I was hoping that somebody could comment on the accuracy of Stanley Lombardo’s reading of Iliad Book One. Should I use it to study the Homeric line, or would it promote bad habits? Are there other/better readings available online? Are there any readings that can be downloaded?
Thanks. 
The Muses weep!
However, this is a fairly conventional recitation, mostly Erasmian pronunciation, and the obligatory mystery-reshuffle of accenting.
Should I use it to study the Homeric line, or would it promote bad habits? Are there other/better readings available online? Are there any readings that can be downloaded?
Well, this is quite good on reconstructed ancient pronunciation. I think the rhythm is quite good and probably not far off what was intended, but I’m much less sure about the plainchant stylings.
Daitz has some Homeric recitations online, which also work to get the reconstructed pronunciation correct, but whose recitation style is, I feel, overwrought.
He uses a stress accent, rather than a pitch accent, he also seems to say [size=150]οὐλομενείν[/size] rather than [size=150]οὐλομένην[/size], and he probably pauses for too long after “[size=150]οὐλομενείν[/size]”.
Here’s a better one, I think:
http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/agp/
http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kal/sh/
EDIT: We keep posting simultaneously, William. 
It seems there’s an unfortunate tendency to overdo it.
Exhibit A:
Thanks for the information! I was so excited to find that the files you hyperlinked are downloadable: I don’t have access to the internet at home, and this way I can put them on my mp3 player, and read along at my leisure. You can’t do that on Lombardo’s website. I can’t wait to listen to them.
Has anybody here considered posting sound files of themselves reading? It would be very useful if somebody qualified were to do that.
I’m having great fun with these audio files already. A question though about the Danek/Hagel reading: Does the mp3 file actually start at Od. 8.267? It doesn’t seem to correspond to my text, but it must be in Book 8 somewhere, right? It sounded very odd at first, but after a few listenings, the music was impressed in my head.
I’m about to listen to the Avery Andrews readings now; although I was able to download them to my computer, I couldn’t put them on my mp3 player, which is disappointing and curious. Is his version very different from Danek/Hagel, or is it primarily the difference between singing and reciting?
I’d love to hear comments about the various recordings, or about your personal experience trying to read the Homeric line.
hi swiftnicholas, stefan hagel emailed me the following explanation of this in 2002 (for the realplayer clip):
You’re perfectly right, that’s not the Odyssee…
In the Odyssee, the poet Homer introduces the song of the fictive
singer-poet by “but he, playing the phorminx, preluded to sing
beautifully, about the love of…”. In the following, the indirect speech
is shifted to something like full quotation, or replaced by direct
narration. I wanted to use the lay of Ares and Aphrodite as a song
taken out of its context in the Odyssee, so I have changed the first
line to a typical opening, with an invocation of the Muse:a)/rxeo Mou=sa ge/lwtos o(\s a)qana/toisin e)nw=rto
Begin, Muse, of the laughter that rose among the undying
and for the mp3 clip, a different last word:
a)/rxeo Mou=sa ge/lwtos o(\s a)qana/toisin e)tu/xqh
re my own experience of reciting homer, a long time ago i tried to model the same information which danek/hagel used to recite homer; they used a 4-tone scale corresponding to the old phorminx whereas i used a more common 7-tone scale (common for string instruments anyway)… it’s in a .pdf here:
http://iliad.envy.nu [Iliad 1 (reconstructed pronunciation)]
i’m not sure about some of my previous conclusions though, if i looked at it again now there are many things i’d change and correct.
hope that helps
Hey Chad,
I’d taken your reconstructed Iliad and translated the first 10 lines it into sheet music. One thing that’s clear is that it has a certain musical melody to it; which is a good sign if you reconstructed it through a purely etymological method (without adjusting for pleasantness).
If your pitch were truely inaccurate, it would be unlikely to form a melody by pure chance.
So, it seems that it probably has at the least a recognisable correlation to the original pitch and melody.
Thanks so much Chad! That does clear up the confusion perfectly. I wish he had posted that information on the website beside the audio clips.
And thanks for the link to your site. I’m only just starting to explore Homeric recitation, and I found your scales for the beginning of the Iliad and Sappho extremely helpful. Have you ever considered recording a recitation and posting it?
Chad, I’d like to ask a few questions about your reconstructed pitch.
Is the pitch, as determined, an exact, or general, guide? In other words, is it intended that the singer’s pitch be in the general region of the indicated pitch at all times, or should the singer always be at the marked pitch?
Did you choose to use a 7 note system more or less arbitrarily? (Because if so, and the ancient bards used a different number of notes, we would expect a small proportion of the syllables to be off by a single pitch.)
Great work, by the way. The Iliad without the music might as well be prose with an odd sentence order.
hi eureka and swiftnicholas
i only put together that model so that i’d have an idea of how greek might have sounded on the basis of the evidence i read… all it does is show how homer sounds if you apply the statistically significant patterns found in extant greek music (found by devine and stephens). i can’t say for sure that there aren’t glaring errors in it because i’ve read references about e.g. a papyrus fragment containing a pitch transcription of a menander iambic line, and the “new guide to accenting greek” suggests that the 2nd beat of a long acute is on a higher pitch than the 1st beat. i’m also not sure if non-accented proclitics cause anathesis, devine and stephens equivocated on that so i’d have to read all the greek fragments again… another thing is that there’s this opinion that non-strophic music (like homer) followed the pitch accents strictly but strophic music (like choruses of drama and pindar) didn’t, i think it’s on the basis of dionysus of hal’s pitch description of a line of euripides’ lyrics where he describes non-accented pitches sung lower than accented pitches and things like that… on first glance to me it looked like the pitch of the strophe in euripides might be following in responsion the pitch of the antistrophe, which would be interesting, but i haven’t had a chance to look at things like this more closely
the 7-tone scale came out naturally as i tried to model the things in devine and stephens, given that i found they described 4 different pitch peaks and 3 different types of pitch drop; as i applied this to texts they all seemed to stay consistently within a 7-tone range, only then i read up on the standard 7-tone scale of ancient greek music. it might be coincidence.
