Hello, everybody welcome to the fourth episode of the overly sarcastic podcast as always am your host blue today
We're going to be talking about some epic poetry some some fun stuff going on there
So I mentioned in the the first episode of this overly sarcastic podcast that epic poetry is formed
in a sort of formulaic
Method so I'm going to go through a little [bit] that right now explain how it works how it relates to other
Ancient forms of writing and how it somehow ties into jazz yes jazz it's weird
But it's interesting so let's get into it first off the Iliad is for those of you who have read it
Or the odyssey - there's a very distinct style to how it is
formulated there's a lot of emphasis on detail in the kind of world around scenes are described Fairly well, and
Characters all have very weird names attached to them
so you have
grey eyed Athena or Athena who bears the aegis or Zeus who wields the thunder or the fast racing Achilles
or you know blah blah blah blah blah and every character has very specific names that go along with them first question why
We in our poetry today use rhymes to be poetic because it's easy with English to get that kind of stuff across
But in ancient times poets are more concerned with meter than with rhymes
So if you look through the Iliad in Greek you won't see a lot of rhymes anywhere
But you will see if you know how to look for it meter so meter is basically
Looking at these syllables and these sounds that words make and making it fit to a rhythm
so if you've read Shakespeare
I am back pentameter Da Dun [Da] dun dun da da is a form of meter in Greek. They use dactylic hexameter dactyls are
basically words that imply the joints of your finger, so
Dactylic Hexameter is long short short repeated six times
So there's a long syllable sound and two short syllable sounds just like if you look at your finger
If you look at your left hand you see a long digit
And then two short ones
So it's based off of that and you can kind of find if you know how to pronounce the right way the meter in ancient
Greek Homeric and then if you read it out
Loud it'll sound a little bit like dot dot dot dot dot dot long short short long short short
It'll sound a little bit like that if you read it out loud
so poetry the way that you get things fit is if you're basically going through and doing
epic poetry you have to get all the names of characters to fit in the way you want them to and that's sometimes difficult because
epic poetry was essentially done by memory, but not quite it was
Everyone had a format of what the store was supposed to be like and everyone
Improvised it a little bit to make it the way they wanted to do it. So there's a very famous historian classicist
person who studies ancient greek stuff named Millman Perry who came out of Uc Berkeley and he
went to the bar Eastern European areas around Yugoslavia and went to
to record a bunch of Yugoslavia bards singing songs from
From their tradition, so what he did was he went to God knows how many of these at least 20
But I think it was some pretty substantial number and would record all of them singing the same
rough song So the you know their version of the iliad for instance and he listens to
the ways that they said things how long it was how they
formulated sentences and structures, and how they followed meter and stuff like that and compared it to each other and
Saw that all of these
Bards have similar formula that they use and there are certain tropes that will pop up again and again
And how they sing even though the stories themselves will not follow you know line by line, so for instance
military would ask one of the bards to sing a song about
some long journey across an ocean for instance and the bard would say and
and then the hero ventured out on his wooden ships and crossed the dark blue ocean under the watchful eyes of the gods and
Came to the distant land and saw whatever blah blah blah kept going and then perry said okay sing a song about me and without
skipping a beat the bard said and Millman perry set off and crossed in his wooden boats along the dark Blue Ocean and came and
He started picking up on the same
Tropes that were being used the same little formulae that are being used in the song about him to the song that they were
singing about the story that they already knew so
Obviously, you know a bard couldn't just come up with a thirty thousand line
you know at poem on the spot about some guy they just met but
They can with very little background story kind of flush out, and it's higher epic poem in
You know a very short period of time based on using formulas, so you have this guy who showed up here
Well of course you have to do their entire back story how they get here they crossed
You know the wooden ships in the dark ocean and stuff like that
So you see they're using these types of formulae over and over again to fill in spaces
And you know kind of create a story from these little building blocks, so epic poetry is entirely formulaic
It's all based on using certain formulas in different places
So if you look through a couple of the different conversations in the in the iliad for instance
There's where ares goes to talk to
Zeus and zeus says you are an absolute failure. You're a waste and later on there's another conversation between two people
[I] think it might actually be zeus and ares and it's the same exact wording in both scenes because it's a similar formula
So when you have you know getting back to the names like grey-eyed Athena or Athena who bears the Aegis
How do you know which one you want to use well each of the different names the epithets
they're called have
different uses for different parts of the meter so if you use athena's name in the beginning of a line
You might want to use athena who bears the aegis?
