[B-Greek] The music of Homeric verse

Jennifer & Bruce McKinnon jennifer.bruce at telus.net
Mon Apr 20 14:11:11 EDT 2009


George,
I haven't looked at any Homeric Greek for 35 plus years but perhaps the time 
has now come to revisit it.  I'll pull out my copy of Homer and see what 
happens.  Thanks for the encouragement.
Bruce McKinnon
Victoria, Canada

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Carl Conrad" <cwconrad2 at mac.com>
To: "B-Greek" <b-greek at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2009 3:16 AM
Subject: [B-Greek] The music of Homeric verse


> 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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