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Literature and history.com. Hello and welcome to Literature and History episode 127 Bashar Ibn Burd a quick reminder that your host's new book on Homer's Odyssey is now available everywhere. There's a link to the Odyssey, an illustrated guide in the episode notes of your podcasting app, and I hope you'll pick up a copy and enjoy a deep dive into almost 40 of the Epic's major characters. The new Odyssey movie comes out this week, so it's a great time for a refresher on who's who in Homer. For today's show, we are not in the 7002 BCE with Homer, but instead the 7002 CE and my haven't we come a long way everybody? This program is on the very early and influential Arabic poet Bashar IBN Burd, who lived in what is today Iraq from from about 713 to 783. Bashar ibn Burd came from noble Persian stock, although his father was a freedman. Like many other ethnic Persians in the early caliphates, Bashar had to balance his pride in his blue blooded Persian heritage with his awareness that Arabic was the language of the new Islamic empire. Accordingly, Baasha wrote poetry in the language of the conquerors. But but his roots gave him sympathy with the conquered. Bashar, like his contemporary Ibn Al Mukaffa, whom we met last time, was for much of his life a citizen of Basra, both of them ethnic Persians who wrote marvelous Arabic and both of them half caste inhabitants of an intellectually volatile metropolis. As the Umayyad Caliphate gave way to the Abbasid Caliphate, Persian citizens of the early caliphates in the 720s, 730s, 740s, 750s and onward were a diverse lot. Some had earnestly converted to Islam, some were still Zoroastrians or Manichaeans, and some were religious skeptics. Some, like Bashar Ibn Burd and Ibn Al Muqaffa, lived in the power centers of the new caliphates, like learning the language and culture of the Arabs, while at the same time speaking Persian and remembering the long history of the great Persian empires. Other Persians lived further afield, paying taxes to the new colonial overlords out in the provinces, but otherwise holding to old Sasanian cultural traditions and business operations. The Sasanian Empire had officially fallen back in 651 when its final king, Yazdegerd III, was was assassinated. But Persia was vast and even a century later, in 750, when the Umayyad Caliphate gave way to the Abbasid Caliphate, many provinces to the east were far more Persian than they were anything else. Over the past few episodes of literature and history, we have learned a bit about the deep rootedness and longevity of Persian culture during the early caliphates. The story of the Byzantine Sasanian War of 602 to 628 taught us that the Sasanian Empire was less of an empire and more of a confederation of stalwart fiefdoms, often called the Seven Noble Houses of Iran. We read the Zoroastrian Bundahsian and learned that during the 800s, a renaissance in Zoroastrian theology in the Abbasid east produced a number of texts still central to the religion today. We read Ibn Al Mukafar's Kalila and Dimna and in doing so observed that Persian scholarship and translation were essential to bringing knowledge into the caliphate's capitals in Syria and Mesopotamia. Put briefly over the past few episodes of our podcast, we've learned that although Arab Muslim leadership conquered Sasanian Persian leadership during the mid-600s, a century later, Persians weren't all that conquered. By 819, just 69 years after the beginning of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Persian Samanid Empire became a semi autonomous region in the Islamic east, sponsoring Persian language, literature and culture for generations afterward. The Persian pushback against Arabization had many forms and it took place across multiple time zones, but the general name for it in Arabic language history books is Sha'. Ubiya. The word simply means nations or peoples, and it's drawn from a Quranic passage in which God O mankind, truly we created you from a male and a female, and we made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another. The verse is quite a nice one in the Quran, generally interpreted as emphasizing the equality of all human beings regardless of their origins. Where the Quran we made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another. The word peoples is sha' rubin in the original Arabic, which is where we get the word Sha' rubiya to Persian Muslims with Sha' ubiya sensibilities bowing down to Arab elites just because they were Arabs didn't make sense. The Quran taught that Muslims were equal. It did not teach that Arab Muslims should live in garrisons and lord themselves over other Muslims in the provinces. The Sharubiya movement was a great equilibration, mainly Persian in origin, but also involving other indigenous cultures, during which various conquered populations of Muslims advocated for equal rights. Our writer for today, again the poet Bashar Ibn Burd, was an early part of the Sharubiya movement in literary history A Persian schooled in Arabic literary history, Bashar could imitate the conventions of Arabic literature as it existed around 750 CE. But as an ethnic Persian familiar with the long cosmopolitan history of the Sasanian Empire, Bashar didn't just want to write solemn odes about solitary speakers astride camels. Restless and intrepid, Bashar, over the middle part of the 700s, pushed Arabic literature forward into a new, more sophisticated epic. He is among the first writers whom Arabic literary anthologists associated with the Badia style or the New Style, a style that developed during the early Abbasid period that was more elaborate, embellished and worldly in nature than the more traditional Arabic poetry that was then popular, those pre Islamic odes on Bedouin themes that we read at the beginning of our podcast's present season. Today's story, generally speaking, will focus on modern day Iraq and the middle of the seven hundreds. And although I imagine most of you listening have never heard of Bashr ibn Burd, over the past 17 episodes on early Islamic history, you've learned everything you need to know to understand his life, his times and his work. So let's begin today's show by taking a deep breath and imagining ourselves in the city of Basra in the year 750 CE. The modern city of Basra, Iraq, is about 25 miles downriver from where the Tigris and Euphrates come together. Originally, the city was 15 miles away from the convergence of the two great rivers, but past and present, Basra has always been at the bottom of the Tigris Euphrates wetlands, near where the two waterways join to make the final leg of their long journey to the Persian Gulf. If we were there back in 750 CE, this aquatic confluence would be a perfect symbol of what the city had become. Basra in 750 had swelled to more than 250,000 residents, an assortment of Arabs, Persians and others. If you sat there among the city's new fangled watercourses and mud brick residences on a summer evening beneath the shade of young trees, with the sounds of marsh birds in the air all around you, you could get a sense of how fast history was changing. You would see Bedouins and other tribespeople from the Arabian Peninsula speaking various pure dialects of Arabic, studded with a particularly enormous vocabulary for describing the places and flora and fauna of the desert. You'd see different Arabs than these well born Syrian aristocrats enriched by the last century of the Umayyad hegemony. Headquartered in Damascus, and Arabs who had already lived on the coast of the Levant for two generations. You'd see Arabs whose grandparents had homesteaded in North Africa, who called the Mediterranean's southern shore home. And you'd see Arabs from the north and east as well, Arabs who lived up on the Caspian's southern shore, and ones whose grandparents had made homes for themselves all over what is today Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and western Afghanistan. And if you sat there in Basra, at the cusp between the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, you would hear many other languages than Arabic. Most obviously, you'd hear Persian, because Basra itself, as of 750 CE, had only been under Arab Muslim control for a century or so back during the hijra of 622, which begins the Islamic calendar, the country around Basra had been part of the Sasanian Empire's balmy western fringe. A marshy lowland superintended by the Lochmed Client kingdom. The confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates had always been a place where Arabs and Persians mixed and worked together. And though the power balance had decidedly shifted to favor the Arabs as of 750, the two peoples were not strangers to one another. Basra in 750 was home to old Iraqi Persian families, together with generations of Persian immigrants who, due to the changing times, had come west over the Zagros Mountains to seek fame and fortune in the power centers of the caliphates. These Persian immigrants might have been a bit surprised to be in Basra itself, because the city was not an old one. By 750, it had ballooned out of a Rashidun garrison staked down in the Badlands, with a desert on one side and a salt marsh on the other. And it was only after considerable effort building earthworks and irrigation channels, that Basra was able to support a substantial population. If you were there in 750, you would know all of this. Mesopotamia held incredibly ancient cities, among them Ur and Babylon, and it was home to old Persian capitals like Ctesiphon. Compared to these storied places, Basra was a new fangled boom town, expanded with the investment money of big wig city planners and the muscles of slaves and hired laborers. These slaves and hired laborers would have been from all over Eurasia and Africa. The Indian Ocean slave trade was a vast enterprise, and along with the sub Saharan slave trade, it had brought Africans up into caliphates to serve as forced domestic commercial laborers. Africans, however, were not the only slaves in Basra. During the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, the conquests of The Rashidun Caliphate and the continued border wars of the Umayyad Empire had brought legions of slaves into the Islamic world. And slaves and freedmen who had liberated themselves from slavery through conversion to Islam or some other means would have made up a sizable swath of Bosra's population in the year 750. From these commingled populations, if you were sitting along a Basran street during a summer afternoon, you'd hear Arabic, Persian, Tamaziyat, Coptic, Armenian, Greek, Bantu languages, and more. To Meccan or Damascan Arabs, and to wealthy Persians from old cities like Bishopur and Firuzabad. The Bosra in 750 might have seemed a bit vulgar, a slapdash sort of place you thumbed your nose at, because it had basically been wrested out of salt marshes in the middle of nowhere in the Wild west or Wild east, depending on which side of Mesopotamia you were from. But if you like our poet for today, Bashar Ibn Burd, were from Basra. The city's novelty and cultural sponginess were exactly what made it fascinating and full of possibilities. Basra by 750 was more than just a slipshod place where the newborn Islamic world mingled. Basra was also an epicenter of cultural development. And before we get into the literary history relevant to Bashar IBN Burd, we should spend just a moment imagining what else was being written there other than Arabic poetry. The Islamic world in 750 was a world in transition and a world that was trying to write its past as well as to plan for its future. In Basra and other cities throughout the