Metre and Oral Praxis

[jsburbidge]

Quoted from an actual classicist talking about the early CE in a Guardian article:

"Poetry was so important; everyone read Homer and all that sort of thing. But we know that spoken language wasn’t really appropriate to that kind of poetry.. "

Somebody has their wires crossed. If they'd cited, say, Callimachus it would be unexceptionable (except that I doubt everyone read Callimachus). But Homer was, very much, oral poetry. The ghost of Milman Parry is turning in his grave.

The speaker is trying to position accentual-metric verse as more natural than real metre, in Greek. But even in the days of Aristophanes the old-fashioned, pre-Sophist curriculum for the well-off young was mainly oral poetry (including composition) and not written. Metrical poetry.

Stressed poetry came in as the language changed and more syllables became short, and the claim underneath the article's actual text may be that the text being discussed is evidence of this transition earlier than previously thought. Germanic had already gone through that transition, which is why old Germanic poetry does not inherit Indo-European metrics but uses a stress-based alliterative metric.

Latin, by the way, was a different case - Greek metres had been grafted onto Latin and accentual-metric poetry reasserted itself early in the common era.