Sound, Sense, and Rhythm

Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry

Mark W. Edwards

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780691117843, 9780691086668
• eBook ISBN: 9781400824830
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book concerns the way we read--or rather, imagine we are listening to--ancient Greek and Latin poetry. Through clear and penetrating analysis Mark Edwards shows how an understanding of the effects of word order and meter is vital for appreciating the meaning of classical poetry, composed for listening audiences.


The first of four chapters examines Homer's emphasis of certain words by their positioning; a passage from the Iliad is analyzed, and a poem of Tennyson illustrates English parallels. The second considers Homer's techniques of disguising the break in the narrative when changing a scene's location or characters, to maintain his audience's attention. In the third we learn, partly through an English translation matching the rhythm, how Aeschylus chose and adapted meters to arouse listeners' emotions. The final chapter examines how Latin poets, particularly Propertius, infused their language with ambiguities and multiple meanings. An appendix examines the use of classical meters by twentieth-century American and English poets.


Based on the author's Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in 1998, this book will enrich the appreciation of classicists and their students for the immense possibilities of the languages they read, translate, and teach. Since the Greek and Latin quotations are translated into English, it will also be welcomed by non-classicists as an aid to understanding the enormous influence of ancient Greek and Latin poetry on modern Western literature.

Chapter One

HOMER I: POETRY AND SPEECH

MOSTLY, we read the Homeric epics; despite the existence of modern recordings, few of us listen to them. In the last seventy years, scholars have devoted a great deal of time to studying the poems as oral compositions, but—as the term suggests—have very largely concentrated their investigations on the techniques by which poems of such metrical complexity and length could be composed and adjusted to the occasions of performance. Not much attention has been paid to the listeners, and what demands were imposed on them by the need to understand the recitations, what capacities they had to employ if they were in any way to appreciate the enormous depth of artistic skill that we readers identify in Homer.

Yet two great advances made about seventy years ago much improved our understanding of what the characteristics of oral poetry meant to the listener, as well as to the singer. Only quite recently, however, has this become clear. The two scholars responsible for the older discoveries, Hermann Fränkel and Milman Parry, though unaware of each other’s work, shared a common and largely original insight: that Homer’s verse should be analyzed into larger units than dactyls and spondees, and his sentences should be analyzed into larger units than words. And now, within the last fifteen or twenty years, there have been two other advances, in the field of linguistics, that have provided a much better theoretical understanding than we had before of why this is the case. They have revealed that the now-well-known compositional techniques of the oral poet not only provide the resources for the singer to present a song adapted to the occasion of performance: they are also developed so that the song will be as accessible as possible to the listening audience.

In what follows I first quickly explain the “larger units” upon which Hermann Fränkel in 1926 and Milman Parry in 1928 focused attention. Then I describe the two more recent and less-well-known theories I mentioned. Finally, I demonstrate the advantages of emphasizing this kind of approach to Homer by commenting in detail on one passage from the Iliad—not a well-known speech or a highly wrought emotional scene, but one of the descriptions of Achilles’ battles soon after his return to the fighting. Battle scenes are sometimes neglected, because there are so many of them, and because their brutality may discourage and perhaps disgust the modern reader; but just as Homer lavishes all his poetic powers on the speeches of his hero Achilles, so, if one pays proper attention, his account of Achilles’ battles, too, brings before our eyes the superb skills of this greatest of poets.

THE OLDER DISCOVERIES: FRÄNKEL AND PARRY

In 1926 Hermann Fränkel published a monumental article in a German periodical1 demonstrating that the Homeric hexameter should be viewed not simply as a succession of six metrical feet, heavy and light syllables arranged as dactyls (DUM DE DE) or spondees (DUM DUM), but as a series of four (or occasionally just three) word groups whose syllables certainly add up to a hexameter, but which should be regarded as entities separated by word-end and often by a pause in sense.² This means a typical hexameter might be DUM DE DE DUM (word break) DE DE DUM DE (word break) DE DUM DE DE (word break) DUM DE DE DUM DUM (verse-end)—or (with some dactyls replaced by spondees)

(Iliad 1.2). The four units in this example include interior word breaks as well, but the sense pauses (often the punctuation points) would fall between the units, not within them. Occasionally a verse occurs that illustrates this by presenting strong and obvious breaks between each of the units, as in

(Iliad 1.158:³ “But you—you shameless thing—we followed you, to do you a favor”). It is highly significant that all the units are of different metrical shapes—a vital matter for avoiding monotony—and, of course, further variety is added both because the units in other verses will be different in shape from those given in the example, and because each group of two light syllables may be replaced by a single heavy one.

Here is a further illustration, from a couplet that will concern us again later. In the second book of the Iliad, after Agamemnon finishes addressing the assembly, the Greek troops move off and fix themselves a meal, which as always includes a sacrifice. Then come the lines (Iliad 2.402–403):

The orthodox prose translation is, “But Agamemnon, king of men, slew a fat bull of five years to the son of Cronos, supreme in might.”⁴ If we follow the examples Fränkel gives (1968b: 112–113), we would divide the lines into word groups like this:

Most of the breaks are obvious, and they divide the sentence into separate sense-units. In the first half of the first verse, however, there is a problem—should the break fall before or after

—and in such cases it is best not to force the issue but (as Kirk pointed out, 1985: 19) to take the half-verse as a virtually continuous whole. We might note (though this is surely acci-dental) that the two verses are similar in rhythm, each composed of the different metrical units DUM DE DE DUM DE DE DUM DE DE DUM DUM DUM (or DE DUM DE DE DUM) DE DE DUM DE.

In the past I have tried to give nonclassicists an idea of the effect of Homeric verse, when looked at in this way, by quoting Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.”⁵ If one runs two “Hiawatha” verses t...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• Chapter One Homer I: Poetry and Speech
• Chapter Two Homer II: Scenes and Summaries
• Chapter Three Music and Meaning in Three Songs of Aeschylus
• Chapter Four Poetry in the Latin Language
• AFTERWORD
• Appendix A Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur
• Appendix B Continuity in Mrs. Dalloway
• Appendix C The Performance of Homeric Episodes
• Appendix D Classical Meters in Modern English Verse
• REFERENCES