10. Giving Pause: The Music of an Ancient World1
This changes everything. We did not use to know how the prosody of Greek words interacted with Greek metres. With the arrival of the new theory of the Greek accent, now we do. The ignoring of the seemingly irrelevant accent marks in texts seems to have led not to the realisation that all we could know, sadly, about the sound and performance of Greek poetry was its metre, but to the delusion that metre was all there was to know. This sometimes wilful delusion does not mean that more than a millennium of metrical analysis needs to be replaced. But it does, all of it, need to be reevaluated—remeasured, and chastened of its generative pretensions. It exists at a pre-musical level of the analysis of poetry.
We are taught that Greek verse is quantitative. This dictum is, at best, a misleading half-truth. Greek verse is, first of all, tonal and accentual. This is not controversial, because the Greek language is obviously tonal, it has a pitch accent, and Greek poetry is made from Greek language. This is not true about Greek metre. It is not made from the Greek language. The ancient usage, still current, is that the elements of metre are ‘feet’. This is as transparent a way as can be imagined to indicate what part of the human body performs the measurement: Greek metre is a measure of dance. Singing Greek, to Greek dance measures, produced a phenomenon called choreia. The composing of such danceable sequences of words came to be the work of someone called a ‘poet’, the product ‘poetry’.
One should note that all of English song is quantitative in the same sense that Greek and Latin verse is. Time-relations of English song syllables are deployed in whole-number ratios. To claim therefore that the Beatles’ music is quantitative, is to focus on the playing of Ringo, and all but ignore the contributions to songwriting and performance of John, Paul and George. In Greek there are naturally long vowels and syllables, but the quantities of English song syllables are assigned and almost completely determined by ictus and melody, not by nature; even ‘a’, ‘the’ and ‘to’ can come in for lengthened or emphatic treatment (‘the bombs bursting in air,’ ‘happy birthday to you!’). But this is not true about the English stress accent, which is rarely shifted in song from its natural place inside words. In my book I highlight the rarity of such a shift in sung usage by citing a line from the song ‘Dreams’ by Fleetwood Mac: ‘When the rain washés you clean you’ll know’.2 In this respect English song is in some ways less liberal than Homer’s hexameter, where the metrical lengthening and shortening of syllables can shift the location of accentual prominence.
In Greek poetry, the relative quantities of syllables were made to match the long and short steps of the movement by the legs (πούς = ‘leg’, ‘foot’). But what made the whole thing choreia was the voice of the dancer, singing syllables not just determined by their relative quantity, but by their relative pitch and direction of pitch change. The Greek ‘contonation’, married to the different sequences of quantities demarcating the ends of Greek words, produced the different dynamic prominences, characterised by one of two directions of pitch change and one of two quantities, plus intensity, that reinforced and syncopated the steps of the dance movement. The recording of this reinforcement and syncopation can now be recovered by correctly interpreting the instructions encoded in the accent marks written into East Roman manuscripts.
I concluded my published study this way:
The experience of epiphany πὰρ ποδί, ‘at the foot,’ is the ultimate aim of the art of χορεία and its summoning circles, whether in its epic or its lyric forms. The promise of such moments, actuated in harmony and rhythm, can now be a reward for the labours of learning Greek. Who can tell what powers these poems still harbour, what epiphanies are yet to strike in bloom, as the music of an ancient world becomes vivid once again?3
We begin with Homer, as things do. My present contribution to the cause, apart from posting recordings, will be posting my own ‘corrected’ version of the text alongside, using bold type to indicate the most prominent syllable in each word or prosodic unit. These boldings will illustrate what must become an admonition among trainees in classical Greek, as indeed it has already been in the course of this work: the most tonally, dynamically prominent syllables in a Greek text are not always the ones marked with an accent; very often they are the syllables immediately following that complete the contonation.
