Hello. From January next year, the LRB will be rerunning our 12-episode close-reading series

Among the Ancients with Emily Wilson and me, Thomas Jones. With a new episode appearing each month,

Among the ancients considers some of the greatest works of ancient Greek and Roman literature,

from Homer and Sappho to Horace and Seneca.

If you subscribe to the full program, as well as the podcast episodes, you'll get copies of all the texts discussed in the series, and more, and access to online seminars with Emily and me throughout

the year, with special guests Catherine Harlow and Mary Beard.

You can find out more and subscribe at the link below or in the shop section at the

LRB website or go to LRB.me forward slash ancients where you'll also find details of audio-only

options. In the meantime, here's a sample from the first episode on the Iliad. So to begin in this first

episode, not exactly at the beginning because it's impossible to say when that was, but with a beginning, the Iliad of Homer.

James Davidson wrote in the LRB in 1997 that Homer appears to arrive on the field of literature like a meteorite out of a cloudless sky,

but turns out to be a mere pinnacle projecting above the surface,

part of the long and ancient chain of the oral tradition.

So I wonder if you could talk a bit about the oral tradition and where this apparently fully

formed poem emerged from.

Yes.

So, I mean, one of the frustrating things about oral traditions is that once they're gone, how do we reconstruct?

The technology of writing didn't exist in the Greek-speaking world for hundreds of years.

So during this time of lack of literacy, these wonderful poetic traditions developed of stories about the heroes who fought at Troy and their tales of

homecoming or Nostoy. And at the very end of that oral tradition emerge as if fully formed,

as you said, these two monumental poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in this traditional poetic metre,

which was used for singing out loud

...