caliphates, hadiths or narratives about the Prophet Muhammad and his generation already numbered in the tens of thousands. And works of fiqh, or religious law and jurisprudence, were in development as well. Two of the four founders of the modern Islamic schools of law were middle aged and productive, including Abu Hanifa and Malik IBN Anas, the teacher of these grandmasters. Jafar as Saadiq, the sixth and final imam that most Shias concur was a legitimate transmitter of prophetic teachings, was about 48 years old. And while these central figures in Islamic theology were hard at work as the Umayyad caliphate gave way to the Abbasid caliphate, works of tafsir, or Quranic exegesis, were also underway. Additionally, the earliest biographer of Muhammad ibn Isaq, was around 50 years old, and the second earliest biographer of Muhammad Al waqiri, was about three. By the year 750, then the real Muhammad had been gone for almost a century, and the Muhammad that history would know through hadiths and prophetic biographies was being created. As all of this high level theological history and jurisprudence unfolded in the middle part of the 700s, Arabic literature was changing as well. Foreigners, especially Persians, were learning the Arabic language. And the old poetic styles of the pre Islamic period were flourishing and changing at the same time as fresh generations tried their hand at the old genres of the Arabian Peninsula. We discussed these genres toward the beginning of our present season. But since it's been a while, let's take a moment to recall what we learned about pre Islamic Arabic poetry. My two friends gather around and listen as I revisit my memories of the past. I used to live here in this camp long ago, when I was young and full of fire, before the desert swallowed it up. These acacias down in the wadis and the astragalus shrubs with their tiny flowers, the rantarium with its yellow blooms in spring and the morning sound, grouse and occasional lark, these were all my home. There I would sit there, where desert erosion has tumbled, earth overrun with the tracks of oryxes and quail. And there I knew her. She was as beautiful as the rain, with a long neck like a gazelle's, with shimmering eyes and a veil that blew in the wind. Once during a storm we dallied in her tent. She was soft and firm and lovely and outside the water awakened the scent of the earth. But she is gone, long gone beneath the sands of time and memory, leaving me to wander. And so I ride. I ride my she camel beneath the shade of ridges and in the full sun. And her bellow rattles the saddle and sends the hares and jerboas dashing to their dens. Her heavy feet make the earth's back groan. And she is mighty, mighty like the continued pulse of life in my veins, as dry as the land and pasturage of memory have become her grunts beneath me are new thunder over the landscape, awakening memories of rain, even on days ungraced by clouds. That was a qasida, or a traditional Arabic language ode that I made up in prose. The qasida was the most influential genre of jahili poetry and it contains variations of everything that you just heard. A first person speaker, generally a middle aged or older man, greets listeners. The speaker visits an abandoned camp where he used to live. The camp is carefully described, often with details about local flora and fauna and local place names. The speaker recollects a love affair that came and went. The speaker is melancholy about the irrecoverable past. But as the poem continues, something whether his own physical hardiness or the horse or camel beneath him, heartens the speaker, his mood moves from depression to resolution, and he feels better, ending with a philosophical statement or a praise to a patron or some other finale appropriate to the poem's original context. The pre Islamic qasida, due to its beauty and early provenance, was the most influential form of all Arabic poetry. When our poet for today, Bashar Ibn Burd, was growing up in Basra, again, he lived from about 713 to 783. He would have heard and read qasidas like the one that you just listened to. Bosra might have been in a wetland, and its streets might have been teeming with people from all over the world, but nonetheless, among the ruling Arab elite, the most esteemed form of poetry was the solemn and reflective ode of a desert Bedouin. The qasidahs of the pre Islamic period are, as we observed a number of episodes ago, indeed beautiful. In the seven hundreds they were celebrated for a reason, just as they still are today. The kasida, along with the Quran itself, came from an earlier period when Arabs predominantly lived in Arabia and when the Arabic language itself was less diluted by the loanwords, colloquialisms, and portmanteaus of the caliphal period. However, language, inconveniently for those with reactionary sensibilities, evolves through use, and by 750 in Basra and elsewhere, an old guard already existed that wanted Arabic to sound like it had during the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In the 720s and 730s, the poetry of the pre Islamic period was standard curriculum for young Persians like Bashr IBN Burd for a number of reasons. When Bashr and his near contemporary Ibn Al Mukaffa learned Arabic and Arabic literary history, it was often under the tutelage of Bedouin instructors from Arabia. These instructors taught Arabic literature and grammar with the reverence of those passing on their own cultural traditions. And although cultural prejudices were everywhere in the early caliphates, curious young students like Bashar Ibn Burd and Ibn Al Mukha Fah may have been perfectly happy to learn great Arabic poetry from instructors who loved teaching it because, as you may have noticed over the past 300 hours of the show, literature can kick ass no matter who is throwing it down. Nonetheless, if Bashar ibn Burd attended a recitation of traditional Qasidas in, say, 750, sitting back in a leafy Basran courtyard as a bard recited them to some nouveau riche Arab landowner and his Pampered sons. Bashur might have scrunched up his lips and rolled his eyes as well. Traditional Bedouin poetry was in some ways a strange fit for the new Umayyad and Abbasid worlds. Most Arabs, even by 750, were no longer wending their way along lonely desert roads astride camels. As scholar A.F.L. beeston writes, by the Life of Bashar, the inescapable fact was that however much the Umayyad princes in their desert hunting lodges might like to fancy themselves as Arab chieftains of the ancient patterns, the bulk of even the pure Arab population of the Islamic realm was abandoning the desert environment and settling down to an urbanized or at least sedentarized life. On top of this, vast crowds of non Arab clients were flocking into Islam and building up a culture which, though Arabic speaking, was only to a limited extent Arab in outlook. In short, by 750 the old Bedouin world of the kasida was already mostly an imaginative construction. As we learned in past episodes, even during the pre Islamic period when Bedouin bards came to the peninsula's trade towns and the courts of Arab client kings, the qasida was already a commodity, a romanticized vision of desert life rather different than the hardscrabble pastoral existence that the Arabian Peninsula's nomads actually lived. For a poet like Bashar ibn Bur, then moving in urban aristocratic circles in the mid-700s, the Old Desert poetry of Arabia was worth knowing. But it was also a relic. And now that we know a bit about Basra in the year 750, and now that we've reviewed the basics of the old Bedouin Kasida, let's see. Spend a few minutes learning about the colorful life of Bashar himself. Bashar ibn, born ugly, feisty, restless, and innovative, was born in basra in about 713. The Umayyad Caliphate at this juncture was at the apex of its power, with the sixth Umayyad Caliph Al Walid I's building projects and social welfare programs ushering in a period of domestic prosperity abroad. The Caliph Al Walid had managed to expand the caliphate westward along the North African coast and up into the Iberian Peninsula peninsula and eastward to what is today the border of India and Pakistan up in Syria. The Great Mosque of Damascus had been built a few years before Bashar's birth, along with Al Aqsa Mosque atop Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Arabic in less than a century had become the administrative language and lingua franca of much of the earth. Bashar and his family had been Caught up in the vortex of these great changes, just like everyone else, his grandfather, two generations earlier, had fought Muslim conquerors in the faraway Oxus Valley in a region called Tuharistan, which is today northern Afghanistan. This grandfather, like so many Persians from the distant east, had been enslaved and brought to the Caliphate's center to work. While Bashar's grandfather died as a slave in Basra. His father was freedom and became a member of an Arab tribe. Bashar later told stories about the greatness of his patrilineage. We don't know if they're true, but whatever the real story is behind Bashur's ancestry. His father was smart enough to set up young Bashr with a strong education and to prepare him for success in the Umayyad Empire. Bashur had a distinctive combination of good luck and bad luck as he pursued his studies and grew into adulthood. On the plus side, he had a brilliant, acute mind, a strong memory and a particular talent with language. On the minus side, though he suffered from disfiguring smallpox at a young age, he was blind, and his very large size and unwieldy frame gave him an even more striking appearance. He later proclaimed that being blind helped him write poetry, stating that lack of sight strengthens the acuteness of the heart and cuts out interference from things which are visible. It intensifies a man's language and stimulates his genius. The 10th century Arabic language Book of Songs, which offers us our longest biographical portrait of Bashar, paints a picture of a genius with a chip on his shoulder. A man who had every confidence in his own poetic ability, but at the same time who, due to being a Persian and disabled person to boot, felt like he had something to prove. One of the things that Bashar had to prove was that he was not an Arab and not a Bedouin, and that he didn't care. At one juncture midway through his career, praising all of the eastern Persians who had helped put the Abbasides into power, Bashar wrote in a satirical piece that his grandfather and father were the noblest of all Persians and the Roman emperor was his uncle, all of them wearing crowns. Basha wrote that since his father was dressed in fine Persian ermine drinking from golden cups and listen close because this is pretty funny. Never did my father sing a camel song trailing along behind a scabby camel. Nor approach the desert melon to pierce it for great hunger. Nor. Nor did I dig for and eat the lizard of the stony ground. Nor did my father warm himself standing astraddle to the flame. No. Nor did my father used to ride a camel saddle. We are kings who have always been so through long ages past. The lineage that Bashar describes here is likely fictitious. He probably wasn't actually the scion of great Persian kings. The satirical meaning of the poem is nonetheless pretty clear. Nope, bashar says. My ancestors didn't eat lizards in the desolate countryside, and we didn't lavish praises on our camels. Persia, Bashar emphasizes, was a civilized place, and everyone knew that. And so the Arabs could keep their worn out kasidas that romanticized the parched and dreary deserts from which they had come. Bashur's attitude toward traditional