EVEN THOUGH Homer’s epics can still inspire Hollywood blockbusters, almost no one nowadays would dream of picking up a copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey and reciting from it. But if you have a heart condition, a couple of hundred lines read out loud before bed might be just what the doctor ordered. Lines such as these from the Odyssey — “Rather would I in the sun’s warmth divine/Serve a poor churl who drags his days in grief/Than the whole lordship of the dead were mine” — could be just the thing to lower your hypertension.

It’s not as eccentric as it sounds. Research by physiologists at the Witten/Herdecke University in Germany has found that reading Homeric hexameters aloud can change the rhythms of your breathing and blood pressure. The hexameter, which was commonly used in ancient epic poems, has six metres or rhythmic units a line which seem to be able to synchronise your heart and your breathing. This in turn, according to a study in the American Journal of Physiology, raises the amount of oxygen in your blood and improves the way the body handles blood pressure.

Yogis and chanting monks have long used breathing as a way of changing their consciousness, and lead researcher Dr Dirk Cysarz became interested in similar effects caused by reciting the hexameter. He learnt that the chorus and audience at performances in Ancient Greece would recite more than 10,000 lines at a time without pausing. “That must have produced feel-good effects,” he says. “Otherwise they would never have gone on that long.”

One effect of reading these lines aloud is to slow the breathing down from its normal rate of about 15 breaths a minute to just six. This in turn synchronises the breathing with the regular fluctuations in your blood pressure — known as Mayer waves — which usually go in ten-second cycles. Both these rhythms usually affect the heart independently, but their combination into a single rhythm amplifies effects such as the slight speeding-up of the heart when you breathe in and the fractional slowing down when you breathe out. One paradoxical and still poorly understood effect of this is that the amount of oxygen taken up by arterial blood is increased.

Possibly the most valuable effect of getting these rhythms to work in sync is that it seems to improve control of blood pressure via the baroreflex system, which raises and lowers heart rate as the body requires. “These days there is little attention paid to natural ways of controlling cardiovascular systems,” says Cysarz. “Physicians tend to give people drugs and leave it at that. But the hexameter breathing pattern improves baroreflex sensitivity, which makes it easier to control blood pressure.”

But if all that is going on with Homer’s lines is a change in breathing, why not ditch the poetry and just breathe more slowly? Finding out whether the poetry itself made a difference was one of the aims of the study. “We found that people got bored when they were only asked to breathe at that rate and it wasn’t so effective,” says Cysarz.

Not everyone is convinced. Juan Carlos Kask, of St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, who has studied the effects of transcendental meditation, suggests that other factors may be responsible for the difference between consciously breathing more slowly and the slower breathing that came with reading. He suggests that the vocal harmonics and differences in air intake volume involved in speaking may be factors.

However, Cysarz is convinced that the effect of poetry goes deeper. “The meaning of a poem keeps people involved but it also engages their emotions,” he says. “We deliberately chose calm passages to induce relaxation.”

CORRECTION: In a recent article on backache we referred readers to the British Chiropractic Association. The statutory body with which chiropractors must be registered is in fact the General Chiropractic Council. www.gcc-uk.org