Another innovation in my corrected text will be a bias in favour of prodelision over elision. This is a common enough phenomenon not reflected in Homer’s modern editions. One such case could come in Odyssey 1.2, πλάγχθη ἐπεὶ → πλάγχθη ’πεὶ. The difference lies in the fact that altering the quantity of a final syllable, in a language with recessive accent, has a large impact on the prosody of a word; πλάγχθη is a natural barytone on the ultima, in the parlance of the new theory; with correption of the η due to hiatus, it becomes barytone on the penult. (The closed and nasalised quality of this penult can allow, but does not require, that the contonation be completed there. Cf. also ἥν τε, 1.5.) Absent direct guidance from ancient witnesses, a performer must make judgements about the musical contract, as it were, between singer and audience, about what liberties can be taken in Greek epic song with the natural prosody for the sake of the beat. Such metrical liberty with the words could not be taken in later lyric choruses.4 But Homer is famous for his licence.
Prodelision sometimes allows a word’s contonation to be completed, where elision can alter or negate this prosody. A bias in favour of prodelision does not need to involve emending a text, but rather reading an initial vowel as instead the final vowel of the previous word. The editor’s decision to elide often reflects a grammarian’s prejudice, rather than a poet’s feeling for the prosodic consummation of a word. Here this grammatical prejudice is applied to a language with an avowedly recessive accent dependent on the quantity of the ultima. It could be countered, with a musical bias, that ultimas should therefore be preserved where possible. The import of this practice, reading prodelision instead of elision, is felt most particularly, I find, in the rendering of the tragic and comic iambic trimeter, but it occsionally applies to the hexameter as well.
This is not to say that elision does not remain a real and useful weapon in Homer’s arsenal. The received writing convention suggests that the ghostly presence of an elided τε (τ’), for example, is enough to release a preceding oxytone from grave to acute, as we have seen in a singular phrase like μῦθόν τ᾽ εὖ γνῶτε from the lips of Agamemnon (XIX.84). The tau at least closes the preceding syllable. But the convention also writes κέρδεά θ’, οἷ’ οὔ πώ τιν’ ἀκούομεν (2.118). The first τε (θ’) also releases the preceding acute, despite the apparent phonetic fact that the enclitic is not actually providing anything but a metaphysical space and time for the completion of the contonation. This tau does not close the preceding syllable, but leans forward in aspiration. Hence we are in fact dealing with the metaphysics of poetic convention and licence, as the French do with their silent but altogether functional e’s in the scansion of syllabic alexandrines.
An objective musical case can certainly be made for preserving the natural prosody of πλάγχθη in the second ἔπος of the Odyssey: there is then a dynamic emphasis on the weak part of the foot, ‘disagreement’ between accent and ictus; such ‘disagreement’ at this point of the line is part of a typical pattern for the hexameter line, which I demonstrate with samples in my book.5 It prepares for ‘agreement’, prosodic prominence on the strong part (longum) of the third foot (in this line, on the final syllable of Τροίης). Harmonic ‘disagreement’ in the singing of πλάγχθη here is specially apposite to the sense: enjambment and displacement of stress combine with the word to deliver ‘wandering.’ A performer can make either choice work; in this case, but not all cases, I choose prodelision over correption. (Note that in this and other cases, I am not proposing a major emendation to the received text, but a reinterpretation of its word division from the lettering in a scriptio continua.)
Here is a draft for a corrected text of the opening of the Odyssey:
ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλά
πλάγχθη, ’πεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσε:
πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόϝον ἔγνω,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν, 5
ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.
ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὧς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:
αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,
νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠϝελίοιο
ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ. 10
τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.
Stephen Daitz has written an indispensable article of musical and historical commentary on these lines, arguing that we should ignore the commas introduced into Homer’s text by editors schooled in the developing traditions of grammar and rhetoric.6
What is clear is that the rhetorical punctuation of poetry, originating in Hellenistic Greece, then adopted by the Roman grammarians and rhetoricians, was eventually transmitted to our medieval and modern texts. What began as a scholarly procedure for semantic and grammatical analysis was imperceptibly and unhappily transformed into a performance practice for Homer and for later classical poetry.7
Daitz argues for a reading of Homer’s lines without internal pauses, such as the one prescribed by the comma after Διός in line 11:
… In the Homeric hexameter we have a form of poetry in which each verse was originally felt to be an integrated unit, centripetal in nature, knit together by the procedures of elision, correption, consonantal assimilation, and syllabic liaison.
