[B-Greek] The music of Homeric verse
Carl Conrad
cwconrad2 at mac.com
Mon Apr 20 06:16:10 EDT 2009
Maybe I just want to see if our list software is still working after
the hiatal silence of the weekend. While what I call attention to is
admittedly tangential to the study of Biblical Greek and the Biblical
Greek text, it is a tangent that I have consistently heretofore urged
B-Greekers to pursue, on grounds that, for readers of any Greek
literature, the Homeric poetry is a wellspring deserving of fresh
visits by mid-life learners as well as old codgers like myself.
Michael Gilleland's blog-entry of April 19 is entitled "Para Thina
Poluphloisboio Thalasses" (παρὰ θῖνα
πολυφλοισβοῖο θαλάσσης = PARA QINA POLUFLOISBOIO
QALASSHS) -- "along the strand of the much-roaring sea." I can still
vividly recall the first time I encountered, as a sophomore in the
fall of 1953, this recurrent formula in line 34 of Book 1 of the
Iliad, where the aged priest of Apollo, Chryses, cursed and sent off
fruitless in his endeavor to ransom his daughter, Chryseis, makes his
way despondently over the sands of the Trojan littoral. It is a
majestic-sounding roll of syllables, and it constitutes one of the
reasons why it is worthwhile reading more than a restricted corpus of
texts composed within a century and a half of the long life-span of
Greek literature. At any rate, the snippet cited by the Laudator
Temporis Acti is from a traveler''s reflections on ways in which the
ancient Greek experience of the sights and sounds of the sea found
echoes in the music of Homeric poetry:
http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2009/04/para-thina-poluphloisboio-thalasses.html
= http://tinyurl.com/cv4jed
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
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