Hear Homer's Odyssey Sung in Original Ancient Greek

Scholars Georg Danek of the University of Vienna and Stefan Hagel of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have developed a technique for singing Homeric epics in the original ancient Greek, appropriate for the oral tradition from which the poems emerged. Their recreation of lines 267–366 of Book 8 of the Odyssey, where Demodocus sings about the love of Ares and Aphrodite, is accompanied by a phorminx, a four-stringed lyre-like instrument. The two scholars caution that their theoretical recreations are not exact reconstructions of a given melody but an approach to the technique Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to individual verses. Before writing was common among the Greeks, poets recited and sang stories at courts and festivals, improvising tales in the six-beat rhythm of Greek verse. Danek and Hagel's site presents an abstract of their Homeric singing theory with musicological and linguistic evidence.