Think of ancient Greek verse and what often springs to mind are those great beacons of literary achievement, the epics of Homer, the odes of Pindar, the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the lyrics of Sappho. But the canon is only a reflection of the limits of our knowledge; vast swathes of ancient literature do not survive, and there are whole realms of cultural activity that never even got as far as a manuscript, leave alone the opportunity to withstand history’s vicissitudes. New research suggests that there was a substrate of more demotic, more everyday verse that has remained largely invisible to modern eyes.
Prof Tim Whitmarsh of the University of Cambridge has examined a short verse that survives not because it was copied down by Byzantine monks, preserved through the medieval age then “rediscovered” in the Renaissance, like much canonical classical literature, but because it was inscribed into semi-precious stones as cameos, and, in one instance, scratched on to a wall as a graffito.
There are various forms of the verse, which has been found on mass-produced, low-cost gemstones scattered across the Roman empire from Spain to Hungary to Mesopotamia, roughly dated to the second and third centuries AD. Spoken aloud in Greek, the verse trips off the tongue, and even in English, it’s hard not to read it almost like the lyrics of a pop song, with its open-ended, simple, adaptable-to-any-situation sentiments: “They say/ what they like/ Let them say it/ I don’t care/ Go on, love me/ It does you good.” (It can apparently be sung very nicely, in Greek, to the tune of the chorus of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode.)
