[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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