Lately, I have been reading (and sometimes rereading) classic literature. My goal is to go back to the original books that have influenced the written art that we consume today, looking for early uses of the techniques still employed in modern writing.
Naturally, I had to reread the Iliad and the Odyssey, given their impact on literature. I haven’t read them this closely since middle school language arts class. This was also my first time reading it as a full-fledged adult with a more mature perspective than I had as a teenager. After I finished reading them, I wanted to understand the context of these stories more, so I engaged in a bit of research surrounding what we know of these stories.
Most people are probably familiar with the idea of these tales coming down to us first as stories told orally from generation to generation before Homer put them in writing. That being said, I don’t know how common knowledge it is that the Iliad and Odyssey are only two poems of eight total. The other six poems of the Epic Cycle have been lost to time; there is enough surviving material to know about the main ideas, however the remains are fragmentary.
Even though we have bits and pieces of these stories, it doesn’t fully contextualize the events that occur in the remaining poems for a modern audience, especially given the general ignorance of these missing pieces. That is how I came to the main topic of this post: in medias res.
In medias res is a Latin phrase for “in the middle of things” and describes a commonly used writing technique. It is used to begin a story with a compelling hook to keep the reader engaged. I do not need to describe the impact that this concept has on writing: open a book at random and chances are it begins in medias res. This mechanism can be seen in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. Not only do the works themselves begin in the middle of either conflict or during a journey nearing its end, but modern readers also begin without the aid of the missing six poems. Which means that it may not have been as “in the middle” as it seems today.
Instead, these other missing works provided more context or details to an overarching story, poems lost both at the beginning and end of the Trojan War and its consequences. Since we know little about these works, we can’t be certain about why they were lost to time. One main theory is that these other works were simply not popular enough to be copied and passed down. It’s possible that the audience themselves were creating this in medias res formula due to their own preferences of storytelling. And it could be that the popularity that still exists today is related to this mechanism that, whether it is by the author’s intention or not, has an undeniable impact on modern writing.
And, to continue with this thinking, it shows the power that readers have. I have heard people theorize that the notoriety of current music, books, or shows can be traced back to the impact of social media and what is trending. However, I would argue that it is not necessarily limited to our modern world. In fact, it’s likely that this form of popularity is only being brought back to the natural state of consumerism that existed before corporations. The democratic means of popularity existed far before social media and can, with that logic, exist apart from it.
