Aeneas is told by the Cumaean Sybil that the way to the underworld can be opened to him only if he finds a golden bough, sacred to Proserpina, Queen of the underworld, and takes it with him as an offering. The illustration shows the golden bough as imagined by JMW Turner. Hear the Latin and follow the English translation here.
Farmers have an easy life, according to Virgil in his Georgics. But would they agree? Hear Virgil’s rose-coloured poem in Latin and follow in English here.
Following a period of revision to catch up on our slightly rusty Greek, including some research and experimentation on pronunciation, we have made a new recording of the first twenty-one lines of the Iliad, which tell how the quarrel, on the results of which the whole poem turns, began between Agamemnon, the high King of the Greek forces besieging Troy, and Achilles, the mightiest of all the Greek warrior-chieftains.
There is a pretty good consensus in the academic world about how, syllable by syllable, Greek words should be pronounced. Unfortunately, just what the language sounded like is probably lost beyond recall. In particular, Greek in ancient times was a tonal language, in which the pitch at which a syllable was spoken mattered, as well as the pronunciation of its vowel sound and whether it was sounded long or short. We experimented with the tonal approach and studied a number of brave readers, who can be found on You Tube and elsewhere, who have attempted it. We ourselves found that the unfamiliarity of a tonal rendering, and a certain tendency for it to “flatten-out” the flow of the poetry and give it a sing-song quality that detracted from the grandeur and pathos of the narrative, were real drawbacks. We have therefore followed the view of Professor W. Sidney Allen, author of “Vox Graeca”, the standard scholarly work on Greek pronunciation, who advised against attempting a tonal rendering, instead concentrating on accuracy and consistency in other respects. We hope you enjoy the results: you can link to them here.
In a reference which few modern readers would recognise without the help of a learned commentary, the mathematician and sage, Pythagoras, makes an appearance in an ode which Horace, unusually, puts in the mouth of someone else, a drowned sailor who reflects on the inevitability of death while appealing to a passing mariner for the burial rites which would allow him to cross the river Styx into the underworld. Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, and Horace refers very obliquely to an anecdote in which Pythagoras was supposed to have recognised in Hera’s temple in Argos a shield which belonged to him in a previous life as Euphorbus, a fighter in the Trojan war.
In a fresco from the tomb of Eurydice 1, Queen of Macedon, Persephone, Queen of the underworld, rides with Hades in his chariot.
Hear this unconventional and mysterious poem in Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.