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The Portable Greek Reader (Portable Library) Paperback – August 25, 1977

by W. H. Auden (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 26 ratings
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It is commonplace to say that our civilization is built on the ruins of Greece. W. H. Auden’s splendid anthology locates the truth behind the truism, while filling in the gaps in our knowledge of a people who gave us so much of our cultural legacy.

Every page in The Portable Greek Reader contains some fundamental precursor of the ways in which we think about heroism, destiny, love, politics, tragedy, science, virtue, and thought itself, Included are excerpts from the mythologies of Hesiod; the martial epics of Homer; the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Heraclitus; Aesop’s fables; poems by Pindar and Sappho; the scientific writings of Euclid, Galen, and Hippocrates; and the history of Thucydides. Presented in their most elegant and authoritative translations, and accompanied by Auden’s brilliant introduction, these selections recreate the Greek world in all its splendor, strangeness, and sophistication.

“Engaging and full and intelligent … a command performance, brought off with considerable aplomb.”
—The New York Times

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  1. Part of series
    Portable Library
  2. Print length
    726 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Penguin Classics
  5. Publication date
    August 25, 1977
  6. Dimensions
    5.12 x 1.6 x 7.71 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    0140150390
  8. ISBN-13
    978-0140150391
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

W.H. Auden was born in 1907 and went to Oxford University, where he became Professor of Poetry from 1956 to 1960. After the publication of his Poems in 1930, he became the acknowledged leader of the 'thirties poets'. His poetic output was prolific, and he also wrote verse plays in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, with whom he visited china. In 1946 he became a U.S. citizen. He died in 1973.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Classics (August 25, 1977)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 726 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140150390
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140150391
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.29 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.12 x 1.6 x 7.71 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 26 ratings

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W. H. Auden

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4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
26 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

gooddog
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent sampling of classic Greek culture
Reviewed in the United States on March 22, 2024
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Wonderful introduction and excellent sampling of classic Greek culture.
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RE Murphy, Jr
5.0 out of 5 stars Context of our culture next to their's
Reviewed in the United States on August 29, 2018
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Wonderful, flavored approach to Greek high culture of the classical period. The difference between us and them is powerfully presented.
2 people found this helpful
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A. Martin
4.0 out of 5 stars Our Hallowed Past
Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 1999
If for no other reason, buy this book for W. H. Auden's remarkably learned 40 page introduction--a survey of the great Greek gift passed down to us. The Portable Greek Reader is a manual on how to think and more importantly, why to think.
Andrew D Martin, Docent, The Parthenon, Nashville, Tn
44 people found this helpful
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Jiang Xueqin
3.0 out of 5 stars All Greek to Me
Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2010
The best part of this book is editor W.H. Auden's introduction. He writes so smoothly and effortlessly, and he's a great example of the benefits of a classical education in Greek and Latin. He also explains quite well that the Greeks liked to wrap the most simple thoughts in the most flourescent and complicated of sentences, whereas the moderns like to use simple syntax and diction to deliver powerful, complicated ideas. I'm much too modern, and had great difficulty going through this collection of essays, drama, and poetry.
12 people found this helpful
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Geoff Puterbaugh
2.0 out of 5 stars This book is 60 years old, and shows it
Reviewed in the United States on July 1, 2010
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Whoever continues printing this book is dead lazy. Admittedly, it's hard to make a BAD anthology of Greek writing, but 60 years is 60 years, after all: we have learned a lot and there are many excellent new translations.

W. H. Auden may not have been the best choice to compile this thing, anyway. Why the heck did he decide to include the entirety of Plato's "Timaeus?" Well, it's a hundred pages, all right.

In fact, this collection may rank with Auden's previous "Anthology of Light Verse," which was a real stinker.

Auden was a superb poet, but he was not a gifted intellectual. He went to his grave trying to reconcile Christianity and Freudian doctrine. (!!) As his enemies enjoy pointing out, he couldn't even get a "First" at Oxbridge, but had to be content with a "Second."

None of this detracts from his wonderful poetry, but I'm afraid he took on a couple of jobs he really didn't have the talent to do correctly.

There is an anthology much, much better than this: Michael Grant's  Greek Literature: An Anthology: Translations from Greek Prose and Poetry (Penguin Classics) .
23 people found this helpful
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Follower of Socrates
1.0 out of 5 stars Watch out for defects
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2015
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Just beginning to read the book, but so far every instance of the word modern I have come across is printed modem (kindle edition). Very disappointed. Whoever was the copy editor should be flogged.
7 people found this helpful
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Reader in Tokyo
3.0 out of 5 stars Not Exactly an Introduction
Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2019
Ancient Greek literature ranges from roughly the 700s BC (Homer and Hesiod) to the 500s AD (the poet Paulus Silentiarius and others), a span of 1,400 years. The time-span is even longer if the Byzantine writers from later centuries are included.