Bedouin poetry was thus playful and irreverent, though his use of Bedouin poetry's conventions demonstrates that he understood and appreciated it. At the same time, he also satirized some of Basra's more puritanical religious figures. Courtly life during the early caliphates involved a fair amount of licentiousness. The famous Kitab al Aqani, or Book of Songs, compiled by the Arab scholar Abu al Faraj al isfahani, demonstrates that 8th and 9th century Arabic poetry contained oodles of dirty stuff. A recent anthology of excerpts from the Book of Songs by scholar George Dimitri Sawa has 20 pages alone of classical Arabic poetry about penises and vaginas, another 12 on sexual acts and positions, and an additional 10 pages of funny sexual mishaps. And to be clear, this was all Arabic language poetry written before about 900 CE. The point is not that early Arabic poetry is particularly erotic in nature. From the Descent of Inanna to Archilochus to Catullus, we have read lots of steamy poetry in our podcast, and writing and giggling about sex and private parts is just something that human beings do. The point is that when Bashar ibn Bur came of age as a writer in the 700s, one of the things that poets did was to write love poetry and satirical poetry in which sex and private parts were fair game as subject matter. This racy content in Bashur's poetry, as you can imagine, was disagreeable to religious teachers and ascetics in Basra who didn't think that sex and genitals and that kind of thing were fit for poetry recited in polite society. These pious critics dismissed some of Bashar's work as garbage. He satirized them right back. While religious conservatives criticized Bashar and other poets for their prurient material, Bashar made enemies of a different sort of theologians as well. Specifically, Bashar IBN Burd set himself against an influential Basran thinker named Wassal Ibn Atta, the most important early thinker in mutazilism. Mutazilism was a divisive movement in Islamic history, especially from 750 to 850. Mutazilites advocated for rationalism and the use of reason in interpreting scripture over and above the inherited traditions of the Hadiths. More famously, Mutazilites argued that the Quran had been created at a finite point in time rather than existing eternally in God's mind for whatever reason. Bashr IBN Burd found these theological developments to be displeasing, and he lampooned the Mutazilite thinker Wassil Ibn Atta in his poetry. Bashur, in spite of his volatile nature and his prickly relationship with Basran theologians, flourished in the sprawling new city while he picked fights with other poets, scoffed at religious conservatives who called him profane, and mocked the progressive theological developments of Basra. Too, Bashar managed to stay on the right side of the truly powerful. He wrote praise poems to the Umayyad governors of Basra. He eulogized the final Umayyad caliph. The Umayyad dynasty gave way to the Abbasid revolution in 750, helped in no small part, as Bashr certainly knew, by powerful Persian allies to the Caliphate's extreme northeast. And in 762, when the second Abbasid Caliph, Al Mansur, founded Baghdad, Bashar moved there. He would have been about 48, and by this time in his career he was a famous writer. His panegyrics, or praise poems, were highly sought after. His satires were fearsome and to be avoided at all costs. His love poems were erotic, but they were also incredibly imaginative, full of new ideas and embellished language. And that seemed to suit the great amalgamation of humanity gathered in the Caliphate's heart in Baghdad. Bashar's career persisted for another two decades. His most pivotal relationship there was with the prince and Caliph al Mahdi, who ruled from 775 to 785. Their relationship had its ups and downs. Al Mahdi at one point commanded Bashar to stop writing love poetry, though Bashur ignored the command. While Bashur seems to have got away with a surprising amount of irreverence, eventually he did something that cost him his life. What this something was varies according to the early sources, but all of them agree that Bashur got in trouble with Abbasid authorities and ended up dead as a result. To offer just one of those stories, Bashur may have penned a criticism of the Caliph al Mahdi that was beyond the pale. Al Mahdi, like other early Abbasid caliphs, relied on Persian bureaucrats, called the barmakids, to help him govern. The poet Bashr, according to the historian Atabari, accused Al Mahdi of delegating so many of his responsibilities to Persian bureaucrats that the caliph was no longer in control of his caliphate. Attabari records Bashr as having written these lines in about 783 sons of Umayya, wake up. Your sleep has gone on too long. The Persian bureaucrat Yaqub IBN Dawud is Caliph. Your caliphate has been ruined. O people, search for the Caliph of Allah among the tambourines and lutes. In other words, Bashur dared to say that the Abbasids might productively be replaced by the Umayyad, whom they had usurped. Since the Abbasid caliphs were no longer doing their jobs. The statement crossed the line from irreverence to sedition. Bashar was imprisoned, beaten nearly to death, sewn in a sack, and tossed in the Tigris to drown. He was about 70, and in spite of being blind, ethnically Persian, and unenviably homely, this Persian Cyrano had a marvelous career at the center of the newborn Islamic world, and he had been at the vanguard of a new movement in Arabic poetry. And now that we have a sense of Bashar Ibn Burd's life and times, let's get a sense of his poetry, what Bashar wrote and why it's so important in literary history. An anecdote about Bashar ibn Burd in the 10th century book of Songs summarizes Bashar's career pretty concisely. Bashar took an untravelled road and excelled in it and was unequalled in it. And he is the greater in versatility and in the genres of poetry, and has a greater abundance and versatility in the genres of poetry and has a greater abundance and broader scope of the new style. Bashar. Earlier historians of Arabic literature agreed after he came of age in the 720s and 730s, began doing things that had not been done before in Arabic poetry. In Arabic literary history, Bashar is often associated with the beginning of what is called the modern period of classical Arabic poetry. This is a confusing term to English speakers because when we think modern, we do not think about Iraq in 750 CE. Modern in the context of Arabic poetry means poetry from the more cosmopolitan epic of the Caliphates rather than poetry from the pre Islamic period. Modern standard Arabic's foundation is in the language of the amalgamating urban centers of the early Abbasid Caliphate. And so it makes sense that what Arabic literary scholarship calls modern begins in the decades after 750 CE. In Arabic, there's another word often associated with the word of Bashar and those who came along just after him. And that word is badih. Badia, in an Arabic English dictionary is defined as originated, invented, made, done, produced newly for the first time, new, wonderful, unknown before. The poetry of Bashar and those who followed him then prized innovation. And while badia literally means newly produced, over time it came to mean rhetorical embellishment. Badiyeh poetry prized the use of metaphor and extended similes, puns, parallelism and antithesis. All of these elements had existed before in Arabic poetry and even the Quran itself. But for Bashar and his successors, adroit and imaginative play with language was given a new centrality and emphasis. The poetic Arabic that Bashar learned when he was young was a strange language. Pre Islamic Arabic odes, as we learned in earlier episodes, are really dense. The poetic language of the peninsula was a churning patchwork of many dialects in which regional place names and local words for flora and fauna made basic comprehension of any given passage difficult. Even during the 700s, the word for this special language of Jahili poetry was gharib. And on top of its dictionaries of obscure proper nouns, pre Islamic Arabic poetry is also figuratively sophisticated, its speakers riding through sandscapes that are partly material and partly metaphorical in their construction. Nonetheless, sometimes because they were not Arabs, and sometimes because they'd simply heard enough talk of camels and wistful introspection among the dunes. And by 750 writers of Arabic poetry had begun experimenting with new styles. As one of Bashur's poetic successors wrote, the vicinity of the Bedouin ruins and of their people that long ago was sweet to drink at, now tastes of salt. Part of the modern style of Arabic poetry that emerged in the mid to late seven hundreds was a focus on contemporary urban audiences. The old qasidas were not only dense and difficult to understand. For those who only knew Arabic as a second language, the old qasidas were full of enigmatic symbols. Their tones were often lofty and somber, and they expected a rarefied audience. Modern poetry, on the other hand, was written with the idioms of the contemporary Islamic world. Bashur's poetry was the verse of the streets, rich with contemporary language, done with wit and spontaneity. For popular audiences, it was neither better nor worse than the old Jahili poetry of Arabia. It was simply new and different. And that was what made it fun. In Bashar's Basra, there was a marketplace called Souk al Mirbaid. It was on the west side of the city, at the breakpoint, where the desert met the wetlands. Almirbaid, in Bashur's day, was where you went to hear developments in contemporary poetry. When he was a teenager, Bashr might have still watched the performances of two of the Umayyad Empire's most famous poets, Jarir Ibn Uatiya and Al FA Razdak, right there in Basra. These two poets, Jair and Al FA Razdak, often performed publicly in the city's western marketplace. The pair had a satirical rivalry that was both fearsome and friendly. And just as Basra was the seam between the desert and the wetlands, between the world of the rural Bedouin and that of the metropolitan Muslim, the poetry that Bashur heard while growing up was also a fusion of old and new, though rather different from one another. Bashur's predecessors, Jarrir and Al Farazdak, who Both died around 730, both served as a bridge to the newer, more colloquial poetry of the next two generations. They were both Arabs, and they revered the old Bedouin traditions, but they were also court poets and city folks, and the Arabic that they heard around them was spoken by tens of thousands of news speakers from all over the empire. Ultimately, these predecessors of Bashar Ibn Burd helped popularize Arabic poetry among a broader audience. Jarir in particular, seemed to think that satire ought to be funny rather than just fearsome. And when Jarir and Al Farazdak held their public matchups in the 710s and 720s, when Bashar was young, in the strange new urban fulcrum between sand and water, a new style of poetry was being born. The new style was not monolithic. The best generation that can be made about it is that its early proponents, first Jarir and Al FA Rzdak, and then Bashar himself and then his younger contemporaries Abu al Atahiya and Abu Nawas, were, for different reasons, searching for novelty. All around the wetland metropolis is where they spent their careers. There were rapid intellectual and theological developments going on, and their lives were lived in courts among a cultured gentility. The centuries old poetry of Bedouin Arabia, with its impenetrable diction and foreboding landscapes, was wonderful stuff, but it was from a different time. The late Umayyad