In Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon,” for instance, the first utterance of Cassandra-the seer brought to Mycenae from Troy as war booty, fated never to be believed-is not just untranslatable but unintelligible: ὀτοτοτοτοι̑ is not even a word, just inarticulate syllables that represent the barbarian princess’s howl of despair. “We can never hope to get the whole fling of a sentence in Greek as we do in English,” she writes. For Woolf, “not knowing Greek” meant that it was impossible truly to know what the playwright meant, partly because we don’t know what the ancient language sounded like. Though she did not enter the academy, she had private tutorials for several years with Miss Janet Case, who, as a student at Cambridge, had played Athena in an 1885 production of “The Eumenides” of Aeschylus. She started studying ancient Greek for fun, at home, when she was about fifteen, later taking classes at King’s College London while her brother Thoby was studying at Cambridge. Well, apparently I had read only the title of the essay. I pictured young Virginia Stephen sulking in a room of her own, an indecipherable alphabet streaming through her consciousness, while her father and her brother, downstairs in the library, feasted on Plato and Aristotle. When I was about ten years old, my father, a pragmatic man, had refused to let me study Latin, and for some reason I assumed that “On Not Knowing Greek” was about how Woolf’s father, too, had prevented his daughter from studying a dead language. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī few years ago, in the Frankfurt airport on the way home from Greece, I bought a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “The Common Reader,” which includes her essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” I already had the book at home, but I was impressed that anything by Woolf was considered airport reading.