A Multiform YouTube Homeric
Rhapsody from 2020
Neven Jovanović
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Ivana Lučića 3, HR-10000 Zagreb,
Croatia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9119-399X
neven.jovanovic@ffzg.unizg.hr
The Odyssey ‘Round the World was a collaborative public reading of Homer’s
Odyssey published on YouTube in December 2020, at the height of the COVID-19
pandemic. Coming from the larger Reading Greek Tragedy Online initiative and
organized by the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies, the reading
featured performances of every book of the Odyssey by students, faculty, actors
and laypersons from about twenty countries. The contributors were encouraged
to perform in their own language, but they could also use the Ancient Greek, or
any other language; the text could have been read, recited, sung, acted. The result,
still available online, is briefly described here. Reflecting on the event I notice
that public readings and YouTube videos are, as genres and cultural activities,
rarely included in surveys of Homeric reception. The Odyssey ‘Round the World
event is distinguished by its prominent diversity; in this way, the event connects
with current debates on “Classics” as an academic discipline and with the
theory of multiform, diachronic development of Homeric poems. The event also
demonstrates both advantages and limits of the technology, and, most importantly,
it makes us aware of the distance between Homeric poems as performance in
ancient Greece and the usual way we deal with them as our reading matter.
Keywords: antiquity / Greek literature / literary reception / Homer: Odyssey / online events
53
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 45.3 (2022)
I consider here a recent performance of Homer’s Odyssey. It was a
“rhapsody,” a collaborative performance, of the complete epic poem
published in December 2020 on YouTube under the name of Odyssey
‘Round the World. Both the form and the medium of this performance
are on the margin of usual academic interests, even in Homeric recep-
tion studies. I will show what is unusual about the performance and how
was it shaped by the social and political developments of the times—
primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also (indirectly) by the
ongoing debates on the discipline of Classics and racism, disadvantage,
and subjugation, as well as by a specific theoretical approach to the
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
54
Homeric poems. My position in the performance is, from a scholarly
point of view, again somewhat unorthodox: I took part in it, as a per-
former and as a translator, and therefore I am more a participant ob-
server than an objective researcher.
The Odyssey ‘Round the World, part of the larger Reading Greek
Tragedy Online initiative, took place on Tuesday and Wednesday,
December 8 and 9, 2020, as an 24-hour internet event. It was orga-
nized by the Harvard University Center for Hellenic Studies, and it
featured performances of every book—the initiative uses the word
“rhapsody”1—of the Odyssey, recorded by students, faculty, actors and
laypersons from about twenty countries. The collaboration included
people from a number of American institutions, mostly universities, but
also people from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia,
Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malawi, Mexico, Mozambique, Peru,
South Africa, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom. The organizers assigned
each team a number of verses from the Odyssey, received recordings of
performances, and published them as episodes on the YouTube chan-
nel of The Center for Hellenic Studies, but no special rules or instruc-
tions for performances were given except for a suggestion that the con-
tributors “connect Homer with their own culture.” The contributors
were encouraged to perform in their own language, but they could also
use the Ancient Greek, or any other language; the text could have been
read, recited, sung, acted.
The reading of Rhapsody 1 opens as a computer screen divided into
a grid of thumbnail displays of participants, a scene familiar to many
people around the world since the last couple of years. All participants
are sitting in darkened rooms, almost as if by a candlelight, and all
are identified on their displays as “Homer” (with their actual name in
brackets); a diversity of faces, colors, shapes, ages, races. Then “Homer
(Argyris),” the actor Argyris Xafis, starts speaking very slowly, with
immense effort of concentration, the first verses of the Odyssey 1, in
(Homeric) Greek: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ
/ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν … and then in English,
as translated by Stanley Lombardo in 2000 (although the translator is
not identified anywhere in the credits for this Rhapsody): “SPEAK,
MEMORY—/ Of the cunning hero, / The wanderer, blown off course
time and again...” (Lombardo 1). The same performer will appear at
1 In the original sense of the Greek word ῥαψῳδία, “portion of an epic poem fit for
recitation at one time, e.g. a book of the Iliad or Odyssey” (Plu. 2186e).
