This book is addressed to students who have already completed the usual basic training course in Greek and must start facing original texts (whether set texts or unseens). It presents a series of characteristics that make it an invaluable tool for students that find themselves in this difficult transitional stage. Its characteristics can be summarised as follows: (1) It offers us not just a selection of five or six authors but a very wide selection of twenty-three authors, combining both prose and verse, and comprehending a wide range of historical periods. (2) Texts are grouped according to syntactical categories: use of cases, temporal sentences, result clauses, participles, indefinite sentences, impersonal verbs, etc., up to nineteen categories. Therefore, it covers all syntactical constructions that a student will find in reading original texts. (3) Each group of texts that deals with a syntactical category is preceded by a short but useful summary of the syntax to be covered. (4) Each text is preceded by a short introduction that puts it into context, and is followed by a series of notes, perfectly presented, that cover difficult grammatical constructions, unusual verbal forms or vocabulary, unusual sense of some expressions, etc. (5) Towards the end of the book, once all syntactical categories have been covered, there is a further selection of prose passages and another one of verse passages, in order to provide more practice without paying attention to only one grammatical category. (6) Several appendices, covering a short biography for each author, Homeric and Koiné Greek, literary terms, verse metres and a map. (7) Vocabulary for terms not glossed in the notes under each text.

Apart from the usual benefits that these anthologies provide, this one offers these additional advantages: (a) Students get a much wider sense of the range of Greek literature: apart from reading the usual authors such as Sophocles, Thucydides, etc., they encounter authors such as Andocides and Arrian. (b) As texts are grouped according to syntactical categories, students can perceive an immediate practical application of reading those selections: not just reading a text for the sake of reading, but reading that concrete text because they want to practise this or that syntactical category. (c) Lastly, and possibly the best characteristic of the book, once the student or the teacher has chosen the syntactical category that needs to be practised, they will not find just a couple of texts or sentences dealing with it, but a wide range of authors in each category. For instance, for ‘Indefinite Sentences’ there are six authors: Xenophon, Homer, Lysias, Sophocles, Thucydides and Demosthenes (some of them with more than one text).

This is a very useful book that will be of great help in this difficult transition between the end of basic language instruction and confrontation with original texts.