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Odysseus sights the cave of the Cyclops

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Hear the story of the Cyclops in Homer’s Greek with an English translation at PantheonPoets.com.  Starting today, we post the whole story from Book 9 of the Odysssey, one of the best and earliest travellers’ tales in European literature, in seven daily parts.

Why in the original? Because translations can’t convey the contribution that the sound of the ancient Greek language makes to the story, or the way in which Homer’s hexameter poetry sweeps the story along.

To do full justice to the performance of Homer’s Greek, a reader should have an absolute command of Homeric metre, which is irregular, complex and sometimes inconsistent, a native speaker’s pronunciation, the skills of a first-rate actor and a time machine to travel back to learn how the tonal aspects of the language – a bit like modern Chinese – actually worked, a question obscured by the passage of almost three millennia and subject to considerable dispute. We cannot claim all of these desirables, or indeed any of them in full, but hope that our careful research and best efforts will make the wonderful story worth listening to, and convey some of the narrative drive, drama and excitement that the Greek original will retain for ever.

Hear Homer’s original Greek and follow in Samuel Butler’s English translation here.

Hector and Andromache

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In an encounter a quarter of the way through Homer’s Iliad, The Trojan hero Hector’s wife, Andromache, begs him to direct the Trojan defence from the wall, rather than return to the battle. But Hector’s duty as Troy’s defender and the warrior’s code will not allow him to do so, although he foresees his own death and the fall of the city as clearly as Andromache foresees that she will soon be a widow and her son an orphan. We learn, too, that Andromache’s life has already been ravaged by Achilles, Hector’s future killer.

Hear Homer’s Greek and follow in English here.

Catullus sticks his nose in.

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In his Lesbia poems, Catullus is a sensitive romantic: when he wants to know intimate details about friends’ new partners, romance goes out of the window. The language is strong, the interest prurient, but the attitudes he is showing towards women were by no means unique to him in the late Roman republic, with its machismo and its slave economy.

Hear Catullus’s Latin and follow in English here.

Westbrook and Achilles

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Suffering from insomnia, the poet John Westbrook recalls the sleeplessness of Achilles. In the illustration, an Attic vase of circa 450 BCE, Achilles tends the wounded Patroclus. See Westbrook’s poem here.

Wealth does not buy happiness

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Odi profanum volgus et arceo, omne capax movet urna nomen, post equitem sedet atra cura – “I despise the profane crowd, I banish them”; “(Destiny’s) capacious urn shakes every name together”; “behind the rider sits black Care”. These, among Horace’s most famous phrases, all occur in the first poem in his third book of Odes. It is “carpe diem” with a difference: the more you have, the more there is for you to worry about, and the answer is to be content with modest comforts and avoid the temptations of greed and excess. It is no coincidence that, at the time, the Emperor Augustus was championing a return to simpler, ancestral, Roman values. Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Archilochus at war

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Archilochus was the earliest Greek lyric poet, writing about the soldier’s life in the middle of the seventh century BCE, two hundred years before this black-figure hoplite was painted onto an Attic pot. Hear a sample in the original Greek and follow in English here.

Pro patria mori

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In a famous but occasionally puzzling poem, Horace gives the Emperor Augustus’s view of what a young Roman should aspire to become – a soldier like the epic heroes of old, inured to hardship, a terror to Rome’s enemies and willing to die if necessary for his country. In the illustration, by Léonce LeGendre, Hector dies at the hands of the hero Achilles.

Hear Horace’s Latin and follow in English here.

Carpe diem, Sestius.

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Close to the beginning of Horace’s first book of Odes, this ode is the first in which he develops the theme of carpe diem: spring is lovely, and the right time to  sacrifice to the country God Faunus, but time is short and death inevitable. All sombre enough, but this piece has some hidden meanings. Sestius and Horace are probably old acquaintances, and there may be some little jokes here at his expense – along with an implied compliment to Augustus and his readiness to let bygones be bygones. Read more, hear Horace’s poem performed in Latin and follow in English here.

Horace’s paean to Augustus

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Horace’s second Ode paints a vivid picture of the time of troubles that Rome, beset by civil war, has suffered, before turning to identify and praise her saviour – the new Emperor, Augustus. The praise is lavish by our standards – it identifies the Emperor with a God on Earth – but there is no particular need to suspect Horace, an old republican, but now completely associated with the new regime and its leaders, of insincerity. The stability and peace provided by the new order would have been welcome to very many, as its durabilty – Augustus was to rule for a further 37 years after the date of this poem – shows.

Hear Horace’s Latin performed in the  original and follow in English here.

The illustration, from the Ara Pacis, consecrated in 13 BC, is a symbolic representation of the peace and prosperity that Augustus’s reign has brought.

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