Neven Jovanović: A Multiform YouTube Homeric Rhapsody from 2020
55
the end of Rhapsody 24, 24 hours later,2 to repeat the lines from the
beginning and in that way create a ring composition which does not
exist in the canonical text of the Odyssey, just as Lombardo’s “Speak,
memory” goes beyond Homer adding, for English readers, an allusion
to Nabokov’s brilliant memoir.
In the rhapsodies, diversity prevails: diversity of expressivity, of
tongues, of approaches, of pronunciations (especially noticeable in
Ancient Greek and English, the two languages most frequently used).
As we open the YouTube videos, we move from students and reci-
tation—some in dorm rooms, their gaze decidedly fixed downwards
towards the book they are reading from (Rhapsody 2)—to Mexican
actors reading in Spanish, pausing at a point to raise up pipes and cigars
as they enact a Homeric feast (Rhapsody 3)—to a cast of formally
introduced Argentinian professors, then again to Greek that is sung by
an American college student club mascot (Rhapsody 4), then to Pope’s
translation with a slideshow background (Rhapsody 5), then to an
American Sign Language version (with subtitles, Rhapsody 6), then to
Modern Greek read outdoors in Australia (Rhapsody 7), then to people
wearing face masks (Rhapsody 8), then to a group of classics students
and instructors in a garden of the University of Malawi, where Homer
is read in English and Greek, but also in Chichewa; at least for me, this
is the moment in which the Odyssey is for the first time encountered
in a wholly unfamiliar and incomprehensible language. Rhapsody 10
is an experimental film, with blurry or empty urban landscapes, water,
night, in slow motion and without people; over these images Homer is
read in Greek and Hungarian, with some folksy music, and at the end
a credit title informs us that the University of Theatre and Film Arts of
Budapest (SZFE)—whose students, faculty and alumni produced the
rhapsody—is under an attack on its autonomy by the government of
Hungary, that the students are on strike and that they have blockaded
the university building.3 Rhapsody 11 was filmed in Mozambique, and
it features a number of African languages as well as Portuguese, Greek,
Italian, English; the clip is very well edited on YouTube, for the first
time in the event YouTube Video Segments/Chapters are used to give
further information, while YouTube’s automatic transcription feature
adds another, arbitrary reinterpretation of Homer’s poetry, decoding
words spoken by a reader as “what fate of beatles death destroy you.”
Rhapsody 12 is filmed outdoors in Australia, introduced by an acknowl-
2 This time Lombardo’s translation is credited.
3 For further developments on the SZFE affair and an analysis of it see Ryder.
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
56
edgment that the performers are “on the land of the Ngunnawal peo-
ple” and pay their respect “to the elders” (cf. “Acknowledgement of
Country”; “ANU acknowledgment”). Rhapsody 13 is one more film,
this time by a company of Greek actors, recorded with a mobile phone;
images and music follow the action in a modern setting and Odysseus
is again disguised by a face mask. The pandemic is equally prominent in
Rhapsody 14, recorded at the Oxford University, with Homer’s words
spoken in French and in a collage of English translations produced over
the course of 300 years; in a college corridor, the performers, wear-
ing face masks, slowly form and re-form a tableau vivant. Students of
the Brandeis University (in Waltham, MA, USA) perform Rhapsody
15 in extremely “lo-fi” production quality, showing realistically how
most of academia experiences the age of online teaching. The online
moment is present too in a dramatic adaptation of Rhapsody 16; the
students of University College London mix stage rehearsals with spo-
ken monologues; in one scene, Athena’s words come from a laptop
held up high by another actor. Rhapsody 17 is in (very fast) Spanish
from several Spanish universities, Rhapsody 18 partly in Turkish and
Ancient Greek—introduced by a reference to the oral tradition of ozan
singers (cf. Barlik)—masterfully supported by English subtitles in the
video; the other part of the rhapsody is performed by students of all
races from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA).
