Comment by cafard
"Learning Ancient Greek, however, is an immensely challenging endeavor that requires many years of effortful study and practice and it is even more challenging (bordering on impossible) to do on one’s own without a teacher."
It is a lot of work. I would point out, though, that not everyone who went through the English public schools or the American St. Grottlesex world was really a wizard. Yet given enough encouragement (often delivered with a stick, to be sure, at least in England) quite a few of them learned Ancient Greek.
I will take a moment to recommend NYRB's slim volume War and the Iliad. I think that Rachel Bespaloff's essays are outstanding, and an infinitely more qualified judge, Robert Fitzgerald, though so also.
> ...quite a few of them learned Ancient Greek
The english phrase "it's all greek to me" has very different connotations depending upon if either (a) one knows no one who knows any greek, or (b) one had some greek in school, and even if one never did well oneself, one knows others with some facility in the language; in the latter case it implies "may look incomprehensible, but can be mastered with some effort".