(Let us also add ‘prodelision’ to his list here.)
This poetry was normally read without pause from the first to the last syllable, but with a pause after the last syllable of each verse, and with sufficient flexibility of tempo and pitch to clearly convey meaning and expression without distortion of the rhythm.
‘Distortion of the rhythm’ is what principally offends Daitz, and also, I should hope, all students of Homeric music. But we do not have the bearings to measure the envelope beyond which there is distortion. Rubato, for example, always needs to be executed in such a way that rhythmic continuity is sustained; the same for rallentando, which Daitz recommends in the conveying of Homer’s meaning.8 Some necessary effects are encoded in the language itself: consider the length of time it takes to say Hamlet’s Latinate ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile,’ in relation to the Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic gasp of the line following, ‘And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain … ’ Both are iambic pentameter.
There is a particular issue to confront, however, about Daitz’s notion that there was a pause after the last syllable of each verse (and also no pause in mid-line). This last syllable is described metrically as ‘anceps’: ‘two-headed’. This means the actual verses can have either a long or short final syllable; and when that syllable is long, the prosodic profile of Greek requires that that syllable be tonally prominent—that is, stressed, so that the line rises in a masculine cadence. In other words, it is only when there is a feminine cadence, and the final syllable is realised as short, that one is guaranteed a pause, of one short syllable’s length, between hexameter lines. This is the realisation best suited for continuous dancing in the round: that each line ends with an accentual trochee, and a pause occurs between each line allowing the dancer a shift of weight to begin once again on the right foot.
Is it possible that epic lines had their final syllables shortened in performance, and hence their prosody shifted? It is in fact a peculiarity of the Latin hexameter that almost every line of Virgil or Lucretius ends with a stress on the long thesis of the sixth foot, and is indifferent to the quantity of the final syllable. To produce a rising cadence in a Latin hexameter one must deploy a final monosyllable, and hence this is very rare (significant initum perculsae corda tua vi, De Rerum Natura 1.13); the characteristic Latin hexameter ends with a descending cadence. Perhaps this Latin hexametric ethos had been, to begin with, an imposition of the dance metre upon Homeric Greek.
But if Homer’s line did in fact sometimes cadence in an ascending rhythm with a tonally prominent long final syllable, any pause before the line following would have been extra-metrical—although it is possible to imagine a pause that lasted a whole foot in these cases. But the longer such a pause, the more compromised would be the effect of enjambement, across that interlinear pause, in Homer’s arsenal. And any six-measure structure to the dance, including any regular steps of retrogression, would be disrupted by the occasional movement in sevens. In my experience it is possible to give full value to a final long syllable in epic hexameters without discomfiting the dancers. The discomfort is for the singer: there is effectively no pause between such a line and the next one, so one has to time one’s breaths accordingly. A little bit of syncopation, alternately tugging and pushing the dancers’ beat with the voice, can in fact be highly entertaining. But performing these lines without dancers physically present, although still in mind—as for Bach at a keyboard—frees up the syncopations and emphatic pauses available to the performer, by stretching the line’s temporal envelope in a way that is impossible when dancers’ steps determine the lines and their tempo.
It is usually an editor’s choice to mark the final syllable of line 1 as a grave (πολλὰ), rather than an acute ‘released’ by a pause at line end. The enjambment of the sense must have influenced this decision. But this is surely an extraordinary assertion of the editor, which requires some considerable apology but goes without comment, in this case to subordinate the physical integrity of the line and the prosodic effect of its offsetting pause; elsewhere this interlinear pause ought to release oxytone accentuation. This editor’s choice also is an example of the ‘rhetorical punctuation of poetry’ mentioned by Daitz, where the musical integrity of the Homeric line is ignored. A case can be made, certainly, for the subordination of πολλὰ; it makes musical as well as rhetorical sense in that it prepares for the enjambed contonation beginning the next line, with the strayed πλάγχθη. But West in the Teubner edition has done well to read πολλά in this position, and in general to read released oxytones at line end. Enjambment actually depends on the line’s ‘centripetal’ integrity; the musical cadence of the line thereby ends up in conflict with the cadence of the sense. ‘Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit’ seems like an expressed, resonant idea until the clause is completed, in the next line, by ‘Of that forbidden tree …’
Editors typically print a comma after line 4, and this does reflect a moment of agreement between the prosodic period of the line and the movement of the sense. But the comma is not the reason that θυμόν should be so accented. It is commas printed in mid-line that need to be revisited in light of any perhaps unfortunate or unintended prosodic effects in releasing ultimate oxytones.
