"This guy is just nuts!"

Some more reference work (not a lot, really) found me the more thoroughgoing source for "epic". The Greek word epos means a "word" -- "word" as in a "statement" or "utterance", rather than an individual noun, verb, adjective or adverb. It also means, by association, a tale, a story or a lay. In plural, the word refers to poetry in "heroic" verse or just plain "epic poetry".

That makes it the opposite of melei -- or lyric poetry. The singular masculine form, melos, initially referred to a "limb" -- arm or leg, not part of a tree -- and secondarily, to a song or a strain of lyric poetry. It was also used to distinguish what the chorus sang in tragic drama, as opposed to the dialogue. I had to think about "limb" overnight. Then, an idea came -- the word for one of the favorite metrical feet in Greek, the dactyl, originally meant "finger" -- one long, followed by two shorts (counting outward from the knuckle). So, maybe (this is what the scholars call a "conjecture" and the lawyers a "surmise" -- what you and I call a wild guess), a finger, then a hand, then a forearm, then the upper arm, then the shoulder -- a lyric poem! (I said it was a wild guess.)

But I'm not talking about melos here. By using "ode" and "hymn" I'm trying to recall (yeah, here we go) the state of humanity in prehistoric times. Which isn't that long ago. You can't have history without writing, so we're talking the last 7,000 years or so of the some 100,000 years of the fully human experience.

Using Greek words makes this jump more convenient. True histories didn't appear (AFAIK) until well into the beginning of civilization. But, unlike the Latin-speaking peoples, the Greeks had a fully developed epic (Illiad, Odyssey) and hymnic (the Homeric hymns) "literature" before they even had their own alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma, ... yeah, that's the word for it) to write it down with. Their odic literature came either just before or not that far after that, historically. (Tragedy may have come from the word meaning "goat song". First you get a goat-sacrifice ode, then you get a goat-sacrifice call-and-response ode, then you get someone to poetically recite the story of how the first goat got sacrificed while the call-and-response ode goes on behind you, then you get somebody to impersonate the first goat-sacrificer ... . Who plays the goat? Whoever's goat they got! Ouch.)

So, yeah, Melos and Epos are the two parts of basic Greek poetic theory. Let me repeat -- theory.

Going back to my crazy Stone Age thing, Dum-Dum (my new name for the first memorizer/reciter -- he had a verbal rhythm going, and he was too "dumb" for anything related to hunting, except to maybe conk on the head and use for mastodon bait. That possibility will improve your memory skills!) wouldn't have had the necessity or even time to write lyric poetry as we think of it. Maybe Oa had had a few starts at it, but really, when your first thought at every sunrise was "How do I survive today?", imitating bird calls in word-rhythm would just not be a priority.

You'd need you some civilization for that Melos stuff to get started. Or maybe just the ghastly peace that follows a long and horrible war. So Dum-Dum's understudy would maybe have cut a reed and started to blow sad bird calls through it, so he could compose him some First-Ever-Post-War Blues.

Who knows?

_____

There is critical basis for all this craziness I've set down here -- though, unfortunately, I've had to resort to my much-fractured memory (again with that!) of yet another book I gave away, the classic Epic and Romance by W.P. Ker. I may have the whole ode-hymn-epic deal ack-basswards or may be thinking of another book entirely, so I'll leave you to find this one (it's a free Google EBook) and read it for yourselves to see.

However, you'll need more than that to vett all I've written in this and the last two posts. Finding a good historical linguist (known as a "philologist" in my day, and maybe still) will be a start, or at least some background essays or books by that person or persons.

Note: If you are taking a course in something related to this, and you use my stuff here -- you risk flunking the course. I am no expert. I am just trying to get a certain discussion going again.