Authors

Most of the example phrases in Eduard Johnson's book Sprechen Sie Attisch? were adapted from the comedic plays of Aristophanes of Athens.

Author: E. Joannides (Eduard Johnson)

Dr. Eduard Johnson (1840-1903) was a German classicist, teacher, journalist and local historian in the German land of Saxony. (The name "Johnson" appears to be an English name, but it is not: The original form of the family name was apparently "Joh(a)nsson".) Eduard Johnson taught Latin, Greek, German and History at the Gymnasium [university-track secondary school] in Plauen and later at the Gymnasium in Chemnitz. He wrote the Greek phrasebook Sprechen Sie Attisch? (1889) under the pseudonym E. Joannides, and the Latin phrasebook Sprechen Sie Lateinish? (1890) under the name Georg Capellanus. Under his real name, Johnson published historical books and articles on people and places in the Vogtland. Later in life he worked as writer and editor at the newspaper Vogtländischer Anzeiger und Tageblatt.

Johnson’s two books of everyday idioms were intended to facilitate and encourage the active use of Ancient Greek and Latin. These books were published as part of a larger series of conventional modern language phrasebooks, Koch’s Sprachführer, by C. A. Koch Verlag.

In the Preface of his book Sprechen Sie Attisch (1889), Johnson emphasized the vital importance of using Ancient Greek as a colloquial language, first, as the foundation for true mastery of the language:

A person who knows the everyday language of a country holds the key to understanding that country’s literary works and the people themselves.

An Attic schoolboy brought to his reading of Greek poets the same thing an Attic farmer carried into the theatre or the assembly: only their knowledge of Attic colloquialisms in their simplest forms. This knowledge enabled them to understand Sophoclean drama and Periclean oratory. The language of everyday life supplied the analogies needed to comprehend loftier works of speech and writing.

It has often been claimed that surprisingly few words and expressions are needed to allow the common man to get by in his mother tongue and to understand matters that for him are novel. Shouldn’t it be possible to tease out the comparatively small original Athenian word-stock, grasp the language at its core, and make those words and expressions familiar once more, for all who want to really learn Greek?

Aristophanes offers plenty of verbal material for this purpose in those bits where he lets the common man speak in a folksy manner. Elsewhere in literature, one finds scattered passages which must represent true depictions of the speech of ordinary life. So this task cannot be unsolvable, even if the writings available to us provide only a small contribution to the solution (Sprechen Sie Attisch?, 1889).

Recent articles about Eduard Johnson’s life and works:

As of this writing (May 2026) the Central Cemetery Administration in the German city of Plauen maintains a brief informational page dedicated to Eduard Johnson. That page contains a photo of Johnson and describes the stone monument (Gedenkstein Eduard Johnson) dedicated to him and located at 82V9+47, 08606 Triebel/Vogtl., Germany:

In 1941, on the spot where Johnson had been found deceased in 1903, his hometown friends erected a monument. This monument was later lost due to the expansion of the inner-German border, the merging of fields, and the disappearance of roads.

In 2007, a new monument and plaque were erected and dedicated at Fuchspöhl bei Sachsgrün [Triebel/Vogtl.] to commemorate this important local historian.

 

Author: Aristophanes of Athens

Aristophanes of Athens lived approximately from 446 to 386 B.C. No lengthy biography of Aristophanes survives from antiquity. Our knowledge of his life is derived from several different sources: from internal evidence inside his own plays, from brief mentions in Plato’s Symposium, from inscribed lists of prize winners at the Dionysia festival of Athens, and from comments by Byzantine scholars, who were writing several centuries later.

Aristophanes experienced the entire Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, from 431 to 404 B.C. There is no direct evidence that Aristophanes was enlisted as a soldier. However, because he was a healthy young Athenian citizen during a total war, it is unlikely that he avoided military service.

Aristophanes' literary style was a mix of stylized lyric poetry and coarse humor. He was a master of cultural observation. His plays featured absurd or fantastical comedic plots, along with funny but blistering attacks on real contemporary Athenians, such as Socrates the philosopher, or Cleon the Athenian military general. In his plays, Aristophanes sometimes expressed a conservative longing for the "good old days" of the Persian Wars. His work displays a detailed awareness of the new intellectual activities of the Sophists. He satirized them with expert precision.

Aristophanes wrote about forty plays. Only eleven have survived, including: The Acharnians, The Clouds, The Frogs, The Wasps, The Peace, The Birds, and Wealth (also called Plutus). Scholars believe that these specific plays were preserved because of their pedagogical value in teaching the Attic dialect. We know about his lost works from fragments quoted by later ancient authors, and from mentions in catalogs of the Library of Alexandria.

For his book, Sprechen Sie Attisch?, Johnson adapted a handful of phrases from Plato and Sophocles, here and there, but nearly all of the other phrases were adapted from Aristophanes.

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⸺ ⸺ Ridentem discere Graeca
Quid vetat? ⸺ ⸺

Readers can send corrections and comments to hypothekai@aristophanic.com.