Homer: Odyssey, Book I, 1-21

Odyssey I: 1-10 read in Greek (RealAudio)                  

Odyssey I: 11-21 read in Greek (RealAudio)

My reading of Homer might be thought of as an attempt to recreate, not the poet's own performance, but the sort an Athenian rhapsode might have given several hundred years later. We know that the rhapsodes recited Homer rather than singing him, and incorporated a good bit of acting into their renditions as well.

For generations, well-meaning scholars have admonished actors, when playing Shakespeare, to pause at the end of every line of verse, even when the sense runs on without break to the next. Fortunately for audiences, the advice has been largely ignored. The same notion of how to speak verse correctly seems to hold sway among classical scholars in relation to Homer, with the further proviso, which no one ever thought of for English verse, that we ought to make no pause for any natural breaks of sense - such as the ends of sentences - that don't occur at the end of a line. The reason given for both recommendations is that otherwise the rhythm of the hexameter will get lost.

My own feeling is that once you "get" the hexameter rhythm, it takes a lot more than an occasional run-on line or mid-line pause to disrupt it. At the very beginning of the Odyssey, in fact, Homer follows one with the other, delaying the expected pause at the end of the first line and moving it squarely between the first two "short" syllables of the second. To complain that a rendition that observes such facts "obscures the rhythm" is a bit like saying that a jazz drummer has lost the beat if he doesn't hit the high hat at the end of every measure. Pretty square, as that drummer might say.

Of course it is entirely possible that in Homer's own rendition, which is usually assumed to have been some sort of chant or quasi-musical setting, there was a habitual marking of the verse-ends, either by voice or lyre or both, and that each line was delivered as an unbroken whole. Things can be done in singing, after all, that would sound boring in normal speech. But it is also quite possible that he did neither of these things. Knowing nothing of archaic musical style, we can only guess. More pertinently, perhaps, the Greeks of the "classical" era didn't know much about that style either, or if they did, it had ceased to appeal to them. That they nevertheless continued to understand and enjoy Homer's verse rhythms, purely as spoken ones, seems abundantly clear. I see no reason why we might not do so too.