# poe: an anonymous short "stressed poetry", already in use in the 2nd Century CE, resonates like the rhythms of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"

<< they say what they like; let them say it; I don't care. >>️

This << little-known text written in ancient Greek shows that "stressed poetry," the ancestor of all modern poetry and song, was already in use in the 2nd Century CE, 300 years earlier than previously thought. >>

<< 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. >>️

<< the poem used a different form of meter to that usually found in ancient Greek poetry. As well as showing signs of the long and short syllables characteristic of traditional "quantitative" verse, this text employed stressed and unstressed syllables. Until now, "stressed poetry" of this kind has been unknown before the fifth century, when it began to be used in Byzantine Christian hymns. >>️

<< You didn't need specialist poets to create this kind of musicalized language, and the diction is very simple, so this was a clearly a 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. >> Tim Whitmarsh. ️

<< this poem could represent a "missing link" between the lost world of ancient Mediterranean oral poetry and song, and the more modern forms that we know today. >>

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Tom Almeroth-Williams. Ancient Greek 'pop culture' discovery rewrites history of poetry and song. University of Cambridge. Sep 09, 2021.

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-ancient-greek-culture-discovery-rewrites.html

Tim Whitmarsh. Less care, more stress: a rhythmic  poem from the roman empire. The Cambridge Classical Journal, 1-29. doi: 10.1017/ S1750270521000051. Aug 25, 2021.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-classical-journal/article/less-care-more-stress-a-rhythmic-poem-from-the-roman-empire/B5A03C3981F21E885228D3C3184109E9