Ancient Greece Had a Thriving Pop Culture

A recent discovery by a British archaeologist at the UK’s Cambridge University reveals that, in ancient Greece, there was a thriving pop culture.

Professor Tim Whitmarsh studied a little-known text written in ancient Greek showing that “stressed poetry,” the ancestor of all modern poetry and song, was already in use in the 2nd Century CE, three hundred years earlier than previously thought.

In its shortest version, the anonymous four-line poem reads “they say what they like; let them say it; I don’t care. Go on, love me; it does you good.”

The experimental verse became popular across the Eastern Roman Empire and survives because, as well as presumably being shared orally, it has been found inscribed on twenty gemstones and as a graffito in Cartagena, Spain.

By comparing all of the known examples for the first time ever, Whitmarsh noticed that the poem used a different form of meter to that usually found in ancient Greek poetry. In addition to long and short syllables characteristic of traditional “quantitative” verse, this text employs stressed and unstressed syllables.

Until recently, “stressed poetry” of this kind was unknown prior to the fifth century, when it began being used in Byzantine Christian hymns.

“Exciting glimpse” of oral pop culture in ancient Greece

Professor Whitmarsh recently told The Cambridge University Magazine: “You didn’t need specialist poets to create this kind of musicalized language, and the diction is very simple, so this was a clearly democratizing form of literature. We’re getting an exciting glimpse of a form of oral pop culture that lay under the surface of classical culture.”

The study, published in The Cambridge Classical Journal, also suggests that this poem could represent a “missing link” between the lost world of ancient Mediterranean oral poetry and song and the more modern forms known today.

The poem, unparalleled so far in the classical world, consists of lines of four syllables with a strong accent on the first and a weaker on the third. This allows it to slot into the rhythms of numerous pop and rock songs, such as Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

Whitmarsh says: “We’ve known for a long time that there was popular poetry in ancient Greek, but a lot of what survives takes a similar form to traditional high poetics. This poem, on the other hand, points to a distinct and thriving culture, primarily oral, which fortunately for us in this case also found its way onto a number of gemstones.”

Asked why the discovery hasn’t been made before, Whitmarsh says: “These [artifacts] have been studied in isolation. Gemstones are studied by one set of scholars, the inscriptions on them by another. They haven’t been seriously studied before as literature. People looking at these pieces are not usually looking for changes in metrical patterns.”

Whitmarsh hopes that scholars of the medieval period will be pleased and also confirmed that the Byzantine verse did indeed develop organically due to changes in classical antiquity, something which medievalists had suspected all along.

In its written form, the poem reads

Λέγουσιν They say

ἃ θέλουσιν What they like

λεγέτωσαν Let them say it

οὐ μέλι μοι I don’t care

σὺ φίλι με Go on, love me

συνφέρι σοι It does you good

The gemstones on which the poem was inscribed were generally agate, onyx, or sardonyx, all varieties of chalcedony, an abundant and relatively inexpensive mineral across the Mediterranean region.

Archaeologists found the most beautiful and best-preserved example around the neck of a young woman buried in a sarcophagus in what is now Hungary. The gem is now held in Budapest’s Aquincum Museum.

Whitmarsh believes that these written accessories were mostly bought by people from the middle ranks of Roman society. He argues that the distribution of the gemstones from Spain to Mesopotamia sheds new light on an emerging culture of “mass individualism,” characteristic of our own late-capitalist consumer culture.