i think the singers of homer would have kept strictly to whatever scale they used, which is what aristoxenus says expressly in his book on music theory. there are lots of unknowns though, in addition to the uncertainty of the whole model, e.g. whether it was sung to an enharmonic scale or chromatic or diatonic (or to different scales at different times), my assumption is that they used the enharmonic scale, which would explain why accented syllables in names of people and in words following grave-accented words are on average 2 whole tones higher (i think that’s right from memory) than accented syllables in other words.
but because of all these uncertainties there’s no point me recording anything; it’s just my general guess about how it might have sounded; i only put it together because i’m an auditory learner and i didn’t want the terrible stress pronunciation of academics i’ve heard to get stuck in my head as a beginner. there was nothing out there which described a technique for doing this so i had to make up one; even devine and stephens just present data about pronunciation and leave it to the reader to come up with a technique about how to apply it.
i’ve seen that stefan hagel has written some sort of software to do what my model does but automatically, he sent me the first few lines of the iliad which have a pitch trace line over the top of each line. it just shows relatively how the syllables probably sat next to each other, which is all my model did as well. i hope this ramble answers what you asked, but if you have any other questions let me know, thanks
but because of all these uncertainties there’s no point me recording anything; it’s just my general guess about how it might have sounded; i only put it together because i’m an auditory learner and i didn’t want the terrible stress pronunciation of academics i’ve heard to get stuck in my head as a beginner. there was nothing out there which described a technique for doing this so i had to make up one
Unfortunately, I picked up bad habits in pronunciation, because I started studying Greek on my own with the first textbook I found in a used bookstore. But I’m still a novice, and I want to form some good habits before the bad ones are too deeply embedded. I’m finding some of the technical language difficult to understand and apply, but the visual scales you created helped me to form an idea in my head of what I was reading about pitches, even if you think it’s not entirely accurate. Listening to the various recitations available online also provided examples of what I’m reading—about the “academic” stress pronunciation, and the attempts to reconstruct the pitches.
I think many other beginners would benefit from the visual presentation of the pitch scales–even if imperfect–and audio examples to accompany them. Some guesses sound so much nicer than others.
Thanks for your helpful remarks and links. It nice to have so many helpful people in one place!
Chad, the reason I asked is that there is a definite musical melody to your reconstructed Iliad (as you would expect there to be). What’s more, the music seems to fit the meaning of the sentences, even changing its feel from one caesura to the next, and when the meaning of the sentence is revealed (for example, in line 3 when the very positive πολλὰς δ’ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς is reversed in implication by Ἄϊδι προι5αψεν.)
However, a small number of the notes seem to me to be off by a single tone (from a musical standpoint). (For example, the last two notes on line 4 seem to be one tone too low.)
I think any pitch reconstruction technique should be able to be tested in this way. The words of the Iliad must have been chosen for their musical qualities. For one thing, the Greeks wouldn’t have employed a musician to sing out of key. For another, the meter alone would have been insufficient to allow a poet to remember six hours of poetry; the melody itself must have been used as a memory aid.
I think I need to take this comment back. I just started factoring ictus in, and it’s complicating the situation. I have a little work to do.
I have one more question, Chad.
Are you certain that in line 1 it is θεᾰ, rather than θεὰ? (I’ve seen it written both ways.)
After all, the comma after a vocative noun isn’t a real sentence pause. In English placing commas around vocatives seems to be just a writing convention, in Greek it’s probably just a Byzantine practice.
I suspect this is another of those long-running editorial disputes, like whether you write an accent acute or grave at the end of a poetic line even if the sentence doesn’t end there.
hi eureka and will, you’re both right, i wasn’t sure either way.
Chad, I’ve been trying to work out what the pitch for line one would be, if the goddess has a grave, using your pitch model document, and I think I have to admit defeat. 
I figure it would be the sounds marked by the letter C, but I can’t figure out which letter represents the pitch if Thea has an acute.
(It seems suprisingly high for a grave.)
Also, what do anathesis and (1st, 2nd and 3rd) catathesis mean? 
I think it’s time I threw my hat in the ring. I’m trying to do exactly that.
All I need is to get my computer’s microphone to work and then, if I find my voice doesn’t sound too bad, someone to host it on their website.
Failing that, I’ll have sheet music and midi files I can share.
I may not be qualified, but I’m going by the work of Chad, who’s going by the work eminent classics professors (I assume).
Hopefully, I can learn the meaning of Chad’s pitch model document, and then reconstruct the old song past line 44.
That’s great to hear Eureka! I’ve been listening to the readings we’ve discussed while I follow along in the text, and it has helped me not only to hear the rhythm of the Homeric line, but to better understand some of the literature on the subject. It would be wonderful to have more readings online, whether to compare with other readings, or for new verses. Thanks for doing the hard work
Verses 8.272-275 in the Danek/Hagel recitation are rendered so beautifully; I keep listening to them over and over.