Avery D Andrews
School of Language Studies
The Australian National University

Homeric Recitation

These pages are intended to present a technique for reciting the Homeric poems, based largely on the work of A.M. Devine and L.D. Stephens (1994). At present, it is intended for people who know enough Greek to start reading Homer, although I hope to eventually have some simultaneous sound-and-translation demos for people who don't.

First, a small sample, Odyssey 12:154-158:

As you hear, this is quite sing-songy; the reason is that Ancient Greek had what is called a 'pitch accent' system whereby each word had a tune, different from its rhythm, so that when a string of words is formed into a line, the word-tunes fit together to make a line-tune.

This is quite different from what happens in English and other familiar European languages, and also Latin, where words have rhythm, but not individual tunes, and the 'pitch contour' (that is, tune) of a sentence is determined by meaning and grammar, and a reciter of poetry has much more latitude.

The Homeric poems and their antecedents were performed in at least two different styles, that of the `aoidoi', who sung to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument, providing dinnertime entertainment to aristocrats, and that of the `rhapsodes', who performed without accompaniment (but holding a staff) at religious festivals and other public venues. This site presents a hypothetic rhapsodic style.

Trying to recite Homer in anything vaguely resembling either of the original styles raises a host of issues; some of them are discussed in the Styles, Pitch and Rhythm sections of this site. Additional samples are provided in the Samples section.

A word of warning for Homeric beginners: these poems have been under study for about 2500 years, from many points of view, and virtually every idea that can be formulated semi-coherently has been proposed, and passionately advanced by some people and equally passionately opposed by others, and the answers to the most interesting questions will never been known for certain. So opinions and conjectures can be more or less defensible, but not right or wrong. Another thing to remember is that these poems and their antecedents were performed for perhaps fifteen hundred years, in at least two major styles and probably many variants. There may be many different techniques which can display their inherent beauty; just because one sounds good to us does not mean that it is very similar to anything that was actually done in Ancient Greece.

In the list of site contents to the left, note the News.

Created by: Avery Andrews
Maintained by: Avery Andrews
Last modified: 29 July 2004