and the early Abbasid empire stretched across much of the world, and in the leafy enclosures of Mesopotamian palaces, as they leaned on peristyles and recited to diverse crowds of listeners. As water sparkled in newly made fountains and the sounds of a dozen languages were faintly audible beyond the walls of metropolitan estates, Bashar and those like him nudged Arabic poetry forward into a new era. So I've offered you a lot of background on Bashar now. We've learned about the Shubiyya movement, that movement spearheaded by Persians in the early caliphates Arab hegemony. We've learned just a bit about Basra, that sprawling boom town at the bottom of the land between the rivers, and how during Bashar's life, it was one of the main hubs of the new Islamic world. We've explored the main events of Bashar's vigorous, productive life, and just now we've discussed the modern and badih movement in Arabic poetry, generally a movement away from conventional Bedouin pieces and tord verse that celebrated and riffed on the new metropolitan and courtly, in which the caliphate's professional poets were actually making a living. Let's go a little deeper now and turn the sound on, so to speak, and actually hear some of what Bashar wrote. Unless otherwise noted, quotes from Bashar in the remainder of this program will come from the AFL Beeston translation published by Cambridge University Press in 1977. Bashar IBN Burd, like any professional court poet, wrote pieces with many different styles and themes. By the last decade of his life, however, if his work itself is any authority on the subject, he was especially well known as a love poet. He reflects in a late piece that I have lived my life with myrtle wine and flute in the comfort of a fine hall, and I have filled the lands with poetry to which maidens and matrons pray as devoutly as the deluded heathen to their idol. Bashar, needless to say, did not invent love poetry in Arabic. The Arabic ghazal, or love poem, had roots in the old kasida of the pre Islamic period. In the kasida's traditional form, the wandering Bedouin speakers of ancient Arabia's odes stop at desert camps and survey the ruins there. And then comes the Nasib, or the erotic or amatory recollection in which the speaker reflects on a bygone love affair. From this convention in the old desert Kasida, poets generations before Bashar IBN Burd were already writing love poems, pure and simple. Bashar IBN Burd may have been living in the urban centers of a new empire, but a lot of the sentiments that he expresses in his love poetry could have been copied and pasted from Sappho Catullus Propertius, Ovid or Tibullus. The speakers of lyric love poetry are lovesick, enchanted, sleepless and sometimes moribund, living lives in which time itself has been fractured by passion that is rarely requited. Just as Catullus had his lover Lesbia and Ovid had his Corinna, Bashr IBN Burd's idealized maiden is called Abda. As when he Abda, visit me and you will be a boon of God for me. I swear by God, be sure of this, that I long for you. But I fear you, Abda, I perish and am lost if I taste not the cool touch of your lips. Do not reject a lover at death's door. In another poem, Bashar tells his addressee. My sorrowing heart is all a flutter. Mention is never made of you without tears starting to my eye, for love of you, you. And in another I seek dear Abda as my remedy. She, however I may conceal it, is a physician for my sickness. This is all familiar stuff. Love knocks even the best of us off of our feet. And so it's no surprise that some of the most foundational Arabic love poetry leverages seemingly ubiquitous human metaphors on the subject. The lover is sick, the beloved is the cure. The lover is parched with passion, the beloved is the only thing which will quench his thirst. The lover is tear stained and alone, the beloved is elsewhere and aloof. Even the old Cosidas reminisced about the torrid passions and morally murky love affairs of bygone youths. And so when Bashar began writing love poems, he was drawing from a lot of very old traditions. Still, even in amatory poems that are pretty conventional, Basher can write absolutely wonderful lines that capture the enchantment of falling in love. One of his love poems O my knight, you grow ever more hateful because of the love I bear towards a maiden with whom I have become enamoured, murmured A sparkling eyed maiden is she. If she glances towards you, she makes you drunk with wine by those two eyes. The pattern of her discourse seems like meadow plots garbed in flowers, and as though a magician sat breathing spells therein. You might well imagine the body on which she gathers her garments to be all gold and scent. It is as though she were the very coolness of drink itself, drink pure and suited to your breaking fast. Be she a maiden of the jinn, a human girl, or somewhat between, she is a most splendid thing. Here the woman Bashir envisions is as varied as the power of his imagination. She has sparkling eyes which intoxicate Those who meet her gaze, her speech is like a pasture full of flowers, where the breath of a secret magician joins the scent of the countless blooms. And extending this metaphor further, Basha writes that his beloved is pure golden fragrance wrapped only barely in human garments. She is as elementarily necessary as coolness and warmth. In these lines, the beloved whom Bashar imagines is in a constant state of flux as his restive imagination tries to transfix her in poetry. Before we explore what made Bashar's love poetry novel as it emerged in Basra and Baghdad in the middle part of the seven hundreds, we should take a moment to discuss what makes it Arabic. Though we're reading an English translation of Bashar, some of his figurative language is distinct to Arabic love poetry. A moment ago we heard Bashar say of his lover, it is as though she were the very coolness of drink itself. Arabic love poetry is full of metaphors and similes likening lovers to water, moisture, coolness, and even ice. Bashr tells his girlfriend in one poem, I'll not forget the taste of the moisture of your lips, and in another, my love sickness is thirst my remedy a drink from a cool, moist mouth. In a later poem, he exclaims to a separation has a fire which ravages my heart and breast when you are far away, but the sight of your face is cooling as ice. The figurative language here makes sense in an Arabian context in poetry with roots in a hot, dry climate. Of course, moisture and coolness and even ice are all imagined as things that heal and pacify the distraught emotions. Arabic love poetry written during the early Abbaside period has some other figurative differences from any other love poetry that we've read in literature and history. For one, classical Arabic poetry tends to focus on the teeth rather than the lips of the beloved. One of Bashur's poems mentions maidens with their sparkling teeth, and another says that his mistress has a smile like the shining petals of the chamomile, the chamomile flower having very bright white petals. And while the alabaster teeth of the beloved were a feature on which poets fixated, so too was the saliva of the beloved. This is a convention unfamiliar to poetry rooted in European traditions, But poets like Bashur will often emphasize the lush moisture of the beloved's mouth. Dampness and coolness, then, are consistent properties of addressees and lovers in early Abbaside poetry, as when Bashar reflects, she was close to me for a while, like one water, but when she had departed, the city was waterless. So far in our consideration of Bashar's love poetry. We've considered how his amatory pieces show verve and freshness and at the same time, how they often adhere to the conventions of West Eurasian love poetry, albeit with some delightful quirks indigenous to Arabian sensibilities. What I want to do now is to consider what made his love poetry new and distinctive when it emerged in performances in the middle decades of the 700s. For one, the poetic speaker in Bashar's amatory verses is a distinctive person. Throughout his love poems, Bashar is himself blind, bearded, and often feeble and ungainly beneath his clothes. Emphasizing that a blind man can be as love struck as anyone else, Basha writes, God, I am not the first one to be enamoured of a maiden in whose encounter he encounters only a waft of perfume. O folk, my ear has fallen in love with a maiden of the tribe. For sometimes the ear falls in love before the eye. He tells the same lover in another, grant me some respite, Abda, and know abda that I am but flesh and blood. Beneath my coat there is a wasted body. Were you to lean on it, it would collapse. Busher repeatedly emphasizes his physical finitude in his love poems. He is not a generic Casanova riffing on the general truisms of romance and infatuation, but a specific person whose physical limitations are appropriate to the poor luck he's had with women. Women. He addresses a companion in one of his love poems with the words, my friend, do not ask of my love for her, but look upon my body and be amazed at one wasted in frame were you to measure him, one who made a passing impression on her heart but never entwined herself therein. Here Bashar's physical deficiencies appear tragically connected to his limited success in love. He's a vigorous man, but not vigorous enough. He has attracted the curiosity of his beloved, but that's about it. Further, his unrequited crushes don't play out in a simple world in which there are only a lover and a beloved. Bashar's love poetry is cluttered with obstacles those who criticize the poet for his various passions, those who try to get in the way of love affairs, and those who spread rumors about him and his crush. There were many sharp eyes in caliphal high society, and so Bashar didn't depict his love life unfolding in some boundless, idealized landscape. Love poetry is always personal in subject matter, but in Bashur's hands it becomes more personal and more introspective. Love poetry is often surprisingly dark, and in Bashur's hands. Part of that darkness is a devastating self analysis and emotional vulnerability and a sense of social walls closing in on him. And while Bashur brought his own body and his own insecurities into the love poetry that he performed more famously, he wrote with a turbulence and technical innovativeness which inspired the next generation of poets in the Abbasid Empire. The idealized lovers in Bashur's poems are things that always seem to to be transforming. He writes in one of his poems, my love for you when I would conceal, it seems abyss on abysses above me and below my feet, beauteous, sparkling eyed, made of scent. When she breathes, the room and the whole house have a perfume from her breath. Here, here, in the murky world of pure imagination, his beloved isn't a person, but instead a vaporous, disembodied thing, a sweetness that begets ardor more than a human being whom he wants to hold and kiss. Elsewhere the figurative language is equally innovative as when Basha my heart is as it were a ball bouncing about for anxious fear of separation. Would that anxiety could be of any use. My eye has become a stranger to slumber, so that its eyelids seem too short for it. Love here is a bouncing ball of useless anxiety. And in a wonderful metaphor, the lover's eyelids are compared to drapes too short to shut out the daylight. He tells us in a different poem that the bones of my beloved are sugar can not bones of camel, referencing a wetland crop more appropriate to Basra than the dromedaries of Arabia. In another departure from the traditional kasida, when Bashur reflects on his beloved's home, he