Rhapsody 19 comes from students and professors from Sao Paolo; one
of the sequences presents singing in Ancient Greek with an accompa-
niment on a tanpura-like instrument, another is a sung performance
in an Alma-Tadema-like setting: the young singer, holding a papyrus
leaf, is interrupted by her cat. Rhapsody 20 combines several transla-
tions, Italian, English, Spanish, and Latin, “conveying estrangement
by archaic languages and white background” (as the YouTube descrip-
tion says); in Rhapsody 21 a club of Texas Tech University Classics
Graduate Students, identifying themselves as “procrastinating,” reads
Homer while the students’ pets (cats and dogs) stand in for charac-
ters; what seems at first a sophomoric joke turns out in the course of
the rhapsody to be strangely appropriate. Against a Zoom background
of Greek columns, a professionally produced (and directed) perfor-
mance of Rhapsody 22 is done by members of the Kosmos Society,
an international online community for Classical studies with par-
ticipants in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Greece, Lebanon, Poland,
Switzerland, UK, and across the USA; they read in English, French,
Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Russian, Spanish, and Ukranian. This
is where Odysseus kills the suitors, and the Zoom participants act out
Neven Jovanović: A Multiform YouTube Homeric Rhapsody from 2020
57
their deaths, in a stylized, soundless way. Rhapsody 23 is performed
by Croatian students and professors, reading—and, in one case, acting
as a gender-inverted puppet theatre—from the original, from various
Croatian translations, and from a Latin verse translation composed in
1777 by an author from Dubrovnik. Finally, Rhapsody 24 is read by
the cast from Rhapsody 1—closing with a simple but powerful gesture:
some of the participants cover their Webcams with their hands—and
then discussed, by a number of scholars and by the performers them-
selves. Note that the closing discussion is another echo of Homeric
tradition; in Plato’s Ion Socrates claims that a rhapsode is expected to
be also a ἑρμηνεύς, an interpreter who knows the poet’s intention, and
Ion affirms that he can indeed speak most beautifully about Homer
(Plato, Ion 530c–531c; Nagy, Poetry 124).
In revisiting of the project two years after its publication I am struck
not only by its diversity but also by its unpretentiousness. The per-
formances hang somewhere between the high culture, represented by
the academia and theatre, and leisure activities (of clubs or societies)
or all kinds of non-formal learning (learning which “may occur at the
initiative of the individual but also happens as a by-product of more
organized activities, whether or not the activities themselves have learn-
ing objectives,” OECD). The unprofessional, uncommercial, dilettante
character and level of execution place Odyssey ‘Round the World on the
margins both of the educational system and the entertainment indus-
try, even though the event engages with one of the Great Books, a work
from the very beginning of the Western Canon, even though most of
the participants are professionals in the field or training to become such
professionals—and even though, as I will soon show, the very concept
of the event rests on sound theoretical foundations.
Through references to the pandemic, the performances are anchored
in the present moment—the pandemic causes a moment of liminal-
ity for the society, to which the group answers by a kind of commu-
nitas (Turner)—but what is even more prominent is the technology.
YouTube and computer video enable me to watch the 24-hours event
from two years ago again and again, from wherever I am at the moment;
moreover, I can (and do) also rewind the recorded rhapsodies, fast for-
ward or freeze them, or jump to different points of interest. This makes
Odyssey ‘Round the World easy and fun to sample, but goes somewhat
against the grain of the poem as performance which should immerse us
into its story, make us experience flow, immediacy, intensity.
The Odyssey ‘Round the World can be understood as a snapshot of
Homer in the 2020s. It opens up space for a number of observations
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
58
on the Homeric poems as we experience them today, on reception,
on politics in higher education, and on an unorthodox way of putting
theory into practice.