My own view, at least about the text of the Odyssey, is that it intends all its final quantities and correlated prosody. I believe it can be demonstrated, purely by internal evidence, that it was composed for a performer equipped with a stick for a multi-use prop—like a wizard’s wand (ῥάβδος);9 and that it was composed decisively with respect not only to the final syllables of lines, but to the nature of the prosodic cadence at mid-line, the choice of which causes the two kinds of caesura. There is in fact very often a best way, to suit the sense, to render these cadence points, with or without histrionic pauses. Some lines do call for a continuous rhythm through to the final syllable, as Daitz describes. All of Homer’s lines can be rendered this way. But some of the accentual realisations reinforce sense divisions, whether at caesura or at line end, or both and neither, and actors will find themselves milking the pauses when that works. The motivations of the actor outweigh the needs of the dancer in most of the Homer we have.
Apart from the seemingly parallel citharodic tradition, we can observe at least three different modes of hexameter performance in antiquity. One is obliged to chart a development: from dancing in a circle while a singer strummed and chanted a catalogue, to solo performance by a bard with a lyre—with or without a circle of dancers—to a declaiming thespian rhapsode, acting alone without instruments and with a staff for a prop. The spell cast by Demodocus was not the spell cast by Ion. Imagine the rhapsode when he plays the Odyssey’s Athena: his staff is sometimes a spear that breaks the ranks of men (1.99-101), that Telemachus takes from her when she’s become Mentes (1.121), and sticks in a rack with Odysseus’ long-neglected spears—like an old umbrella (1.127-9); at other times a magic wand that turns Odysseus—also played by him when he takes his place—into a tight-jawed black Adonis (16.175), or else a ragged old beggar leaning on the same stick. And yet all three modes of performance, from the solo actor to the communal dancers, can be said to be in the same business: of conjuring presences remote in space and time to inhabit and animate the living here and now. This is the work both of participatory dance and the theatre stage; what is astounding is the one poem that can serve both as score and as script.
It seems impossible that these different modes did not exploit different rhythmic possibilities and options, once the tether to dancing and even to singing was cut, and the lines were freed from strict isometry, and the dactyl from strict isochrony. But Daitz is right all the same to point to a late stage where verse was read as if it was prose—without the ‘centripetal’ integrity of the line—and commas were introduced to indicate rhetorical or grammatical pauses, rather than musical ones—as a ‘distortion of the rhythm.’
Daitz, unusually, fails in one case to pay attention to the effect of editorial pauses on accentuation. A comma or pause after Διός ‘releases’ its accent, so the mark changes from grave to acute (Διὸς → Διός, ). Daitz’s text strangely prints the sign as grave10 before a comma; is this a wishful emendation of his, or a printing error? The standard text makes the final syllable, the second short in the dactyl, become dynamically prominent (an oxytone), a syncopation that would seem to disrupt the movement of dactylic hexameter. Is there a motive to emphasise Zeus as a parent in this way? This is an example of the new questions that must come before an editor of the text of Homer, when he or she learns to take the accentual effects of commas into practical account.
In my opinion, the striking tonal-dynamic pattern of Διός, in that position of the verse, is not impossible to perform nor does it ruin the line; I myself prefer the Daitz way in this case, however, without a pause and the accent made grave; but either way, the rhetorical as well as the musical emphasis lands on the long final circumflected cadence at line end, whose meaning strikes a peculiarly Odyssean, comedic tone in pointing to the audience: καὶ ἡμῖν, ‘even us.’