An anthology of the literature must select from among poetry (hymns, odes, epic, lyric, epigrams), drama (tragedy and comedy), oratory, philosophy (fragments from the Pre-Socratics, longer works by their successors), the sciences (Archimedes, Aristotle, Cleomedes, Euclid, Galen, Hippocrates, Soranus, Theophrastus), biography (Plutarch, Xenophon, Diogenes Laertius, Philostratus), history (Herodotus, Thucydides, Flavius Josephus, Appian, Arrian, Dio Cassius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Xenophon), fiction (Lucian, Heliodorus of Emesa, Longus, Xenophon of Ephesus, the fables of Babrius/Aesop), other essayists (Longinus, Pausanias, Plutarch, Pseudo-Xenophon, Strabo) and religion (the pagan Plotinus, the Christians St. Luke and Eusebius, and so on). To sample many key works in all of these categories, a decent collection would need 1,000 pages just to start.

Just for the period from the 700s to 300s BC, there are so many things worth including that --- generally speaking --- the shorter the anthology, the smaller the space available for the writers in the centuries that followed. The compiler must also decide how to structure the anthology: by theme (as in this book), chronologically, or by literary genre, and whether to include just a general introduction (as in this book), or combine it with background on each writer and analysis of each work.

***
This anthology was published in 1948, edited by the poet W. H. Auden. It contained 56 works by 36 writers. There were 23 poems excerpted or in full, 4 plays and 3 excerpts from plays, 1 work of philosophy in full (the Timaeus) and 7 excerpts of other philosophic works, 4 sets of philosophical fragments from the Pre-Socratics, 7 essays excerpted or in full (mainly on the sciences), 2 excerpts of biographies, 3 fables, an excerpted letter and an excerpted speech.

A critic once wrote of Auden that he might not be a good or bad author but was certainly an original one. This comment might help in understanding some of the quirky choices Auden made in this anthology. He has been criticized by other readers for including all of Plato’s Timaeus --- a difficult work that took up nearly 15% of the book --- and for using dated translations, but there are idiosyncrasies in the book besides these. His book isn’t a systematic introduction by a scholar, but an artist’s very personal response to the ancient Greeks.

Auden’s selections were grouped in five categories: cosmologies, the hero, nature, man, and society. This is the only anthology I’ve seen that takes a thematic approach to the Greeks, and this approach might be one reason the Timaeus was chosen, since it was used to illustrate Greek cosmology. An account of the formation of a divinely created universe, the Timaeus has been called the peak of Plato’s intellectual achievement by some and dismissed as extremely obscure by others. It’s a challenge to read, and Auden made no concession to readers by including all 95 pages of it. On the other hand, he offered parts of other works such as The Phaedo (on the death of Socrates), The Laws and The Symposium.

Unfortunately, in philosophy, science and history Auden seemed to prefer very long selections, even though in many cases the gist could have been expressed in shorter excerpts. In the philosophy and science this often made for tedious reading, with large, indigestible chunks of Plato (Timaeus and The Laws), Aristotle (Physics and Metaphysics) and Hippocrates.

Some of the translations felt dated (Evelyn-White’s translations of Hesiod, Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer, Whitelaw’s translation of Sophocles), but the problem of dated translations is perennial and not limited to Auden’s collection. And a number of other excerpts in the book felt fresh: Burnet’s translation of Xenophanes, Jowett’s translation of Thucydides, Trevelyan’s translation of Theocritus, the translation of Sophocles by Fitts and Fitzgerald, and Rieu’s prose version of the Odyssey, which the scholar Michael Grant has called a tour de force. The excerpt from the Odyssey described the hero’s encounter with spirits from the underworld, perhaps chosen by Auden because of its influence on Virgil and Dante.

Enjoyed was the relatively large amount of space given to the Pre-Socratics (poetic fragments from Heraclitus, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles) --- more than has been encountered in most other anthologies. Yet Anaximander, Protagoras and Anaxagoras were excluded. It also seemed original if eccentric to include an entire trilogy by Aeschylus --- the Oresteia --- rather than works in full by the other two great tragedians. It was laudable that Auden presented excerpts by writers on science and mathematics: Aristotle on nature, Euclid on geometrical definitions (important in the development of logic and modern science), Cleomedes on measurement of the earth (a great achievement of early astronomy), Galen on organic growth, and Hippocrates on environment and character. But the selections Auden chose were often opaque.

In place of the Timaeus and some of the other philosophy and the science, more poetry would’ve been appreciated: from the 600s BC Archilocus of Paros, Semonides of Amorgos, Alcman of Sparta and from later centuries Solon and Lucillius. There were major omissions in oratory (Demosthenes and Lysias could’ve been included at least) and philosophy (Marcus Aurelius), and omissions in drama such as Menander and Herodas. For history, Auden chose to include 70 pages of Thucydides --- more than is typical in other anthologies. He had a reason for doing so (see below), but ignored other historians such as Herodotus, Xenophon or Polybius. In biography, Plutarch was missing. In fiction it was an eccentric choice, I think, to exclude Lucian, a satirist of note from the 100s AD. (Auden said this author was left out for reasons of personal taste.) For the writers who were selected, no background was provided and there was no analysis of each work. Nor did the anthology trouble to mention which lines of works had been excerpted.

