, or in the various graded readers, including (but not limited to) Ancient Greek Alive, Athenaze, Logos, Alexandros, Reading Greek, Thrasymachus, or Thrasymachus' Catabasis (q.v.: bit.ly/thrasymachuscatabasis ).