proclaims that her abode gleams bright as lines of writing. The beloved here is not the long lost tribal maiden of Jahili poetry, but instead a modern urban woman who, if she is even real at all, is lovely in large part due to the writing that she inspires. Bashar then wrote more personally and literarily self conscious love poetry than had been conventional up to the mid-700s, embellishing the old Arabic literary traditions with new filigrees and making amatory verses more more modern, urban and suited to the cosmopolitan courts of Umayyad and Abbasid cities. And he did something else with his love poetry to set the tone for the next few generations. Something that we've actually seen before in literature and history. If you read enough poems in which tear stained, crestfallen lovers whimper about women who won't give them the time of day, you start to get a little tired of it. Don't get me wrong, I can get down with gloomy, unrequited love lyrics, black nail polish, tears in the rain, metaphors about sickness for which love is the only cure, and verses about being so fixated on a new passion that everything else seems drab and faded by comparison. Falling in love is a wondrous, surreal experience, and we have always written poetry about it, and we always will. However, although we are a passionate, wistful species, humans can also be prudent and hard headed, and some of the love poetry that we write reflects the sober realism of adulthood too. Bashar comforts himself in one of his more complex love poems, remarking, it is a light thing so long as you yourself are safe life to suffer the loss of someone, what soul has that which it desires in unmixed measure? And then later concluding with lapse of time, solace will come to you. These are not the sentiments of someone experiencing heartbreak for the first time, but instead the conclusions of a mature person who knows how to move on. Another love poem begins with a conventional outpouring of passion for a coy mistress, but then takes an unexpected turn. Basha writes in three lines that epitomize his entire corpus of My beloved made a stealthy sign with her fingertips to me to tell me of her feelings, and they stirred up my passion, although maybe they lied. Thus she did act, but then she turned away, just as I called on resolution to aid me, but it turned away. I will leave love's folly to other eyes, but I will not abandon the quaffing of ruddy wine into the cup. Here we have a love poem for grownups. A boy sees a girl's possible signs of affection. He's excited, but he's been burned before and he doesn't get his hopes up. And indeed nothing comes of it, and it's nobody's fault, and it's not the end of the world. We can almost imagine Bashar voicing that final line. I will leave love's folly to other eyes, but I will not abandon the quaffing of ruddy wine in the cup With a tilt of his wine mug to his audience as he recited verses to a sophisticated Baghdadi audience made up of a melange of aristocrats and courtiers. Just as Ovid in the capital of the Roman Empire, wrote love poetry for adults, seven centuries later, Bashar in the capital of the Abbasid Empire was doing the same thing. And speaking of Ovid, Bashar's love poetry invites us to remember something else about 8th century love poetry in Arabic. In A previous episode, we heard a historian describe the entire Umayyad period as quite a time of great disruption. With conquests, urbanization, great influx of wealth and a new system of beliefs. The whole picture of the world was changing rapidly. Love poetry during such dizzying times can be a nice form of escapism. Umayyad love poetry took some different forms. Some of it was unrequited and tragic. An entire genre of love poets called Al Ghazal al Udri flourished during the Caliphate's ascendancy, in which woe begone speakers lamented their distance from unattainable mistresses. Yet a whole different tradition of Umayyad love poetry was nothing like this. The Qurayish writer Umar IBN Abi Rabiyya wrote light hearted love poetry about flirtations and dalliances, mentioning more than 40 women in his oeuvre of wood. Other Umayyad writers were similar, offering chronicles of conquests and flings undertaken for leisure. Just as two centuries before, some of the old Jahili poets had written about hanky panky and Bedouin tents. Umayyad poetry then, when Bashur encountered it, was a wide, diverse genre. It could be about longing or lust, failure or fraud, but it was almost always autobiographical in nature, chronicling the experiences of the individual in a giant, bewildering empire. As such, the love poetry that Bashur read and later wrote, just like that of Ovid long before him, was a search for agency and individuality in an unstable dictatorship. In the early Caliphates, just like the early Roman Empire, just like the Hellenistic successor kingdoms, literature about love was a small escape hatch from large, scary worlds and a place where individual choice and experience was still precious and worth remembering. So that should give you an idea of the range and the reflection, refinement of Bashar's love poetry. Love poetry, however, was only one of the things that this influential writer left behind. And while Bashar was famous for love poetry in his own time, he was just as well known for satire and political lampoons. Satire had old roots in Arabic poetry. In pre Islamic times, poetic satire's main function was to disparage one's tribe's enemies and to promote one's own tribulation tribe. The genre of hijah, or satire, then went hand in hand with the genre of fakhr, or boast poem. In Hijah, you scorned your rivals. In Fakhar you told everyone how great you were. Poets in Jahili society on the peninsula were spokespeople and public relations managers for their clans and tribes. And so it makes sense that as Arabic poetry emerged in the caliphates, one of the dimensions that it served was similar to caricature and discredit rivals and to showboat and puff up allies. We've read satire in our show before. From Catullus and Horace to Jerome and Augustine, we have encountered writers from antiquity who make fun of their rivals with varying degrees of severity and civility. What's most surprising about Boscher's satire is is that he seems to have been able to target any members of Abbasid society, including caliphs, and get away with it. To understand one of Bashr's most absolutely remarkable satires, we'll need just a bit of background. Between 762 and 763, a pair of brothers who were descendants of Muhammad's daughter Fatima led a rebellion based out of Medina against the newly established Abbasid Caliphate. Caliphate. This was one of what historians call the Alid revolts that threatened both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, politically dangerous events for either dynasty's caliphs, because, for obvious reasons, the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad had political traction merely by being who they were. And interestingly, during this brief rebellion, Bashar sided with the rebels against the Abbasid Caliph Al Mansur. Bashar wrote to the Caliph Al Mansur, the length of life is not enduring. He who is now safe will soon be safe no more. Even upon the mighty king will destruction burst and smite him down in the narrow strait of death. The days ahead may come in lucky guise, or they may appear scout howling with all too manifest hardness over the final Umayyad Caliph Marawan's head did the millstone of war pass. And his crimes were petty compared to those you have committed. You have devoted yourself to Islam, but it was to efface its ways and to leave its back bare to the fierce lions. And you did not cease doing so until religion sought the aid of its adherents against you. I will say to one who smiles decked in magnificence, who has become a generous lover of noble deeds, one of the descendants of Fatima, who sound the clarion summons to guidance, you are a lamp for the eye of the seeker of light. So, to be clear, in this satirical poem, Bashar explicitly told the Caliph Al Mansur, who was eight years into his reign, that Al Mansur was a terrible Muslim, that Al Mansur was worse than the Umayyad Caliph he had usurped, and that the descendants of Muhammad who were rebelling would be much better leaders than the Abbasids. These are fearsome criticisms, and to be equally clear, Bashar lived for two more decades after writing this poem. Some accounts survive stating that the poet altered the verses of the poem so that it turned its scorn on one of Alman's enemies. Instead, the poem that we just heard overall invites us to remember that although the new Abbasid monarchy was a totalitarian state, it was still a new squishy state where an inaugural generation of writers and intellectuals had a lot of political freedom. A different satire survives from Bashar in which the poet depicts the Caliph Al Mansur's brother as an unlikable miser, and it further suggests that the first Abbasid kings had a surprising degree of toleration for criticism and dissent. The relative political freedom of the early Abbasid period is also evident in Bashar's pieces dealing with Shauubiyya themes. Just as a reminder, the Sha' ubiya movement, or People's movement, was a Persian led cultural campaign against Arab domination in the early caliphates. In a poem we heard quoted earlier that mocks some of the conventions of the Qas, Bashur says that his ancestors were kings and not Arabs roasting lizards in the desert hinterlands. And just as Bashar strikes an irreverent attitude toward pre Islamic Arabs, he emphasizes that during the Abbasid Revolution of 750, Persian armies from the Iranian east led the campaign against the impious Umayyads, bragging that we we Persians restored the sovereignty into the family of the Arabian Prophet for the sake of God and of Islam. We Persians are wrathful with a most noble wrath. The meaning there is pretty straightforward. Everyone revered Muhammad and Islam. But a century after the Prophet's death, in Bashar's opinion at least, Persians were the most powerful torchbearers of Islam. Bashar's satirical poetry thus advanced some extremely contentious statements about Arabs and Persians in the early Abbasid caliphate and their relations with one another. It is remarkable that such Persian nationalism flourished openly in literary circles. If dissident poetry against Augustus and the Julio Claudians were written during the first decades of the Roman Empire, none of it survives. But to continue our consideration of Bashar's satirical poetry, not all of it was so gutsy that it criticized actual Abbasid caliphs or denigrated Arabs more generally. In a few pieces, Bashar makes fun of specific people who pretend to have impressive Arab lineage that's just made up. And though he was obviously proud to be a Persian, some of Bashar's satire sounds like the old Hijah or satirical poems of the pre Islamic period period when a tribal spokesperson slammed a Rival clan Bashur satirizes a tribe called the Bani Zed in one of his poems. I have tested the Banizaid, and there are no traits of good sense among their tribes elders, nor among their youngsters. One who is decent tell the curses upon you. My odes are thunderbolts smiting high land and lowland alike. They gather the children of adultery into their numbers so that their number exceeds that of all mankind. This sort of satire, again a poetic invective against an entire tribe, was at least 200 years old in Arabic poetry by the time Bashar disparaged the Zayd tribe. One of the common Structures of 8th century Arabic satirical poetry was something with which you might be familiar with familiar. Let's say you wanted to satirize me. You might say, doug, I'm not going to be mean, I'm not going to satirize you. But if I were going to satirize you, I wouldn't say X, Y and Z. And if I did satirize you, well, let's just say you'd be limping for a week afterward. This is an ironic literary device called apophysis or paralepsis. You say something by saying that you won't say say it. Some paraleptic satire survives from Bashur and its delightful stuff, once again striking at perilously high targets. Bashur advised a member of the Abbasside royal family, seek my good pleasure. Seek not to embroil yourself with me. The feeble and decrepit cannot bear the loads I impose. Close. A moment later, passive aggressively, Bashar tells the recipient of his satire, how noble is this Abbasid man of the Koreish tribe. We deny not his claim to kinship with the Prophet, even if he be the son of an ignoble mother. His ancestors are lions of the tribe when they return in the evening to a feast, but jackals of the tribe when they face the in this poem and other satires like it, Basher acknowledges the merits of his satirical targets while at the same time coming down hard with his critique. Although we don't associate poetry today with political power in many pre modern societies, including old Irish, Anglo Saxon and Norse ones, we'll soon get to know a stinging color, especially if it contained some kernel of truth, could be a devastating weapon once it went into circulation. Basher compares his poems at one point to cauterizing irons which brand the flesh of his targets. And it's thus no surprise that even his paraleptic satires, which hold back and strike surgically, had real power in the 750s, 760s and 770s in summation. Then, in his satirical poetry, Bashar got away with a lot. He made fun of the Bedouin ancestors, of the Arab gentility of Basra and Baghdad. He said Persians were of a truer and more storied nobility, descended as they were from ancient monarchies and noble houses. He mocked Abbasid social climbers for making up impressive Arab genealogies. And most remarkably, he lampooned the Caliph Al Mansur and Al Mansur's brother and another Abbasid relative. And when the ever compelling descendants of Ali Ibn Abi Talib rose in rebellion in 762, Bashur backed the rebels, and he continued to live and work in the caliphate afterward. Eventually, in 783, Bashur did take it too far. As we learned earlier, as the Caliph al Mahdi delegated his managerial responsibilities to Persian bureaucrats, Bashr said that Persians were effectively ruling the caliphate and that the Umayyad caliphs might as well wake up and return to rule the Islamic world. From an old Persian poet already smirched with a long history of political dissent against the Abbasids, this criticism was a bit too much, and it cost Bashar his life. Still, though, Bashur's long career as a brazen satirist suggests that the early Abbasides permitted a remarkable degree of criticism and nonconformity among the artists and intellectuals of the court. The Islamic Golden Age would not have happened beneath a totalitarian theocracy that micromanaged its scientists and literature. The Islamic Golden Age happened because its urban centers were like Hellenistic Alexandria and classical Athens, vortexes of money, opportunity, and very energetic and talented people. The Abbasid Empire was a monarchy, certainly, but it was also something new, amorphous and improvised. And in its first decades, courageous and outspoken writers like Basho helped set the stage for the renaissance that would unfold over the next few generations. So we've heard enough to have a sense of Bashar's love poetry and his satire. Let's spend a bit of time considering what we might call his philosophical poetry. In addition to writing about their love affairs and broadcasting their various vexations and jealousies in satirical pieces, early Abbasid poets also entertained audiences with poetry that mused on the ups and downs of the human condition. Abbasid civilization was Islamic, and so, of course, Quranic truisms and more broadly, the norms of Muslim society figured into the philosophical poetry of poets like Bashar. Bashar evidently had a young son named Muhammad who passed away as a child. And on the subject of his lost boy, he reveals that he sunk not under grief but turned to God for comfort. A moment later in the same poem, Bashar I seem to be a stranger in life since the death of my son Muhammad, and after him death is no stranger among us. I must endure with long suffering the loss of the best of youths. Were it not for my reverence for God, long would have been my lament. Close Quote these are sad lines, but they're not complicated. Upon the loss of his little boy, Bashur was devastated, but faith in the providence of God was a consolation that kept him from losing himself to grief. In a sad, searing metaphor about the loss of his child, Bashar a vanguard party of us set forth in the morning, and a late starter traveled in the heat of the day in the tracks of the earlier ones. But this late starter, meaning the child never got far down the road. Toward the end of his elegy for his son, Basha writes, we are all just like the jostling crowd that has gone before, victims of a few fate which sometimes misses the mark and sometimes strikes home. Those again, are not philosophically complex statements. Grief for the departed is part of life. In another doleful line, Basha writes, time has swept away necklace and bangles, and my tears have flowed copiously from mortality. I have lingered on for a day which is far fast approaching, while my dear companions have already passed on in death. And while Bashar's poetry looks death very directly in the face, just as he does with love, the poet understands death as something as natural as it is non negotiable. Bashar writes, if you do not at times drink a bitter cup and endure it, you must go third thirsty. What man is there whose drink is always limpid or put differently in another man's perishing is one of his plagues. How hard to find would be one untouched by the wretchedness of perishing? The transience of mortality has been a subject of poetry ever since the Epic of Gilgamesh, also written in present day Iraq. Although eons before the birth of Bashar IBN Burd, mortality is rarely given an enthusiastic thumbs up by human critics, and yet each generation copes with it as best we can. In Bashar's case, a meditative resignation is most generally the attitude that we see toward death, as when he writes in some simple, relatable lines, Quote I was created with such qualities as I have given no choice of my passion. Had the choice been left to me, a clever fellow would I have been. I desire and am not given it. I am given when I did not desire my wit is too small to fathom the secrets of Providence. I sought to ride on fortune's back in hopes that it might prove propitious, though fortune is so stubborn a beast. This is Bashar Ibn Burd's wisdom poetry at its best. Just like the Roman poet Horace does in his Epistles, Bashar takes a good long look at himself, doesn't feel especially impressed, and accepts the unalterable ground of fate. There is a self conscious modesty in Basher's more philosophical poetry that's a bit surprising after coming to it from his more incendiary satirical works. He writes about the importance of friendship with self conscious humility, emphasizing how vital it is to forgive I will be reconciled with my friends and pardon my close companion for any hasty deed he has incautiously committed. How should I not pardon, even if he has vexed me when my own soul is vexed by the deeds of my hands? In other words, with ample awareness of our own mistakes, it's only natural that we forgive the mistakes of others close to us. And although elsewhere in his poetry, Bashar trumpets a regal Persian lineage that is probably fictitious, in his philosophical verses he says that being high born isn't anything to lord over others. Rare is the man whose forefathers are unblemished and his mother stock of fairest fame. These must have been surprisingly crowd pleasing lines in the court life of Basra and Baghdad, advising as they did, mildness, humbleness and forgiveness. In our previous show, as we read Ibn Al Mukaffah's Kalila and Dimnah, we learned that the text was intended to be a mirror for princes and a book that cautioned the powerful against anger and hasty action. In just the same way, Bashar IBN Burn's philosophical poetry, which paints all of humanity as fallible and subject to the same ultimate fate, was surely very healthy stuff to have circulating amidst the braggadocio and posturing of the early Abbasid aristocracy. It's always important to remember the performance context of pre modern poetry. Historian Hugh Kennedy writes of Basher that quote he always prepared for his public recitations by clapping his hands, clearing his throat and spitting first on one hand and then the other. Then, then he would launch into performances. I'm not sure why he spat into his hands by the way, though, damn, it sounds weirdly formidable. I would probably listen to someone who spat into each palm before speaking, but to not get distracted by that stage move. Bashar Ibn Burd was a serious performer as well as a careful composer of verses. We've heard some of his love poetry and some of his satires, and just now some of his more philosophical poetry. And we can imagine that when he stood up in a posh dining hall or walled garden or even throne room, he moved from genre to genre of his own poetry strategically in order to make any given performance the best that it could be. Maybe he'd start with a tender love poem and then, hearing cynical scoffs in the audience, offer up a less sentimental love piece, and then, with the audience warmed up, launch into a satire, and then another satire, and then, before the mood got too feisty, some mellower philosophical poetry urging humbleness to bring tempers back down and on and on. And almost any of his performances would have involved a genre of poetry we have not yet discussed. Dust. This genre, for thousands of years across many continents, was literature's main moneymaker, the cash cow that no matter what else you wrote, you had to be good at. In this genre, brilliant poets offered florid, hyperbolic praises to rich patrons who were either too stupid to know they were being flattered or too steeped in court culture to care. This genre is called the panegyric or praise poem. And although panegyrics to patrons are one of those same stuff, different century things in cultural history, they were nonetheless a big part of a professional writer's life for many centuries and always worth taking a quick look at. If I had to summarize the panegyrics or the praise poetry of Bashar IBN Burd in just two words, those two words would be surprisingly good. Bashar can be formulaic with his plaudits. He compares his addressees to lions and their martial bravery, and he discusses their generosity and their admirable ancestry, just as Merovingian court poets had been doing for generations over in Frankia, and Roman court poets had done long before that. He thanks his patrons profusely for the gifts that they've given him, such as, quote, lavish wealth, slave girls and slaves from the Caliph Al Mahdi, and more slaves and silk from an Abbasid governor of Basra. He is quick to point out the noble lineage of his Abbasid patrons, emphasizing in one poem in regards to Al Mahdi, that on him you can see the mark of the Prophet Muhammad. And as for the Abbasid clan, more generally, the blood of the Prophet is infused into their blood as thick honey mingling with water of the rain cloud. These are all