Complex Numbers

We Got The Beat

Hey look - it's a link about writing.

‘I don’t care’: text shows modern poetry began much earlier than believed  
Academic finds that lines widely reproduced in the eastern Roman empire are ‘stressed’ in a way that laid the foundations for what we recognise as poetry

"I don't care?" Wow, Generation X is older than I thought!

For Taylor Swift, the “haters gonna hate”, but she’ll just “shake it off”. Now research by a Cambridge academic into a little-known ancient Greek text bearing much the same sentiment – “They say / What they like / Let them say it / I don’t care” – is set to cast a new light on the history of poetry and song.

Good thing that copyright long ago expired, huh?

The anonymous text, which concludes with the lines “Go on, love me / It does you good”, was popular across the eastern Roman empire in the second century, and has been found inscribed on 20 gemstones and as a graffito in Cartagena, Spain.

I mean, seriously, how many of us have seen poems like that? Or, well... written them?

In my defense, I was 14.

Before the emergence of stressed poetry, poetry was quantitative – based on syllable length.

Honestly, this is a distinction I never could wrap my head around -- hence why most of my forays into "poetry" are doggerel or parody.

“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 on to a number of gemstones,” said Whitmarsh.

This kind of reminds me of children's rhymes. Not the widely-known ones, but the ones that rarely, if at all, get written down, and are passed down to younger children exclusively from older children, who continue to pass it down in an attempt to look cool. Since they're not written down, they usually transform like a generational game of Telephone (what do they call that these days, anyway? "Reply All?")

This poem pushes back the earliest appearance of stressed poetry by at least 300 years,” he said. “It has this sort of magnetic rhythm to it, four beats to the bar, a stress on the first beat, and weaker stress on the third beat, which is rock’n’roll and pop music as well.”

I once heard a theory that rhythm -- whether drumbeats or poetry -- was connected to heartbeat. No idea if that's the actual case or not, but it makes sense.

I also find it fascinating that, even in classical antiquity, there was a distinction between "low art" and "high art," and this seems to be one of the few instances of "low art" that survived. I suppose it's possible that a lot of modern music, especially folk and the like, owe its existence to those half-forgotten words and rhythms. A message across time. We may be facing different challenges now, but we're not so different than those working-class Greeks of old, are we?