There is no substitute for this sounding of Homer. There are no doubt countless more correlations and connections made between prosody and context, beginning from the more obvious prosodic gestures like those discussed in the previous chapter, which call attention to themselves by violating rhythmic and melodic norms. But the real sea change happens when one starts to get a feeling for the names of invocation, the nouns and their epithets as distinct from the predications upon them.
The final initiation is from participating in the dance. Those who have done this, who know what it is to feel Homer’s phrases propel and interweave with the motion in their feet—those steps back to the left, resumption to the right, all the while with the twist in one’s spine—know something they cannot demonstrate with words on a page. It is a fine libretto, but it’s only the libretto. Neither can they demonstrate anything but the most histrionic effects from visual patterns in the score. The bread and butter is an endlessly sustaining rhythm. It needs to be moved before it can be tasted or supply any nutrients. It is true about any score and every script: the playing is the thing, hidden realities become revealed. Truth only happens when the score is played.
An immediate and lasting lesson from performing Homer is that his score must be prepared in order to be performed. It has been composed for a skilled performer: to render the rapid syncopations and land the cadences requires practice and dexterity. There is of course a recurrence of patterns, as in all music, which helps create context and sustains one’s energy, but the rule from line to line is variety in the prosodic implementation, even as the underlying ictus creates stability and expectation.11 The whole experience is composed; nothing about it is improvised. The actor must anticipate and prepare his voice for the many roles he must adopt as he literally ‘exchanges place’ (ἀμείβεσθαι) from one persona to another in conversation. His is a one-man show.12 Rendering a convincing Eumaeus does not prepare you for Penelope and her circumflexes.
The noun-and-epithet (allegedly ‘formulaic’) language is for people who like to dwell on the phonic texture and semantic rhythm of names; it is not for people who prefer the rapid, the plain and direct—or the noble. These words of Matthew Arnold’s were once meant to guide a translator as descriptors of Homer’s narrative style—and so they are, on occasion. They are very far, however, from describing the almost ubiquitously tangible quality of his word-craft, and the correlated concreteness of the referents invoked, rather than merely indicated, by the arresting presence of such phrases in the movement of the line. The proof of this really is in the pudding—in the mouth. One has to perform it to learn the spell; in my opinion it is not enough to hear Homer on someone else’s lips. But Ion has a different opinion.
‘The music of an ancient world’: now there’s a phrase to pull at the heart of an alienated, fragmented, colonised and displaced modern consciousness. It is like the conversations on the stoop about old Ceylon. Once upon a time it was known that this music was lost, but like the statues with their radiant painted eyes all faded, this knowledge caused a sweeter longing than the thing first missed and longed for. That is classicism. But there is a goddess in the name of μουσική. Once upon a time, the moderns knew, because Plato knew, that her elements were rhythm and harmony. There is an hierarchy: harmony sourced from the voice is the ‘joining’ of accented word to foot that causes rhythm. The moderns also knew very well that the ancients called the elements of metre ‘feet’, and themselves persisted with the term. But somehow, more or less stupidly, it escapes them that it is the movement of legs, dance, that supplies the beat or ‘ictus’ of ancient metre. Greek metre has nothing to do with the voice, for which Homer composed. It is the measurement of space and time by dance steps.
That is why I give no quarter to these metre-mongers. They are bad for the children, and mean to diminish the wonders of rhythm and harmony, not to mention sound and meaning, and any other things that might annoy their sense of rule. Once upon a time they knew that the real music, and therefore the real composition, was lost: hence there is no excuse for the growing presumption of their metrical analysis, extending even to the point of claiming insight, purely from metre, into how Homer’s verses were made. Amidst the grateful reception of scholarship on oral poetry and orality generally—much of it inspired by Parry and Lord, and the former influence of Homeric studies on all the humanities and social sciences in general—the application in specific as a theory of Homer, of how Homeric poems and the music of their poetry were created, is an extraordinary caricature of the modern academy’s hubris beyond the bitterest satire imagined by Jonathan Swift.
