A Multiform YouTube Homeric Rhapsody from 2020

Abstract

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.