standard moves in the panegyric playbook. Tell kings that they have great big scepters, that you appreciate their generosity, and that their ancestors were stupendous. Yet within Bashar's praise poems there are elements of both literary ingenuity as well as perhaps some degree of sincerity. For the wealthy men who signed his checks, Bashar left behind a long panegyric to the Caliph al Mahdi. Al Mahdi III, Abbasid Caliph, was on the throne between 775 and 785, and he was ultimately the emperor with whom Bashar had the closest relationship. Bashar's praise poem to Al Mahdi is both formulaic and original. The poet tells his the earth is refulgent with Almaty's excellencies, as though a borrowed light were added to the sun. Telling someone that they are as bright as the sun is a stock comparison, but saying that their presence added some ineffable additional brightness to the daylight, as though some secret luminescence had come to earth with them, that is pretty decent poetry. And in a different poem, in lines intended for the caliph, al Mahdi's vizier, Bashar, beneficent the vizier is, and spendthrift in the manner of his wealth, when he goes out at morning or returns at night, is like the ocean's ebb and flow. Bashar could have just said that the vizier was as generous as the rain, but instead the poet compares the vizier's munificence to the continual force of the ocean's tides, as constant as it was bountiful and natural in what is maybe the loveliest flight of poetry in Bashur's panegyrics. Once again in his praise poem to the Caliph al Mahdi, Bashur writes a long passage emphasizing just how far off Al Mahdi was from ordinary people, Bashur tells us quite to reach such a man's presence I have assaulted the sandhills and plains which separated him from me, urging on my high bred camels made fit on barley mash and green fodder for oppressing or overmastering business. Camels which tread on sand hot as embers of acacia wood, when the mirage has begun to fall flicker and its intensity has veiled the dunes facing from every noontide a summer heat and a flood that you can see boiling, emaciated with travel, dropping their pace to a walk when the rider covers his face against the heat of the day, or swimming through the rain cloud until when they had reached the camp in the end, as guests of a protector who dissipates all cares, I came in the morning at sunrise to him whose hands rain gold on the visitors to his house. In this long sentence the traveler Bashar becomes an everyman figure, slogging through deserts and storms that humble all of humanity until finally he reaches the caliph al Mahdi. There is a sense of providence in the long metaphor. Bashar traveled and traveled through life, just as humanity went on and on without Abbasid leadership, until finally Al Mahdi appeared to offer guidance and succor to the beleaguered travelers of the human race. The praise poems of Bashar will probably never be revered as much as his highly figurative love poems or his brassy, whip cracking satires. Yet they were innovative pieces written by an ambitious craftsman who never wanted to just dial it in. It is natural to read panegyrics with some skepticism. As our translator for this episode, AFL Beeston, put it wonderfully back in 1977 There is little reality about the endless and wildly hyperbolical catalogues of bravery and generosity with which Abbasside poets extolled inordinately wealthy noblemen who occasionally took part in the intermittent skirmishing on the Byzantine frontier. Such pieces were for the most part designed simply simply to extract money from the person praised, and the poet would as readily turn to satire if his piece failed to produce as big a dividend as he had hoped. Panegyrics in any century are calculated and transactional meal tickets for otherwise hungry writers. At the same time, though, they can be both genuine in their praise and gratitude, as well as virtuoso in their art. Earlier in this episode, we read some of Bashur's satires. The biggest takeaway from those satires was that early Abbaside society tolerated a surprising amount of political dissent, even dissent aimed at caliphs and their families. Bashur's praise poems can teach us something just as interesting about the Abbasid aristocracy. The Islamic cities up and down the Tigris and Euphrates were full of people who had become very wealthy, most of all the caliphs and their families. These noblemen surely ran the gamut between dull and insipid on one side and fantastically intelligent on the other, between greedy on one side and magnanimous on the other. When poets like Bashar met patrons like Al Mahdi, personal relationships based on the appreciation of art began growing into an intercultural mix marketplace that would soon become the Islamic Golden Age, because the Islamic Golden Age did require some literal gold. As cynical as we can be about praise poems and patronage systems in a monarchical society, poets plates are filled with food purchased by patrons. After Bashar IBN Burd died, the caliph Al Mahdi's son Al Rashid and Al Rashid's son Al Mahmud, were great patrons of the arts and sciences. Al Mamun funding a translation movement responsible for preserving many of the texts that we still read today. As florid as they can sometimes be, then panegyrics in early Islamic society, some of them quite heartfelt, helped bridge the gap between artists and the lavishly wealthy and create an infrastructure for funding the arts parts. So that takes us through four of the main genres of Bashar Ibn Burd's the love poem, the satire, the philosophical or wisdom poem, and the panegy. Some of his works fit into more than one of these categories, and he wrote different kinds of poems as well. Today he is famous as an early Shauubiyya poet and a founder of a newer, more modern form of Arabic poetry suitable to the sprawling and dynamic world of the Caliphates. Our podcast's first two programs on classical Arabic literature have been both covered works by Persian writers Ibn Al Muqaffah last time and this time Bashar Ibn Burd. Bashr's two immediate successors in Arabic poetry were Abu Al Atahiya, born in about 748, and Abu Nawas, born around 756, both of them thus a generation younger than Bashar. Of these two second generation modern or Mudath Arabic poets, Abu Nawas is by far the most famous and influential, and he was half Persian on his mother's side. The literary heavyweights of the early Caliphal period were often Persians or half Persians, and it's long been a subject of fascination in Arabic literary history that so much seminal Arabic poetry during the 7 hundreds and 8 hundreds was set down by Persian writers on this subject. The 14th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun mused that during the life of Bashar, the Arabs, who had recently emerged from nomadic life, found the exercise of military and administrative command too engrossing to give them leisure for literary avocations, which have always been disdained by a ruling caste. They left such studies to the Persians and those of mixed race race. They did not entirely look down upon men of learning, but recognized their services, since after all it was Islam and the sciences connected with Islam that profited thereby. It's not a bad analysis, though it's a bit reductive. Ibn Khaldun tells us that Arabs had the affairs of state to tend to, and so when a couple of generations of Persian writers threw themselves into the production of literature and literary scholarship in Arabic, the Arabs didn't have any problem with it. That alone is an inspiring fact to remember. Bashr IBN Burd showed up pockmarked and homely. But his Persian extraction didn't bar him from entrance into the very highest echelons of Umayyad society. Bashur's poetry doggedly reminded his listeners of the glories of the bygone Persian Empire and the grime and hardship of Bedouin life. Life and Arab aristocrats all the way up to governors and caliphs listened to him and invited him back. But to return to the question of why so many ethnic Persians authored 8th and 9th century Arabic language texts, there are a couple of very simple answers. First, there were a lot of Persians. The Abbasids moved the center of the Caliphate's governance government into what had been up until very recently, Persian territory. The scions of the old Sasanian empire needed to pay their bills and they found what work they could. Second, as Bashar punctiliously reminded his audiences, Persian civilization was vast and complex, with its own nobility and bureaucracy that served them. When a new Eurasian superpower arose, the Persian intelligentsia had the experience, education and tact to partner with the caliphates in ways that were highly mutually beneficial. The progressive metropolises of the empire center drove various partnerships and collaborations. And Islam said that everybody was equal. And so it was quite natural that in Basra and Baghdad and elsewhere, Persians threw themselves into literary and scientific work alongside Arabs. Speaking of Islam, the new religion is palpable in Bashar's poetry. Those he criticizes are sometimes vilified as bad Muslims. Those he praises are sometimes depicted as good Muslims, stalwart and steady in their beliefs. In one of his saddest poems, he mourns the loss of his young son. But he says that faith in God's design took the harshest edge off of his grief. It's certainly no surprise that Islam is a feature in Bashar's poetry. The new religion was burning bright in the mid-700s, with some of its all time most important theological developments underway and more soon to come. However, while references to Islam show up from time to time in Bashur's poetry, they aren't very widespread. Poetry about love affairs after all. And the Khamrid or wine poems of Abu Nawas in the next generation, that's all about worldly experiences. Islam was an integral part of early Abbasid life, but Islamic law was still a work in progress. And the prophetic biographies of Muhammad, as well as the most important hadith collections were just starting to come into being. The stirrings of Shiism and Sufism were already already being felt by the mid-700s. And although the Quran was codified by the time. The Abbasid Caliphate began in 750. Exegesis and cultural differences led to the Islamic world having its own regions and divisions. Further, as is always the case in any civilization, in addition to the interplay of majority and minority religions, there were surely those whose dispositions were not very spiritual in nature, and thus an entire spectrum of Abbasid citizens must be imagined who played by the civilizational rules but did not participate in any religious activities with real earnestness. A few episodes ago, when we discussed the Rashidun Caliphate, I used a map of the Rashidun Empire as the episode's cover. Graphic maps of imperial expansions are always a useful way for us to get a sense of the scale of the military activity of several generations. The maroon part of the map showed the bits that the Rashidun Caliphate gobbled up. The cream colored part showed the bits that the first caliphate did not. It's important always to understand history at the continental scale. At the same time, though, it's important to understand history at the least local scale, as we can when we read certain kinds of primary texts, among them the urban poetry of the empires. In the modern Anglophone world, we commonly understand the Romans as a bunch of brutes who killed each other in coliseums in between building aqueducts and enjoying orgies. The poetry of Horace, Propertius and Ovid help correct this misconception because it's a gateway into the complex