Edwin
D. FLOYD The
Importance of Pitch in the Odyssey
Among points which have
traditionally not been attempted in the modern
pronunciation of ancient Greek, the most important, for
the appreciation of poetic texts, is the pitch accent.
Conversely, it may be justifiable to sacrifice aspirates
to a spirant pronunciation and to fudge on various vowel
sounds, inasmuch as many of one's hearers, long inured to
English, cannot readily hear the ancient Greek sounds
properly.
Pitch accent, though, is readily
heard. Moreover, to pronounce just the quantities when
reading verse, with some kind of ictus, appropriate to
English or German, introduces a serious distortion. The
result of such a practice (somewhat imperiously
prescribed by Maas [tr. Lloyd-Jones], Greek Metre [1962:55-58]) is that the
underlying rhythm overwhelms the word accents. A
combination of quantity and pitch sounds much better than
quantity alone. It is also pretty directly accessible to
any audience with some knowledge of ancient Greek. A
reading of Latin with careful attention to quantity and
the ordinary prose accent is likewise better than a
purely ictus-based reading.
Besides sounding better, there are
also instances in which the original accentual pattern is
crucial. An obvious example is Odyssey 9.366. Here, we need to hear Oûtis - let
us translate it, with Fitzgerald, as "Nohbdy" - as
different from oútis "nobody". If instead
Odysseus does not properly pronounce the circumflex, even
the dense Polyphemos might suspect some trick - and we
need to remember that in an oral presentation he would
not hear the capital letter of Lattimore's or Fagles'
"Nobody".
Another, more specifically "poetic"
example is the opening word of the poem. This is
ándrá (not ándra)
inasmuch as a resonant consonant (m, n,
r, l) functions in Homer like the second
element of a diphthong (i or u) to give a
trochaic word an extra accent before an enclitic; see
West, Theogony (1966: 438-442) for discussion. Unfortunately, most
modern texts of the Odyssey (both Allen and van Thiel, for
example) ignore the rule. Ludwich 1889, though, observes
it. (Ludwich is available through; TITUS;
online version electronically prepared by Marina
Benedetti, Siena 2000; TITUS version by J. Gippert,
Frankfurt a/M, Jan. 20, 2001.)
Heard as ándrá,
the opening word of the Odyssey is correspondingly marked. To be sure, the Greek acute
accent was not a matter of absolutely higher pitch, but
instead relative to surrounding syllables. Nevertheless,
the presence of an extra acute accent suggests a female
voice and so combines male and female resonances - the
word means "man", but it is spoken with a higher pitch.
As the Odyssey unfolds, the point thus adumbrated will be developed in
various ways. For example, at the beginning of Odyssey 1.11, as the Muse's voice is
ostensibly first heard, we again have two higher-pitched
syllables, énth' álloi. In this
instance there is nothing specifically Homeric about the
accentual pattern; nevertheless, a suggestion that the
Muse somehow takes over at this precise point is
confirmed by the fact that in the Iliad
too the first words following the proem show exactly the
same accentual pattern in tís t' ár
(Iliad 1.8).
The pattern is also picked up (with
appropriate modification for Latin) by Vergil, with the
second accent on ándrá being alluded
to in his own word virúmque at Aeneid 1.1. Also, tantaéne in
the middle of Aeneid 1.11 arguably comes at the precise point that the Muse
responds to an introductory request - but responds with a
question, somehow "correcting" the preceding proem, just
as Iliad 1.8 introduces a question to which Apollo is the
answer, rather than Zeus, to whom Homer had referred at
1.5.
Abstracts
Index