But if you want to use Athena's name at the end of a line you might want to say grey-eyed Athena and different
constructions of the names and the Epithets will work better in
Two different parts of lines when you're trying to fit it into the meter so yeah, I hope you can see that
There's a lot of different stuff going on
It's a very kind of delicate dance to get all the right pieces in the right place to make the poetry work
but when it does work
It's amazing and the theory of that Millman
came up with is you know you know homer wrote the Iliad, right?
Well, not really there are a lot of different versions of you know the story
Maybe he was blind but how could you write it?
He was blind so what will and Parry said was
Maybe there are a lot of people who would have sung the Iliad because ancient Greek was an oral tradition and the kind of dark
ages archaic you know type of place between
Roughly
1200 and 800 BC when we don't really know what happened? So they wouldn't have had any writing and to get these stories down
they would have had to have damn good way to reproduce them, so you have the rough outline of the Iliad and
you can get it back up to a thirty thousand line epic poem just with a little bit of finessing your formulae, so
Millman Perry said that homer was probably the guy who sang the iliad the best and
When they came up with writing you know the people in the palace said, okay
We've got you know we've written down store logs of all the stuff
We have in the palace. Which is some of the earliest writing is usually logs of you know accounts and storage
How about we get you know we should write the Iliad down who should we get to do it?
Well, we're going to get the best guy of course we're going to get the best guy, so you have
Homers, you know probably account of it. He would sing it out for them
They copy it down scribbling like college students in a lecture hall
but
one of the reasons you can tell if there's some weirdness going on with the iliad itself. Is that there's a lot of stuff
That's both old and new in the iliad
so for instance you have
actual physical descriptions of where Troy was on the anatolian coast in actual physical
descriptions of where a lot of the people in the Iliad came from so
You would have had people saying you know and hear
from Mycenae is agamemnon and from Sparta's Menelaus and different
have you know pretty specific descriptions of where stuff is for an epIc poem like that and
You can actually go through and historians did this they went and excavated or archeologists?
I should say they excavated places where the epic poetry said you would find this stuff and Lo and behold they actually found this stuff
So troy was pretty much lost to history for a while, but then in the 1800's they
You know thought well, maybe the Iliad is on to something
And then they looked where it was and they just dug it up and voila
They actually found troy a real physical place
So you wouldn't have had people in the you know say you have 1000 ish, BC
Span knowing where troy was because it would have been destroyed and lost at that point
so then how in
800 Roughly when homer would have lived and they would have copied the Iliad down
would they have known where troy was if it had been lost well, it would have been passed down from the story, so
Millman's theory is that they had started telling the story pretty soon after the actual events themselves happened and
you get very very accurate descriptions of stuff from you know 1200 BC that you would not have had an 800 and
Beyond just physical places there are a lot of things that are old and
new in the Alien the descriptions of ships descriptions of weapons of Chariots and
You know compound bows and all these things that are
Kind of anachronistic and swimming in a soup that spans four hundred years from 1,200 to 800 BC. Roughly all
coexist in this one
you know epic poem and the only way that can happen is if it is a
conglomeration of a bunch of different people telling stories
And they got homework to tell his version and they wrote that down and they heard another guy sing it differently, okay?
Let's hear it. Let's put this in so in one
scene where they're describing these ships they all of the ships that are there a docked on the
The beaches of troy there are two different scenes in which they describe the ships and they're actually different
and if it was one guy seeing this you wouldn't have that you wouldn't have two different versions, but
but when you hear two different
People telling the story in ways that both sound nice
You're gonna put them both in there because why not I
mean look at the bible
it has the the genesis story two different times and
They you know what's one story after the other and they're both very
Distinct and different they could not have both happen the same way just like with the ships you couldn't have both
Descriptions of the ships being accurate because they list different places and different people and stuff like that
so it would have had to have been a conglomeration of different stories [that] just got codified later on and
Comparing to the Bible again the interesting thing is that with ancient poetry you have very very
Vivid and specific scene descriptions of what's going on or as my favorite example is in the binding of Isaac?
You have God says you know go and totally kill your son sacrifice him, it'll be hilarious and Abraham says okay
And then the bible says and three days later he took them out to the mountain  whoa whoa whoa three days?
