Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It’s been a human­ist tru­ism for some time to say that Shake­speare speaks to every age, tran­scend­ing his time and place through the sheer force of his uni­ver­sal genius. But any hon­est stu­dent first encoun­ter­ing the plays will tell you dif­fer­ent­ly, as will many a sea­soned schol­ar who works hard to place the writer and his work in his­tor­i­cal con­text. Even one­time direc­tor of London’s Nation­al The­atre, Nicholas Hyt­ner, once said, “I’ll admit that I hard­ly ever go to a per­for­mance of one of Shakespeare’s plays with­out expe­ri­enc­ing blind pan­ic dur­ing the first five min­utes. I sit there think­ing… I have no idea what these peo­ple are talk­ing about.”

Of course, none of that means we can’t learn to appre­ci­ate Shake­speare, and we do not need a grad­u­ate-lev­el edu­ca­tion to do so. But much of his archa­ic lan­guage and obscure ref­er­ences will always sound for­eign to mod­ern ears. How much more so, then, the lan­guage of the ancient Greeks, whether in trans­la­tion or not? Although we’ve also been taught to think of the Home­r­ic epics as con­tain­ers of uni­ver­sal truth and beau­ty, the world of Homer was, in many ways, an alien one—and the lit­er­a­ture of ancient Greece was far clos­er to song than even Shakespeare’s musi­cal speech­es.

In fact, “before writ­ing was gen­er­al­ly known among the Greeks,” the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cincin­nati notes, “poets recit­ed and sang sto­ries for audi­ences at the courts of city lead­ers and at fes­ti­vals. A poet could actu­al­ly impro­vise a tale in the six-beat rhythm of Greek verse if he knew the plot of his sto­ry.” We do not know whether Homer was one enter­pris­ing scribe or “a group of poets whose works on the theme of Troy were col­lect­ed” under one name. But in either case, that poet or poets heard the tales of Hec­tor and Achilles, Odysseus and Pene­lope, and all those med­dling gods sung before they wrote them down. Now, thanks to Georg Danek of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na and Ste­fan Hagel of the Aus­tri­an Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, we have some idea of what those songs may have sound­ed like.

“In the course of the last years,” write Danek and Hagel, “we have devel­oped a tech­nique of singing the Home­r­ic epics, which is appro­pri­ate for the pri­mar­i­ly oral tra­di­tion from which these poems emerge.” The two schol­ars cau­tion that their the­o­ret­i­cal recre­ations are “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.” Accom­pa­nied by a four-stringed lyre-like instru­ment called a phorminx, “the Home­r­ic bard” would impro­vise the “melody at the same time as he impro­vised his text, which was unique in every per­for­mance.” In the audio above, you can hear Danek and Hagel’s melod­ic recre­ation of lines 267–366 of book 8 of the Odyssey, in which Demod­ocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite.

At their site, the two schol­ars present an abstract of their Home­r­ic singing the­o­ry, with musi­co­log­i­cal and lin­guis­tic evi­dence for the recre­ation. Their tech­ni­cal cri­te­ria will con­fuse the non-spe­cial­ist, and none but ancient Greek speak­ers will under­stand the record­ing above. But it brings us a lit­tle clos­er to expe­ri­enc­ing Home­r’s epic poet­ry, “the foun­da­tion stones of Euro­pean Lit­er­a­ture,” as the ancient Greeks might have expe­ri­enced it.

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