The key to the rhythm and harmony of Ancient Greek was found in combining W. Sidney Allen’s theory of stress in Ancient Greek verse with his description of the ancient accent in terms of the Vedic contonation. However well-meaning and articulate some exponents of the metrical Homer turn out to be, the fact remains that metre has nothing important to do with the real motives, and real impact, of Homeric composition. Metre does not distinguish Mozart from Salieri, nor hardly does it Mozart from the Sex Pistols.
Composers look at critics’ and linguists’ protestations about ‘metrical necessity’ and the constraints imposed by metre, and discover their sense of humour. Metrical constraint is a real thing, but it is all a matter of negotiation between artist and audience. In this relationship the artist is the predator: he will attempt what he hopes the community, and its sensibility of both language and dance rhythm, will bear. Recall that a composer of Greek epic begins life facing the situation Chantraine describes: his language is badly suited to the dactylic hexameter. Hence it must be forced to fit. Some of the constraints upon his jury-rigging are inherent to the metre, others are no doubt forced on him by a sense for what will sound acceptable. Either way, substitution (‘spondaic’) evidently can only happen in the weak part of the foot, or else the rhythm of the movement falls apart. Syllables will have to be stretched and shortened; as for the latter, there is perhaps already something natural about correption. But as to the former, can one really stretch the first vowel in διά? ‘Will they take it?’ ‘Let’s find out.’
The ‘metrical equivalence’ of phrases may or may not be a problem for the concept of ‘economy’ in Milman Parry’s theory. Once we have come to remind ourselves, however, or simply realise, that such ‘equivalent’ phrases still sound different because they are different phonetically; but especially when we realise that Homer is composing for the melodic patterns in the prosody of the words that syncopate with the metre, crafting whole melodic lines, not composing metres—or whatever it is that is capable of being built by metrical building blocks—we come at last to a reasonable footing: from here it may be possible to raise questions, if so inclined in the encounter with music, about how the thing was composed. (The recent release of a film of the rather wondrous moment when Paul McCartney ‘came up with’ the germ of the song ‘Get Back’, strumming on his bass under pressure of a deadline, suggests that seeing the process happen—the Muse at work in voice and stringed instrument, in real time right in front of you—does not exactly solve this Homeric question.) There remain enduring riddles about the scale of Homer’s poems, their modes of possible performance, and so on. Let us call them mysteries. But there is no doubt that we are dealing with someone making choices in telling a musical story, even in mid-line, not someone soldering phrases under duress in an Indo-European dungeon.
Lots of rock ’n’ roll is sung in a generic American Black English, while other portions are sung in a generic sort of Estuary English, sometimes within the same song (I think immediately of ‘Baba O’Riley’ by The Who, but there are many such examples.) It really makes no difference what region or country or race the performers come from. Given Homer’s circumstance of having to adapt language intelligibly to a dance measure, we should expect him actively to poach from all the varietals that the available dialects offer: the criterion is only and always, ‘does this work if I make it sing this way?’ Just as the syntactician has to ask the question of a subject, ‘can you say this?’—there is no substitute for the question, the patient is always right, and his answer cannot be anticipated or predicted—so there is nothing for Homer but to do it and see. Evidently there are a number of modern analysts who take exception to his apparent choices, and need to do the historical chemistry to try and cast them in a more acceptable light. The consistency often found in these analyses does not, however, justify any conclusions about an epic tradition: only the consistency that tends to characterise a peculiar artist’s aesthetic diction and choices. Shakespearean English, and Homeric Greek, are not ‘art languages’ separate from the art.
