Advanced Greek Unseens, edited by Anthony Bowen, and first published by the Bristol Classical Press in 1980, contains a selection of passages drawn from Cook and Marchant’s Passages for Unseen Translation, which was first published in 1898. This volume contains 120 out of the 200 Greek passages originally provided by Cook and Marchant. Half are prose, and half verse.
The passages are drawn from thirty-seven different authors, including lesser-known individuals such as Bion, Mimnermus, and Teles. However, the majority of the passages are drawn from the great Athenian luminaries – Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Xenophon, Thucydides, and Plato.
The typescript is very small, and is uneven in places. Both breathings and accents are often difficult to discern and interpret. Those letters that go below the line are often foreshortened. All-in-all, the production quality leaves much to be desired.
The passages are expected to challenge pupils in their last two years of school, and perhaps a little beyond. The passages are all untitled, and receive no introduction. No vocabulary is provided. The only information given is the name of the author, the title of the work from which the passage is drawn, and the line-references.
The poor typescript aside, Advanced Greek Unseens does what it says on the tin – it provides a series of advanced Greek unseens from a great variety of sources that ought to provide excellent practice for examinations both in the last years of school, and also at university.