Hear the First Guide of Homer’s Iliad Learn Aloud within the Unique Greek

You may, after all, study the Greek lan­guage because it’s spo­ken as we speak. You may as well learn Greek as it was spo­ken in antiq­ui­ty — and because it was, till truthful­ly current­ly in his­tor­i­cal time, taught to stu­dents within the mod­ern West. However it’s a good­ly dif­fer­ent endeav­or once more to study Greek as Homer spoke it. The actual fact of the mat­ter is that no human being ever actual­ly spoke like Achilles, Agamem­non, Odysseus, Pene­lope, or any of the oth­er char­ac­ters within the Ili­advert and Odyssey. House­r’s many lit­er­ary obtain­ments by way of these works embrace the cre­ation and com­mand of a sort of syn­the­sized poet­ic Greek, com­bin­ing qual­i­ties of area­al Ion­ic and Aeolic dialects with var­i­ous types and expres­sions that had been out­dat­ed even within the eighth cen­tu­ry BC. If it served the meter, Homer used it.

Want­much less to say, when most of us try to learn Homer aloud within the orig­i­nal, we get all of it or most­ly fallacious, even when we’re famil­iar with mod­ern Greek. We’d need to spend a very long time certainly on the earth of clas­si­cists earlier than hear­ing a extra accu­price report­ing than the one above, deliv­ered by a YouTu­ber referred to as Thomas Whichel­lo.

On his chan­nel, Whichel­lo spe­cial­izes in per­kind­ing ven­er­a­ble lit­er­ary texts with a professional­nun­ci­a­tion and cadence as near peri­od-accu­price as pos­si­ble, usually within the orig­i­nal lan­guage, some­occasions along with his personal musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment. He’s completed learn­ings of the Bible, Shake­speare, Keats, and Wilde, however none to this point has been so pop­u­lar as his ren­di­tion of the first book of the Ili­ad, accom­pa­nied by sub­ti­tles of House­r’s textual content and an Eng­lish trans­la­tion.

A Greek right here in 2026 with no par­tic­u­lar knowl­fringe of the clas­si­cal lan­guage might beneath­stand a quar­ter of the indi­vid­ual phrases Whichel­lo makes use of, and possibly half of them in cer­tain pas­sages. Actu­al­ly with the ability to fol­low the sto­ry, how­ev­er, is anoth­er mat­ter. Nonetheless, you will get a sur­pris­ing quantity out of the video even in case you beneath­stand noth­ing in any respect, since Whichel­lo is intention­ing not only for lin­guis­tic accu­ra­cy, but in addition emo­tion­al res­o­nance in his deliv­ery. Ignore his glass­es, however­ton-down shirt, micro­telephone, and win­dow body, and you would nearly be sit­ting round a camp­hearth with him close to­ly 30 cen­turies in the past. Observe, additionally, that the com­menters embrace gen­uine clas­si­cists who name his one of the best learn­ing they’ve ever heard — in addition to view­ers, cre­den­tialed or oth­er­smart, keen to listen to him title all these mighty Achaean ships in Guide 2.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch All 18,225 Lines of the Ili­ad Read by 66 Actors in a Marathon Event For an Audi­ence of 50,000

Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sound­ed Like When Sung in the Orig­i­nal Ancient Greek

Learn Ancient Greek in 118 Free Lessons: A Free Online Course from Bran­deis & Har­vard

The Ancient Greeks: A Free Online Course from Wes­leyan Uni­ver­si­ty

Lis­ten to The Epic of Gil­gamesh Being Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Hear Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight Read in Their Orig­i­nal Old and Mid­dle Eng­lish by an MIT Medieval­ist

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the creator of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly generally known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.