why did the Romans read Greek texts through translation when they could read them from the originals?
Saturday, November 14th, 2009 at
11:36 am
the Romans who could read were the educated and the educated Romans could also read in the Greek language.. then why did the educated Romans who also were able to read Greek, read Greek texts through translations such as of Cicero and Horice, when they could read them from the original language?
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Tagged with: cicero • Greek Language • greek texts • romans • translations
Filed under: Greek - Written and Spoken
Do you watch foreign language films without subtitles? Have you watched "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (Ang Lee masterpiece film of a few years ago) – - in dubbed English or Mandarin Chinese?
The answer still applies to our mono-lingual laziness – - they were more or less able to pay less attention when the translator had already done the work of bringing the original material over across linguistic barriers
St. Augustine had to confess that he couldn’t read Biblical passages of Hebrew and Koine Greek in the original languages, by the way
EDIT:
"His knowledge of the Biblical languages was insufficient: he read Greek with difficulty; as for Hebrew, all that we can gather from the studies of Schanz and Rottmanner is that he was familiar with Punic, a language allied to Hebrew. "
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02089a.htm
Because reading in the language you speak on a daily basis is always easier than translating.
There is clear evidence that the Romans moved towards establishing their own cultural dominance by rewriting and redocumenting texts into Latin. Their association as a possible colony of Hellenic expansion was fine by them up to a point (the great philosophers of greece, military history, their very religion which they would later rename the Gods), but Rome developed their own language culture and imposed it on the rest of the world (as seen with latin/romantic languages to this day).
Many of the Greek texts that were available to the Romans weren’t written in the same dialects, nor in the same time frames. There were different types or dialects at different periods of time in Greece.
Although many educated Romans had been taught by Greek teachers, usually educated Greeks that were then Roman slaves, archaic Greek, Athenian Greek, Spartan Greek, Macedonian Greek, Ionian Greek….all were somewhat different. There was also the early Mycenaean Greek and Pelausgian ‘Greek’, [which was in use at the time that the 'Greeks' entered the Peloponesian Peninsula]. Many dialects were regional and tribal. Migrations of successive tribes moved into the Peninsula and amalgamated with the earlier tribes [which some historians refer to as 'Pelausgian']. Hints of their language can be found in early archaic Greek.
Modern linguists have divided all of the Greek forms of speech into four groups: (This doesn’t include Macedonian.)
1.Arcado-Cypriot
2.Aeolian
3.Doric
4.Ionic
Also, although considered ‘educated’ in Roman style, many were not fluent in ‘Greek’ as a whole.
isis1037@yahoo.com
Perhaps partly because the Romans wanted to be better than the Greeks, so rewrote their literature in an effort to upstage them.