RECONSTRUCTION: HOW HOMER'S ODYSSEY MIGHT HAVE SOUNDED

Farya Faraji and his World Musicians have attempted to produce an approximation of the original Odyssey of Homer, with a long text explaining their effort. If the maledicted Christopher Nolan has achieved one good thing, it is a renewed interest in the classics. The introduction is pointing out that the pronunciation is a reconstruction of the ancient Greek classical language, already archaic by the time that Homer's work was written down, some time in the 8th century BC. Praise to Luke Ranieri of Polymathy, who signed off on the vocal part of the reconstruction, for avoiding Erasmus's nightmare for the curse that it is*. He explains the language issue in another video below. 

Aug. 2, 2026 Farya Faraji, World Musians and more: The Odyssey's Opening - Ancient Greek Music feat. Luke Ranieri.

Here's part of the pinned comment.

"Vocals by Luke Ranieri of the polýMATHY and Scorpio Martianus channels, lyre, aulos and arrangement by Farya Faraji.

"Whilst many videos circulate nowadays around the Internet claiming to offer an idea of what Homeric recitation of the epics would have sounded like, most of them do not take into account a vital variable necessary for such a claim: ancient Greek music and its systems, practices and sonorities.

"These videos virtually all employ modern Western melodic and harmonic tendencies, often supplementing the music with modern chord progressions on the lyre, and using lyres that are modernised with synthetic strings and sound properties not historically authentic to the instrumentation of the period.

"This video was made to offer a more historically informed approximation for those interested in that aspect. This historically informed approximation employs the known elements of Ancient Greek music, as well as working theories espoused by current scholarship, in order to offer a possible approximation of the sonority of the ancients."

Read the entire explanation in Farya's pinned comment (link). 

June 10, 2026 Polymathy: The Language of the Odyssey.

* Around 1500 the Dutch humanist scholar and Catholic priest Erasmus of Rotterdam pioneered new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament. He transformed the pronunciation and spelling of Greek into something no modern Greek would recognize as their own. Mere decades after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 he claimed that Greek was a “dead language” that was no longer spoken.

By examining grammatical and linguistic features of the modern language, linguists have gained a comprehensive understanding of its development. Ancient Greek is not a “dead language” reinvented by Western academics; modern Greek is a continuous development of the language as it existed before Erasmus’s innovations, though in successive stages. Old misspellings, for example, reveal historical pronunciation; irregular verbs preserve obsolete rules.

Homeric Greek is closer to modern Greek than Old English is to modern English. After 2,700 years Greek has maintained a strong continuity. Greek is an unique subject for linguists studying the evolution of a natural language over a long period. It is the oldest living language in the world with a homogeneous development. 

- More on Farya Faraji, Homer, the Odyssey, the Bronze Age, Classical Greece -