Homeric Rhapsody: Iliad I

Welcome to the Homeric Rhapsody podcast! These brief meditations will be renderings of Homer’s poem in Greek, following the new theory of the Greek accent from my Oxford book, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics. After the Greek, I shall perform my impression of the lines in English. The rhapsodes were solo performers of Homer who declaimed in a theatre, draping a traveler’s cloak and wielding a long staff as a multivalent prop. So there was more to Homeric rhapsody than the audio. Yet how remarkable and unique is Homer’s text, whose rhythm originally accompanied a dactylic round dance, but unlike any other song lyrics known to me, becomes numinous as spoken poetry; these verses harbour moments of transcendent lyric, amid the potency of the greatest dramatic verse.