networks of personal relationships, economic entrepreneurship and patronage systems that were the real fabric of Augustan Age Rome. In just the same way, if all we know about the early caliphates is that they practiced Islam and fought Frankish armies in 732 at the Battle of Tours, we might misconceive of the entire Umayyad and Abbasid empires as great masses of Muslims practicing Shari' ah and speaking a ton of Arabic. Over the past couple of episodes, though, through the fiction of Ibn Al Mukaffah and the poetry of Bashar Ibn Burd, we've learned a bit about what the early Islamic empires were actually like. As scholar Salma Jayousi Early Muslim society was full of tensions. A new hierarchy was emerging, different from the old tribal order and quickly acquiring status as the source of power and wealth. Society was moving steadily towards a more urban way of life. The sudden thrust of a Bedouin people through conquests into a completely different world also caused a kind of anxiety. It needed more than four generations of Islam and urbanization to obliterate the effect of the pre Islamic days and ways of the Arabs and to bring in basically different attitudes more suited to the spirit of Islam. In other words, 8th century Islamic civilization was uneasy, and new power relations, as we've discussed throughout this episode, made entire segments of society feel disenfranchised. But in cities like Basra, poetry and literature more generally were a pressure release valve. When Bashar was young, he could watch the poetic celebrities of the previous generation, Jarir and Al FA Razdak, throwing gross and hilarious verses at one another and laugh his ass off along with everyone else in the crowd. As Bashar grew older, he could compose original poetry and find that although some echelons of Arab society were closed off, to him, the Arabic language was public property for anyone with talent. As Bashur came of age and had his share of romantic affairs, consummated and unrequited, he could chronicle them in the escapist stanzas of love poetry, a genre that in giant empires is often a place for artists to cherish and contemplate their private and personal worlds when public life feels unjust and incomprehensible. As he wrote his own satires, he put into words what many citizens around him were thinking. And in all of these cases, Arabic literature was immediately that connected the past with the present, the individual with the collective, and helped the regions and cultures of a disoriented new world get acquainted with one another. In the mid-700s, in freshly constructed megapolises up and down the Tigris and Euphrates, a newfangled composite of humanity came together. They spoke a lot of languages, and they were from all over place. The the world, the Caliphate's heart, was a place of injustice and opportunity, of prejudice and equality, in which a thin aristocracy floated on top of a churning sea of slaves, freemen, laborers, artisans, contractors, hustlers, merchants, industrialists and moguls, and in which a status quo of Arab Muslim domination, even though it was barely a century old, was already being scorched by the brilliance of intellectual bootstrappers like Ibn Al Muqaffah and Bashar. Through concerted effort and merely by being themselves, Persians and others brought a wonderland of talent and artistry into Arabic culture. Translation after translation, book after book and perfection, performance after performance. Well, everybody, we are now most of the way through this season on early Islamic history, with just two more programs to to go. The past 17 programs have, over the past 40 hours or so, taught us the basics of Jahili history on the peninsula, the life of the Prophet Muhammad and the emergence of the Quran, the overall history of the first three caliphates, and most recently, how late Sasanian history and More generally, Persian people were central in shaping the early Islamic world. It has been a complex multipart series reason and I have intended it to be the Arabic word sawad was used to describe southern Iraq during the early Islamic period. It literally means black land or arable land. And just as the sawad was dark with rich soil, the Abbasid flag was uniform black. Both the blackness of the land between the rivers as well as that of the Abbaside stand standard seem appropriate to the world in which Bashar Ibn Burd lived and worked. Black, after all, is all colors swirled together. The Abbasid world was vast. It contained multitudes. All human cultures are mixtures. But early Abbasid Iraq was a mixture of mixtures. Just as Islam itself, as the Quran tells us us, holds the teachings of many different prophets. But from the rich loam of the Abbasid empire, as European vernacular literature slowly began being written down during the 7002 and 8002, Arabic and Persian literature was already moving forward at a dead sprint. Our writers over the past two episodes, Ibn Al Mukafah and Bashar Ibn Burd, could very well have been nudged into our future season on the Islamic goal of golden Age. These two writers, along with Bashr's immediate successors, Abu al Atahiya and Abu Nawas, departed from the majestic but somewhat static conventions of pre Islamic poetry and wrote about life in Abbasid cities. But I didn't want to end this season on early Islamic history with the ascension of the caliphates. Islam was wildly successful as a move movement, but it did not usher in a new monoculture that deleted everything that had come before it. The word for literature in Arabic is al adab. The word means both literature as well as good manners. As scholar Geert Jan van Gelder, the term adab is often applied to literary output that is entertaining and edifying at the same time, based on the notion that ethics and aesthetics should go together. Arabic literature, then, by the very nature of its name, is expected to enrich and teach as well as entertain. Just as the Roman poet Horace once wrote that poetry ought to be charming and instructing. The notion that literature teaches us stuff in addition to being fun, is not a sentiment over which Romans or Arabs or anyone else holds a copy of. Of course we learn from literature. That's part of why we crack open books. What's exciting for fans of literary history like us to explore is how different civilizations learn from literature and what they learn. The Arabic word for literature. Again, al adab inextricably links literature with courtesy and refinement. In Bashar Ibn Burd's Baghdad, the Quran and early hadiths drew out the beginning and the ends of things. They taught that Muslims needed to believe in God and the coming Judgment Day, to be kind, optimistic and forgiving, to fight when they had to, and overall to celebrate the boundless miracles of the divine creation all around them. But Al Adab was part of early Abbasid society too, supplementing the word of God with the wisdom of man. And although the word of God had come to earth through one West Arabian prophet, the wisdom of man was a giant arena with many different experts. Arabic poetry in Bashar Ibn Burd's age and certainly afterward, was an instructive thing, teaching its listeners and readers how to be smart, perceptive and articulate, how to imagine and reimagine the world around them them with figurative language like metaphors and parallelism, how to recognize malarkey and call it out with memorable witticism and above all else, how to take the sometimes lonely world of individual consciousness and share one's tiniest and most nuanced experiences with others through the precise use of language. These were some of literature's paramount roles in early Abbasid society, because teaching us how to be courteous, discerning and communicative is always something that literature is there to do. I am absolutely brimming with excitement to get to the Islamic Golden Age with you guys. In just the next generation of writers who followed Bashar, we have some of the heavyweights of world literature. The aforementioned Abu Nawas, born in around 756, the Basran polymath Al Jahiz in 776, the Abbasid princess and poet Ulaya bint al Mahdi in 777, and the itinerant scholar Abu Tamam, born in about 796. These writers and their frequently close interplay with key Abbasid caliphs were the dawn of a long renaissance in Arabic and Persian literary history. And I think that by studying them and their successors indeed, we will familiarize ourselves with literary traditions that are at the moment not very well known in the English speaking world. For the present, though, it's time to move forward to the penultimate episode in this season, and that episode will be on the subject of Sufism. Sufism, generally described as Islamic mysticism, is a big and diverse subject. Due to poetry by Rumi and Hafez, and due to the oversimplifications of 18th and 19th century orientalists, Sufism has sometimes been understood as a kind of lightweight Islam, more about universal oneness with God and less about Sharia and Hadiths. The truth is that Sufism's roots were very much Islamic, and many of the foundational figures of Sufism were Islamic scholars whose work began a movement more energetic and manifold than anyone could have predicted during the early medieval period. So next time in episode 128, early Sufism, we're going to learn the basics of Sufism, how it came to be, and why Sufism is so important to artistic and intellectual history in the Islamic world. Thanks for listening to Literature and History. I have a quiz on Bashar IBN Burd and his era available there in your podcasting app. Give it a try and see what you remember about our first classical Arabic poet. Again, my new book on Homer's Odyssey is available everywhere. If you want to experience literature and history's distinct combination of warmth, humor, and hardcore academic rigor on the printed page for everybody, I have a song coming up. This is a good one. You might want to listen to it, even if you usually skip them. But you know, no pressure and I'll see you next time. Either way, if you're still around by popular demand, I've recorded some more of the Odyssey in Homeric Greek, and in a minute I'm going to sing that to you while playing my lyre. This will be the opening of the Odyssey and maybe the most famous lines of ancient Greek poetry out there. It was really wonderful to do this. The Greek lyre is a pretty simple instrument, but it has this clear, insistent sound to it, like the voice of a whole civilization saying, don't forget about me. You wouldn't dare forget about me, would you? Anyway, whether it's because I'm playing an instrument I haven't played that much, or singing in a language that's not my own, when I did this, it felt like the intrinsic cadences of Homeric language just took over and the melodies and harmonies wrote themselves and the lyrics sang themselves. That was a really cool experience, and I don't believe in the Muses or anything, especially not when it comes to myself. But you've got to hear this. I'll play it in just a sec. If you're listening to this episode, there should be links in your episode notes to some 4K YouTube videos of me playing this song and another excerpt from Homer on camera and singing the lyrics just like Homeric bards did back in the day. If you like the sound of it, do me a favor and share those videos with friends and family. I actually couldn't find any footage on the entire Internet of someone playing an ancient Greek lyre while singing Homeric poetry such as was done during antiquity. So I made some videos of myself doing it. So this is Homer's Odyssey, book one, lines 121 as it was once sung and played two and a half thousand years ago. Sa. Su. Sa.