Apparent Magic

Artists have been reimagining The Odyssey for as long as it’s existed. During the early centuries of the first millennium BCE, the poets of ancient Greece traveled to marketplaces and palace courts to entertain their audiences with tales of an age long past. These were popular stories, already familiar to those listening, but their actual form remained open to interpretation. Rather than reciting a fixed text, the poets improvised, chanting their loose collection of stories, myths, and stock poetic phrases, sticking more to the strict 12-beat rhythm of dactylic hexameter than to any settled narrative. And because both the bards and their audiences were largely illiterate, these poems had to be recomposed every time they were performed. Make it new, indeed.