First, the event makes me realize that today we, specialists in
antiquity, know more or less precisely the story of the Odyssey, but not
so much the poem, the actual sequence of its words and scenes. When
the Odyssey is divided into “rhapsodies” and each one is announced
only by its number, I know only vaguely what to expect; I cannot say,
without looking it up, what happens in Odyssey 19, or in which book
Poseidon turns the ships of the Phaeacians into stone. I have read the
Odyssey, but I do not remember it that precisely. Not many people
possess this knowledge today, Homeric scholars (the specialists among
the specialists) excepted. A wide gap separates us from the rhapsode Ion
of the Platonic dialogue—when Socrates challenges him by giving an
arbitrary point in Homer, Ion can start his recitation from there; and
he is saying the words that have already been spoken, not the words that
“he had read and happened to have memorized” (Nagy, Plato’s Rhapsody
32–33). My insufficient recall of the poem-as-text is further complicated
by the “montage of attractions” in the event—by the diversity of the
YouTube episodes—and by the partial or total incomprehensibility of
Homer’s words in foreign languages. It all makes the Odyssey itself to an
extent take a back seat in this reading. Moreover, the Odyssey ‘Round the
World makes it very clear that we miss another component of Homeric
epic as an oral performance: “[T]he face-to-face communication during
which the singer recomposes his poem under the steady cooperation and
control of his audience.” (Skafte Jensen 49) In the YouTube channel,
such communication is substituted with its simulacrum; a recording,
even a recording of live performance, is not live, and my watching of
it is not a public event, and the audience cannot “cooperate” in the
recomposing of the poem. The insight is valuable. The Odyssey ‘Round
the World is thus at the same time a popularization activity and an act
of estrangement. It performs in a dramatic way the fact that for us some
forms of the Homeric poems are unreachable, that we can know about
them and imagine them, but cannot actually experience what is “the
essence of performing song and poetry, an essence permanently lost
from the paideía that we have inherited from the ancient Greeks” (Nagy,
Homeric 8).4
4 A further, though lesser sign of modern taste and condition is a (surprisingly)
small share of “historically informed” performances in the rhapsodies. Reconstruc-
tions of the imagined original through language, including prosody, appear frequently
throughout the event; nevertheless, as can be seen from the outline above, in 2020 the
Neven Jovanović: A Multiform YouTube Homeric Rhapsody from 2020
59
Second, Odyssey ‘Round the World presents a form of reception of
antiquity that has hitherto been neglected in the reception studies. As a
kind of popularization activity, the performance can be compared to the
Classici contro of Alberto Camerotto and Filippomaria Pontani (Venice,
started in 2010: public lectures by specialists in the form of inspirational
theatrical acts), or to the Festival Européen Latin Grec (Lyon, started by
Elizabeth Antébi in 2005; includes live readings of Greek and Latin lit-
erature). As a day-long global manifestation centered on a literary work,
Odyssey ‘Round the World follows the idea of Bloomsday (organized by
the James Joyce Centre since 1994). As a theatrical performance of
an epic, it reminds me of Roberto Benigni’s Tutto Dante (begun in
2006 with the canto XXVI of Inferno, the Ulysses canto, the perfor-
mances recreated the tradition of lectura Dantis, a public reading and
explanation of the Divine Comedy canto by canto; cf. also the Lectura
Dantis Romana at the la Casa di Dante in Rome or Lectura Dantis
Andreapolitana at the University of St Andrews, Scotland). Homer as
theme brings Odyssey ‘Round the World close to the Homerathon of the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln (started in 2018). Despite this wealth
of activities, neither the genre of public reading festivals nor the digi-
tally streamed collaborations were included, for example, in Hall’s
study of the “cultural presence” of the Odyssey which was at the time
praised for its scope and modernity (“Hall surveys the incredible num-
ber of manifestations of the Odyssey, notably in modern media, using
the resources of recent critical theory,” Burgess 185). Hall mentioned
texts published online as “digital literature,” and “interactive computer
games”—without, however, surveying or analysing them—but at the
time of writing YouTube videos as a medium of academic communi-
cation barely existed (YouTube, today the second most visited web-
site, was only launched in 2005, as Hall was developing the idea for
her book). Moreover, as I have already suggested, the Odyssey ‘Round
the World remains somewhere between the poles of “academic” and
“creative.” Most people would probably place it into the category of
“pedagogy,” which is usually omitted from Homeric reception stud-
ies (and judged to be of lesser merit, as suggested by Burgess: “[W]e
need to think of (Homeric) reception as more than a validation of our
profession, or a practical means to entice students into our field, or
relaxing recreation,” 194). The omission should be reconsidered, not
least because reflection on how the Odyssey is presented, taught and
performers rarely reconstruct or reimagine “wie es eigentlich gewesen” through music,
images, costume, behavior.
