A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter E

Echetus

Mythology
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Proverbially cruel and savage king mentioned by Homer as the ultimate example of tyranny and torture. His name became synonymous with merciless punishment in Greek rhetoric.

Detailed Definition
Echetus, a mythological king known for his extreme cruelty and barbaric punishments in Greek lore, symbolizes tyranny, moral corruption, and the feared consequences of unchecked power. In poetry addressing justice, ethics, or political critique, he serves as a cautionary archetype representing harsh despotism and the warning against abusive authority. Poets invoke him to heighten dramatic tension in narratives of retribution or societal decay, contrasting his brutality with ideals of compassion. This figure deepens explorations of human governance and morality, teaching students the use of negative exemplars in verse to illuminate virtue through opposition and to craft warnings that resonate across historical and contemporary contexts of power and resistance.
Example
Example in poetry:
Echetus, a cruel king in the Odyssey, symbolises barbaric savagery; A poet might compare a tyrant to Echetus; In moral allegory, he stands for inhuman punishment; His name heightens threat.
Additional Notes
Echetus appears in the Odyssey as a legendary cruel king used as a threatening comparison—"worse than being sent to Echetus, destroyer of all mortals." His reputation for extraordinary cruelty made his name proverbial, though specific stories about his tortures vary in later sources, including piercing victims with bronze spikes or mutilating them. For students analyzing Greek conceptions of tyranny and cruelty, Echetus represents the extreme end of despotic violence, serving as a measure against which other dangerous figures are compared. His appearance in Homer as an already-proverbial figure demonstrates how oral tradition maintained knowledge of figures who existed primarily as negative exempla rather than as characters in extended narratives. References to Echetus invoke extreme danger, the ultimate cruelty that mortals might face, and the spectrum of rulers from just kings to monstrous tyrants. Such figures helped Greeks articulate standards of proper and improper rule, using mythological examples to discuss political and ethical questions.
Also Known As
Echetus|Echetos
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