I’m at the lesson in Pharr where he has you mark up all the feet in the first five lines of the Iliad and then encourages you to recite and memorize them. I looked online for models of people reciting this passage and found the following:
They sound very, very different. Of course my ear is completely unformed, but to me the ones that are pleasant to listen to are Nagy and Lombardo, in which the metrical structure is very light or even undetectable. Lombardo takes many long pauses in what I think is the middle of a foot, e.g., where there are commas in the modern text after θεά and οὐλομένην. To my ear it sounds a little bit like Nagy is doing a triplet rhythm for the first couple of lines, then switches to even “eighth notes” in the third line where there are a bunch of spondees. Sarpedon chants it with tones, the pitch always returning to a certain baseline, which is interesting to hear but seems pretty far out compared to the others. Muellner is reciting at the very end of a lecture in which he’s just presented all the rules, so he’s probably trying hard to emphasize the structure for this purpose, but to me he sounds robotic.
Any opinions on which model or models would be the best to emulate? It seems like a big decision, which will affect my whole experience of the poem from now on. My inclination would be basically to read it like prose, but with very slight variations in stress, quantity, and pitch, wandering freely away from a measured beat, but landing back on the beat once in a while. Sort of a Bob Dylan approach.
Does anyone have other recordings they could point me to that are freely available online?
When I try to read it with the dactyls, it feels artificial and painful. All of my mental effort is devoted to the meter. It’s like I’m making a strenuous effort to sound worse than I thought I sounded before reading this material in Pharr.
Ben, thanks! It’s great to have these recordings collected together. I’ve heard only Nagy before (and Stephen Daitz, whom I expect you could find online, through the Society for Classical Studies?).
They all know what they’re about—but as you say they’re all about rather different things.
I’ve only listened to part of each one, and only once, so I may have missed important things.
My immediate personal reactions:
Nagy’s is a very flat and stale reading, reasonably “correct” and orthodox but dull.
Lombardo’s is the best of the bunch, to my mind and ear. At least he shows he understands what he’s reading, even if he does sound 20th/21st century (which is probably deliberate).
Sarpedon’s is most interesting, and the only one not obviously USAmerican. He concentrates on the accents, and his notion of the accentual pitch patterning, but comes over as too broken up and out of sync with the phrasing of the Greek.
Muellner’s may be good for beginners, since he focusses exclusively on the meter, but like Nagy’s is very conventional and colorless.
I haven’t yet listened to Chamberlain’s, but I mean to.
This is not to say any of them are really bad but I find it hard to believe that any of them come at all close to any ancient Greek delivery of any period, quite apart from the question of the original accompaniment.
Perhaps that doesn’t matter too much. Our ears are not their ears, and any kind of “authentic” rendering is quite out of our experiential reach. I’m all for reading aloud, but It’s what we hear (or imagine) in our heads that matters.
Oh, which to emulate? I guess you’d be safest with Nagy. My practical advice would be to read Homer metrically (but not exeggeratedly—just get the rhythm fixed in your head and read it naturally) and not worry too much about stress or accents and not at all about pitch. Don’t try to juggle too many balls in the air at once.
Too much advice, I suspect.
PS Tomin not at all bad, perhaps best both in itself and to emulate?
It’s a weird experience for me hearing the Kemiktsi recording. I originally learned modern Greek about 30 years ago and only recently started learning ancient Greek. I was very reluctant at first to change any of my pronunciation habits, but gradually changed more and more of them, mainly because I wanted to be able to listen to recordings (koine at that point). At first it sounded ridiculous to me to pronounce β like “b,” etc., but now I’ve retrained my brain so that her pronunciation is the one that sounds unusual.
It seems like half or more of the recordings we’ve compiled here completely ignore the supposedly correct original meter.
I actually started this because I was trying to do my homework from Pharr, exercise 14-72 being to practice reciting the first 5 lines of the Iliad. Here’s the best I’ve come up with so far:
I posted a comment on your reading on Youtube. I want to encourage you to read metrically, either aloud or silently. The Homeric poems were, after all, sung or chanted originally (at least we think they were), and the meter is an integral part of the text. Reading metrically will help you master the vocabulary, and assist you in understanding the text. The building blocks of the text are not individual words, but rather groups of words (“formulas”) that are shaped to fit the meter.
Juggling both the meter and the pitch accents is difficult. I would suggest prioritizing the meter and not worrying much if at all about pitch accents.
I like the Stratakis recording – he gets just about everything right, including more or less accurate pronunciation (at least something reasonably close to what is thought to be archaic Ionic pronunciation) and pitch accents, along with the meter. However, he gives effect to word-initial digammas, which I think is unhistorical. In the Homeric poems, digammas that existed in earlier Greek are reflected in what appear to be metrical irregularities embedded in traditional formulas inherited from previous generations of bards/aoidoi – previous, that is, to the generation(s) that produced the Iliad and the Odyssey. These traditional formulas, with their apparent metrical irregularities, are integral units that are part of the language of the Homeric poems. But the poems don’t consistently give effect to digammas in words that are known to have originally included them, showing that they had already vanished by the time the poems were composed, leaing only the apparent irregularities.
My previous post was written before Stratakis’ admirable recording was posted. Now I just want to say I agree with what Hylander has written about that and about reading Homer in general. We’ve both written about this before.
I would like to add, not necessarily as models for recitation but as examples of artistic interpretation, the versions sung by Eusebius of the Accademia Vivarium Novum.
This is Martin L. West’s reconstruction of the opening of the Iliad as he thinks it might have been sung.
On the You tube presentations, my favourite is Stratakis’ but with the same reservations as Hylander has regarding the digamma. Another aspect of his rendition which I think would have been impossible when singing or chanting the poem is his continuing to the enjambment (first example is ούλομενήν,) and not stopping at the verse end. For reciting poetry, I suppose it’s more a matter of choice. I like to recite it (very quietly) when I’m out walking, where my gait can provide the thesis and arsis. It’s not exactly pounding on a desk, but “picking 'em up and putting 'em down” provides a steady rhythm.
@Aetos: It would be fun to hear West’s composition actually performed. I guess it’s aeolian mode in 5/8, which is alien enough to my musical experience that I don’t really have a feel for what would be an appropriate way of performing it. (My ear wants to hear it as repeatedly outlining a d minor triad, which would have to be an anachronism.) I know that modern Greek folk music uses these asymmetrical meters, but I don’t know enough about the musicology to have any idea whether that was likely to have been a plausible thing for the actual era of Homer.
I feel that it’s probably pointless and hopeless to worry about getting any kind of authentic pronunciation. Since a lot of my vocabulary practice is listening to my recordings of myself in the car, I just want as many of the phonemes as possible to be distinguishable by ear.
It is in fact the rhythm of the συρτός Καλαματιανός. West actually footnotes this in the article ( also where this piece of music appears) “The Singing of Homer and the Modes of Early Greek Music”, which is available on JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/629848
Our theory is not to be understood as the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but as an approach to the technique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse, guided by the accentual structure and sentence-intonation of the Ancient Greek language as well as by metrical structures.
The West article is interesting, although speculative. JSTOR wouldn’t actually let me access it, but it can be accessed here: https://sci-hub.do/10.2307/629848
Personally, I have a problem with repetitive melodies, which get stuck in my head and will sometimes continue for days or even weeks. Oliver Sacks wrote about this problem, which I guess is fairly common, in his book Musicophilia. He calls them brainworms. My solution is just to avoid repetitive pop music.