What is more, one should not exclude a diachronic intuition from the assessment of an artist’s usage, on a presumption of naïveté in the historical sensibility of popular language. Homer’s hapax coinages like παναώριον (Iliad XXIV.540) stand alongside frozen forms like ’Αργεϊφόντης. The term ‘art language’ (Kunstsprache) need not be assumed to apply only, or even primarily, to the product of a sort of traditional guild: individual authors (Shakespeare, Joyce) also develop such things. In restoring the aesthetic judgement to Homer’s crafting of a melodic and rhythmic line out of a dance metre, we restore also the criterion ‘what works?’ to the artist in his outlook, and along with it, crucially, ‘what still works?’ A similar question must have been asked by the archaising translators of the King James Bible, sharply in contrast to the translators of the Septuagint, with their direct, plebeian calques. Once we introduce the model of a somewhat avant-garde musical predator working within an intractable metre used for remembering catalogues, we can no longer assume that newer (for example, contracted) forms reflect a later date of composition. The question is not whether they had ‘taken over,’ but whether the metrically essential and vitally necessary un-contracted forms still worked.
This is not to say that Homer’s music is some kind of free form; there are a number of characteristic shapes and syncopations to his phrases that can become familiar to a performer. Inside the ongoing movement of the hexameter, words can at times submerge into noun-and-epithet phrases as a kind of musical evocation, only to trip one up when Homer cheats the prosodic expectation. Rhythmic transposition, hearing familiar words in unfamiliar rhythmic places, can turn musical epithets suddenly into semantic predicates, or proper names, without debarring them from returning again to sonorous anonymity.13
These recurring melodic and rhythmic patterns encoded by the accent marks have not heretofore served as the basis of a theory of Homeric composition, oral or otherwise. My argument demands that anyone who takes Homer’s poetry seriously, needs for the first time to consider the contours of this native, recoverable music. Any theory of composition that results would likely apply broadly to works by the likes of Mozart and the Rolling Stones. Perhaps it would extend also to genres that are overtly oral and improvisatory in relation to a fixed structure, like the now classical 20th Century American blues. But Homer sounds like Homer. It is absurd to concoct a data-free tradition to explain this fact. Homer does not sound like Hesiod. Likewise.
The catastrophic history of human consciousness, and the impulse in the rearguard to fabricate various ‘traditions’ as its source, is borne out by the history of texts as well as the texts themselves. But we have ourselves a Homer, despite everything, because of the foresight, judgement and faithfulness to a lost music of some unnamed editors or compilers in the Eastern Rome. ‘Music do I hear?’ says King Richard.
Ha, ha! keep time. How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men’s lives. (Richard II, V.5)
The manuscript Venetus A has survived catastrophes, as surely as has Homer’s poetry in its paper ark. It ‘is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.’
Why not learn this line: when you incant it, the early-born child springs into consciousness of dawn at any time of day, in any age of the Sun, under any pole star:14
ἦμος δ’ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς
And when the early-born child appeared, Eos Rose-Fingers, the dawn …
ἦμος δ’ ἠριγένεια φάνη ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠϝώς
The dactyl is a risen rose. The pause is silence; and the spell is cast.
Originally from A. P. David, ‘Singing Homer’s Spell: The Disyllabic Contonation and the Proposition Made by East Roman Manuscripts’, Dramaturgias: Revista do Laboratório de Dramaturgia da Universidade de Brasília, 19:7 (2022), 805-66; since revised.
David, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 154.
Ibid., 269.
Ibid., 228-31.
Ibid., see esp. 115-137.
Stephen G. Daitz, ‘On Reading Homer Aloud: To Pause or Not to Pause’, American Journal of Philology, 112:2 (1991), 149-60.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid., 156-7.
One explanation for ῥαψῳδός was that it meant ῥαβδῳδός, ‘wand-singer’; see M. L. West, ‘The Singing of Homer and the Modes of Early Greek Music’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 101 (1981):114, 124-5.
Daitz, 160.
see my discussion, quoting Arthur W. H. Adkins, of Iliad VI.29-36, a ‘run-of-the-mill description of battle’: David, Dance of the Muses, 127-9.
see Katherine Kretler, One Man Show: Poetics and Presence in the Iliad and Odyssey, Washington DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020, passim.
see my discussion ‘The Choral Signifier: The Shaping of Homeric Speech’, in David, The Dance of the Muses, Ch. 4, 145 ff.
David, ‘Demise of the Polar Bear’, Chronology and Catastrophism Review, 2019:2, 36-45.
Giving Pause: The Music of an Ancient World