Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter by Gregory Nagy

Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter Reviews

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  Mac

  This was an eye-opening book for me! Despite the bland title and the curiously amateur typeface (it looked like a facsimile of a document typed on a typewriter), the content was interesting and even exciting.
  
  Essentially Gregory Nagy is attempting to investigate the prehistory of Indo-European poetry and meter via a common formula that appears in both Greek (kleos aphthiton) and Sanskrit (´srávas áks.itam). This may not sound exciting, but it ended up explaining Greek poetic meter much better than anything I've read before.
  
  Dactylic hexameter, the form used in Homer and Hesiod, makes sense to me. Though it has a lot of flexibility, the rhythms are steady and predictable. Greek lyric meter, on the other hand, gives me fits. It always seemed like the later lyric poets were just making it up as they went along. Counterintuitively to me, Nagy argues in this book that the lyrical meters are more in line with the inheritance from Indo-European poetry. Despite the fact that Homer and Hesiod are the earliest extant Greek poets, it is dactylic hexameter that is the modern innovation!
  
  Nagy makes an understandable and compelling case for how dactylic hexameter may have evolved from the earlier, more flexible meters. He uses a system of notation that was easy to grasp, and then illustrates it with examples of formulas being expanded from the epic tradition or from lyric poets like Sappho, among others.
  
  I cannot judge what Nagy says about Sanskrit poetry to the same extent, since he is mainly working with the Rig Veda, which I haven't read yet. But I can say that I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic!