The Music of the Proper Names in Homer – A Guide to Pronunication

James Romm, Professor of Classics at Bard College, friend and board member of Reading Odyssey, provides in this podcast a guide to prononuncation in Homer.

This short podcast is intended for anyone reading Homer and especially for Reading Odyssey readers tackling Homer for the first time.


About this guide to pronunciation

Tips on pronuncitation are very important for first-time readers of the Iliad. Readers often get intimidated by the names or experience some doubt when subvocalizing (subvocalization is silent speech) yet part of the power and beauty of the poetry comes from the music of the names.

Professor James Romm has faced this question of helping first-time readers pronounce the names when teaching his students at Bard. He has them read aloud sections of Homer and they invariably experience anxiety attacks becauase they don’t know how to handle the names.

He also faced this questions when writing his recently published and well-reviewed book, Ghost on the Throne, the first thorough account for the general reader about what happened after the death of Alexander the Great – a moment in history that many historians not to mention average readers know very little about but was quite important in the development of the Hellenistic world and the later Roman Empire


About Professor James Romm

James Romm is an author and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Macedonian history, but has also worked on imperial Rome. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000) and various fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently Birkelund Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11). He’s a member of the board of Reading Odyssey and lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife, artist Tanya Marcuse, and three children.

27. December 2011 by Phil Terry
Categories: Commentary, Commentary, Homer-Iliad, Homer-Odyssey | Tags: , , , | Comments Off on The Music of the Proper Names in Homer – A Guide to Pronunication