Because it just it skips to what's necessary the bible
will go through the important points that goes through the highlights and tells you what matters whereas with the Iliad
It's not even the end of the war. It's not even the trojan horse
It's basically the span of like one month out of an entire nine year war so temporally it hones in on very specific instances
The span of weeks, they make such a [huge] deal out of how Achilles decides to stay and fight even though
he knows he will totally die if he does, and he doesn't died during the course of the iliad that happens afterwards and
In terms of how details described it's very very specific and setting scenes for you
So it's a very narrow and focused
uh
Mode of storytelling which would fit because the way that you have formulaic epic constructions in the poetry
It's it lends itself to very distinct
descriptive
Explanations of what's going on same thing [with] the name same thing with settings with you know ships and stuff like that
It's a very very dense form of storytelling, and I personally really like reading the style
I think it flows beautifully especially if you can read an ancient greek oh my God
but it
Doesn't translate very well into English and you can do your best, but there's really nothing close to reading the original life
and I've learned that that's piece passed two years in college now that I
sort of have a grasp on latin and sort of have a grasp on Greek and sort of have a grasp on Italian hear my
Voice cracking it's is amazing the things you can hear in the original language that are just lost in
Translation one of the things my modern
Brain says that bo Burnham
is it it must be impossible to translate into other languages because his comedy is so very much reliant and
heavily
Based in the language that he's speaking English
Obviously that there must be no we can translate that so how on Earth would anyone get the jokes out of that
But think of what it must have been like for you know ancient Greek to write this down
And think wow the language is so beautiful the way we've formulated this tactic
Hexameter it must be impossible to get anywhere near the enjoyment out of this in any other language
And it's the exact same thing. I mean shakespeare it must be a pain to read if you don't speak English right? It's crazy, so
comparing the Epic formula and the epic
You know style of writing to stuff that came a little bit later on in Greece
you have herodotus and
You have through siddha t's and both of them put a lot of emphasis in writing their histories on
What you would call mimesis, which is the kind of art of storytelling by way of making you feel like you're there?
So in Herodotus and in Thucydides you have a lot of speeches characters talk a lot
Because if you can sort of hear someone speaking can feel like you're there, and it makes to see much more powerful to a reader
But it's really interesting to see how you have
Epic Style of Storytelling
Kind of carrying on into the way that classical history was constructed because you have such an emphasis on
Making it seem like you're really there and having it flow
Organically and seem like a beautiful piece of writing in itself where it's not just telling you something and you explaining that oh yeah
So this greek guy came here and totally killed these trojan guys, you know it's it's meant to be
pleasurable to read and the Same kinds of things happen later on with classical history
And that model has lasted for God knows how much longer into the you know late roman
Era right before the middle ages you have a couple people doing that kind of history
Procopius was one gregory of tours Sort of has that style
But it's a very powerful type of storytelling that is lasted through you know historical writings
But also you get it a little bit in jazz now hear me out here. If you've listened to freestyle jazz
You may have heard a couple things called licks which are
little packages of notes that you would kind of string together and in the process of
Constructing you know freeform jazz
You're using a lot of tiny discrete formulae that you can plug in and unplug and move around places to create
Well, it seems like it's very
Free-flowing and kind of off the top of your head
It's still very much
structured and
Organized in a way that you can really only get when you're thinking the same way that you know in ancient Greek bard would have
Been thinking when he was singing the Iliad for instance
So I'm going to play underneath you've been hearing it the whole time a great music video called the lick
On YouTube where it just shows in a bunch of different types of music
How many different times you will hear this one little melody done?
Anana, and how it shows up in everything it shows up in the Halo soundtrack for crying out loud
It's insane
And it shows that even today you have types of media in this case jazz that are very much
descended from the type of
construction that you get in epic poetry so I think it's amazing that this this very very complex type of
You know art exists. I think it's fantastic that it's managed to stay alive
For you know 3,000 here's how most it's insane, but what I think is most important. Is that it's just a
fundamentally
constructed and highly composed form of
You know composition a form of poetry when it seems so smooth and so seamless. Which is truly
I think the accomplishment of the epic
Of the epic style is to seem off the cuff and as if you've only said it for the first time yet
There's so much thought behind it. There's so much structure to in the formulae that you use in it
I think it is amazing and you should all go home and read the iliad and the odyssey
Right now and listen to some jazz while you do it, all right
Thank you that has been episode 4 of the overly sarcastic podcast. I hope to see you all soon. Red is alive
I promise you that it's true
She's been pretty under the weather lately her entire
Dorm is actually mostly dead from some type of plague sickness, but she's recovering which is good. So she'll be back
I of course will be working hard
Tirelessly for all of you on the history of the venetian Republic which will be probably a three parter, so look forward to that
Hopefully this week next week, but anyway I have been blue as I always am and I shall see you next time
 
 
