Robin Batteau - Banned in Sparta

Photo by Brook Batteau

As it stands, 2024.  I've been working on this since the Pandemic summer of 2021, when I went back to Harvard to get my degree ('Integrative Biology'— I asked the chairman of the department what that meant, and he said, "Robin, your guess is as good as mine.").  After a modern half-century Odyssey braving the captivating sirens and other dangers of the treacherous seas of the music world, I landed on a Cambridge island of red brick cliffs and green-grass canals where ancient poetry came to life and caught me in its spell.  Archilochus, the Bob Dylan of the 7th century B.C., a poet and a warrior for hire, so irreverent that he was 'Banned in Sparta,' like Batman comics in the 1950's, or 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and James Joyce's 'Ulysses' in the 1920's, left us only myths and fragments on shards of pottery and shreds of parchment, and I actually had the audacity, the unmitigated gall to assemble bits into a skeleton with lab-grown bones to fill it out like a T. Rex in the Natural History Museum, until it rhymed and came alive and moved me— like it said what Archilochus meant.

Because he was, like Dylan, a singer/songwriter whose intent only becomes clear with music, I added an extra to my 6-string guitar to make it 7 like the lyre of the 7th century B.C., the better to call the Muse and channel the song itself.  The Ancient Greek Lyric Poets from Sappho on down were called "Lyric" because they played the lyre, the guitar of the day, and danced around the stage like Taylor Swift and Joni Mitchell and Tom Paxton, drawing tears and laughter from audiences that meant as much to them then as audiences do today, essential parts of the loop that squares the circle unbroken.  As I stumbled on other such poets, I let the process repeat itself, letting the songwriting trance dictate the chords until they rang true.

I called on voices I first heard in the 1960's, our own Golden Age of singer/songwriting, to bring them alive again, Sappho, Praxilla, Corinna, Alcaeus, Telesilla, Anacreon, Simonides, Stesichorus, Gorgias, Catullus, Archilochus, in the vivid timbres of Carolyn Hester, Tom Paxton, Robin Lane, Livingston Taylor, Kate Taylor, Matt Nakoa, Eric Andersen, and the Broadway-primed family of Greg Naughton, Keira Naughton, and 2-time Tony Best Actor (and David Buskin's Brown University teammate) James Naughton.

So here's to the Ancient Greek Lyric Poets who may have seen the page for thousands of years but were still waiting for their microphone.

You're up.

This project is still a work in progress.
02/09/25: MP3 files updated to new, "Full Band" arrangements.

Play or download individual tracks:

Track	Title	Artist	Play/Download

Read/Download the Liner Notes (PDF - 838KB)