There was a general introduction by Auden that contained some useful insights; he’d been educated in Greek and Latin from a young age. Among other things, he wrote that Greek culture was rich enough to encompass an emphasis on reason, the golden mean and emotional restraint, but also a celebration of gaiety and beauty, the life of the senses, mystery cults and superstition. That all phases of Greek activity --- drama, science, philosophy, politics --- should be seen as interrelated parts of one complete and unique culture. And that Plato’s philosophy should be read in conjunction with the history of Thucydides, in that only a political situation as desperate as the one described by the historian could have produced in Plato a desire to break with the past and build a new society, combined with a horror of disunity and change. Maybe the march toward catastrophe described in The Peloponnesian War seemed especially relevant at the time Auden’s book was compiled, in the aftermath of World War II. The time might come when it feels relevant once more.

***
To sum up, parts of this collection were enjoyable (the poetry, the drama, the excerpt from the Odyssey, fragments from the Pre-Socratics), others were not (much of the philosophy and the science). An anthology this reader found much more engaging is Volume 1 of Classics in Translation (Greek Literature), edited by Paul MacKendrick and Herbert Howe and published in 1952. Aside from fairly clear translations, coverage of many authors and selections of reasonable length, it offered good background on the writers and works chosen. It’s not a book to read if you dislike small type. A worthwhile, more recent anthology is The Classical Greek Reader (1996), edited by Kenneth Atchity, which covers a wide range of authors and genres. Each of these books is just over 400 pages.

Larger anthologies --- 800 pages or more --- are Greek Literature in Translation (1924, revised 1948), edited by George Howe and Gustave Harrer, and Greek and Roman Classics in Translation (1949), edited by Murphy, Guinagh and Oates. The Norton Book of Classical Literature (1993) devotes about two-thirds of its space to the Greeks.

A much lighter anthology, with many short selections, is Greek Literature: An Anthology (1973), edited by Michael Grant. A short, basic anthology is Classics of Greek Literature (1963), edited by Harry Wedeck. If you found Auden’s book impenetrable, these last two are especially recommended as worthwhile, short introductions. Auden’s collection might be something to read after tackling a few of the others.

A collection of poetry in modern English is Greek Lyric Poetry (1962), edited by Willis Barnstone. Older translations by eminent classicists are in The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (1938). Readings in the Classical Historians (1992), edited by Michael Grant, contains selections from 14 Greeks as well as eight Romans. Sixteen plays are in The Greek Plays (2016). An anthology of fiction is Collected Ancient Greek Novels (1989).

Comments by Auden:

“. . . [I]t is hardly too much to say that the Athenians of the fifth century B.C. were the most civilized people who have so far existed. The fact that nearly all the words we use to define activities and branches of knowledge, e.g. chemistry, physics, economics, politics, ethics, aesthetics, theology, tragedy, comedy, etc., are of Greek origin is proof of their powers of conscious differentiation; their literature and their history are evidence of their ability to maintain a sense of common interrelations, a sense which we have in great measure lost as they themselves lost it in a comparatively short time.”

“It is the unlikeness of the Greeks to ourselves, the gulf between the kind of assumptions they made, the kind of questions they asked and our own that strikes us more than anything else.”

“There could be no stronger proof of the riches and depth of Greek culture than its power of appeal to every kind of personality.”
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Top reviews from other countries

Sharon Braham.
4.0 out of 5 stars Could do with something info on the different contributors.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 26, 2018
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I have given this four stars, because I think that there is a certain lack of information about the individual contributors, by which I mean the actual contributors, not the translators; although more on them would be nice too.
For example, in my Viking Portable Nineteenth Century Russian Reader, and also the Twentieth Century Russian Reader, there is small biography for each contributor, along with a little bit of literary criticism, and something to give one a bit of context and understanding generally, i.e. maybe some relevant history of that time. It makes a big difference to one's appreciation of the writing.
I know who Plato, Aristotle and Aeschylus and the rest are, at least roughly, but there were one or two I hadn't heard of, so I could have done with something along the lines of the content of the Russian Readers. It sort of left me feeling a bit lost, without structure. As someone else pointed out in another critique, some of these translations are a bit dated. I can live with that, but it would help if there was a wee blurb about each writer- and the translator- to make that clear, to help people understand that and what it means.
The whole thing could do with an update, maybe with some other more modern translations for people to be able to make comparisons between older and newer translations.
Other than that, like the choices in the Russian Readers, I think they are a good cross section of the writings of the times.
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Costas Kalotaris
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 26, 2014
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