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
60
learned in schools and universities provides a basis for understanding
other forms of reception.
This brings me to the third, political point. To me, a bystander
that watches from afar the U.S. higher education and its disputes,
the Odyssey ‘Round the World seems to be an indirect answer to the
2019–2020 American debate on the academic discipline of Classics
as it is taught in English. The critics connected the traditional pro-
file of the field first with “systemic racism and white supremacy,” and
then with “Greek and Latin as gateways” which exclude the less privi-
leged groups—women, people of color, working-class citizens (Poser;
McDaniel; McWhorter). There was a loud call to classicists to broaden
geographic, temporal and ideological scope of the discipline. This is not
the first round of the debate nor does it add much that is new—Adler
showed that previous rounds have already taken place during the “cul-
ture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s—the debate, more probably, points
towards unresolved problems of American society. But the Odyssey
‘Round the World, while remaining outside the debate, acknowledges
the critics’ call and tacitly expands and transforms the field, including
in the Homeric performance many and various places, nations, lan-
guages, ages, levels of professionalism and skill.
The organizers of the event were ready for such expanding and
transforming because researchers connected with the Harvard Center
for Hellenic Studies have already, for a long time, interpreted Homeric
poems as multiforms. One of the many historical forms of these poems
was a performance of a rhapsody, a relay in which one performer picked
up where the previous one has left off. Multiplicity and diversity of per-
formers, languages and artistic expressions aligns with Gregory Nagy’s
insights on Homer developed in 1996–2008 and presented in Homeric
Questions, Poetry as Performance, Plato’s Rhapsody, Homer the Classic.
Nagy claims that there is no “one” Odyssey. “A purely synchronic per-
spective is insufficient for reading Homer” because the “transmitted
texts of the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey cannot be reduced to single
speech-events, self-contained in one time and one place, as if we had
direct access to actual recordings of the language of Homer” (Nagy,
Plato’s Rhapsody 3). In the development of Homeric poems Nagy dis-
tinguishes a number of “ages” or “time-frames,” showing how the
poems evolved from the “preclassical” oral poetry to the “common and
standard classical text of the Athenian empire” to multiple “common”
texts known in Hellenistic Alexandria, and then to the “relatively most
rigid period” at the Library of Alexandria and in Rome of Vergil. Nagy
aims to transcend “current debates concerning Homeric ‘orality’ or
Neven Jovanović: A Multiform YouTube Homeric Rhapsody from 2020
61
‘literacy’” (Nagy, Homer the Classic 3) through a sequence of “snap-
shots,” glimpses that we have of different states of Homeric poems in
their “multiformity” which is “a key concept in understanding poetry
as performance in ancient Greece” (Nagy, Poetry 107). The many forms
were created by changes in the nature of the Homeric text. It was first
fixed in writing as transcript, “a record of performance, even an aid for
performance, but not the equivalent of performance,” then as script,
“where the written text is a prerequisite for performance,” and finally
as scripture, “where the written text needs not even presuppose perfor-
mance” (Nagy, Homer the Classic 5). Among ancient testimonies on
performances of Homer, Nagy reads especially closely a passage from
the Platonic dialogue Hipparchus (today commonly considered as writ-
ten not by Plato, but during his lifetime and in the context of the
Academy). The passage contains a story about a law which required
that the Iliad and Odyssey be performed in sequence by the rhapsodes
at the Panathenaea, an annual Athenian festival:
Ἱππάρχῳ ... ὃς ἄλλα τε πολλὰ καὶ καλὰ ἔργα σοφίας ἀπεδείξατο, καὶ τὰ Ὁμή-
ρου ἔπη πρῶτος ἐκόμισεν εἰς τὴν γῆν ταυτηνί, καὶ ἠνάγκασε τοὺς ῥαψῳδοὺς
Παναθηναίοις ἐξ ὑπολήψεως ἐφεξῆς αὐτὰ διιέναι, ὥσπερ νῦν ἔτι οἵδε ποιοῦσιν
Hipparkhos, ... who made a public demonstration of many and beautiful
accomplishments to manifest his expertise, especially by being the first to bring
over to this land [= Athens] the poetic utterances of Homer, and he forced the
rhapsodes at the Panathenaia to go through these utterances in sequence, by
relay, just as they [= the rhapsodes] do even nowadays. (Hipparchus 228b–c)
The important concepts are “the Panathenaea,” “in sequence” and “by
relay.” If we replace the Athenian festival with the Odyssey ‘Round the
World, the other two concepts express the essence of the YouTube
event. Additionally, Homeric diachronical multiformity gets its ana-
logue in the multiplicity of performers’ languages, settings and ap-
proaches, while internet and YouTube become our modern response
to the public performance.
Another Nagy’s hypothesis helps us to understand why the per-
formers of the first and the last Rhapsody of Odyssey ‘Round the World
identify in their Zoom thumbnails as “Homer” with the performer’s
name in brackets:
when the rhapsode says ‘tell me, Muses!’ (Iliad II 484) or ‘tell me, Muse!’
(Odyssey I 1), this ‘I’ is not a representation of Homer: it is Homer. My argu-
ment is that the rhapsode is re-enacting Homer by performing Homer, that
he is Homer so long as the mimesis stays in effect, so long as the performance
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
62
lasts. In the words of T. S. Eliot (The Dry Salvages, 1941), “you are the music /
While the music lasts.” From the standpoint of mimesis, the rhapsode is a
recomposed performer: he becomes recomposed into Homer every time he
performs Homer. (Nagy, Poetry 103)
Just as an actor becomes the character whom he or she is playing, as a
musician becomes the music he or she is performing, so an internation-
al collaboration of “rhapsodes” in Odyssey ‘Round the World for a brief
time became Homer, a theoretically funded mimesis, “re-enactment”
of Homer in the pandemic 2020.
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Multiformna homerska rapsodija iz leta 2020 na
portalu YouTube
Ključne besede: antika / grška književnost / literarna recepcija / Homer: Odiseja /
spletni dogodki
Odiseja okoli sveta je bila skupno javno branje Homerjeve Odiseje, objavljeno
na portalu YouTube decembra 2020, na vrhuncu pandemije COVID-19. Bra-
nje, ki je izhajalo iz širše pobude Reading Greek Tragedy Online in ga je orga-
niziral Center za helenske študije Univerze Harvard, je vključevalo uprizoritve
vsake knjige Odiseje s strani študentov, profesorjev, igralcev in laikov iz pribli-
žno dvajsetih držav. Sodelujoče so spodbujali, da so nastopali v svojem jeziku,
lahko pa so uporabljali tudi staro grščino ali kateri koli drug jezik; besedilo so
lahko bodisi brali, recitirali, peli ali igrali. Rezultat, ki je še vedno na voljo na
spletu, je na kratko opisan v članku. Ko razmišljam o tem dogodku, opažam,
da so javna branja in YouTube videi kot žanri in kulturne dejavnosti le redko
vključeni v raziskave homerske recepcije. Dogodek Odiseja okrog sveta odlikuje
izrazita raznolikost; na ta način se povezuje z aktualnimi razpravami o »klasič-
nih vedah« kot akademski disciplini in s teorijo multiformnega, diahronega
razvoja homerskih pesnitev. Dogodek obenem pokaže tako na prednosti kot
na omejitve tehnologije in, kar je najpomembnejše, osvešča nas o razdalji med
homerskimi pesmimi kot uprizoritvijo v stari Grčiji in danes prevladujočim
načinom, ko jih obravnavamo kot čtivo.
1.02 Pregledni znanstveni članek / Review article
UDK 821.14'02.091Homer
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i3.04