Making the Hymn: Mesomedean Narrative and the Interpretation of a Genre (original) (raw)
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WHOSE HYMNS?: THE ARCHITECTURE AND AUTHORSHIP OF THE HOMERIC HYMN COLLECTION
A persistent problem in the scholarship on the Homeric Hymns concerns the organization of the collection: how, or indeed if, the poems are ordered. Several attempts have been made to explain the principle or principles underlying the order of the Hymns, but while these theories 1 account well for the disposition of most of the poems in the collection, they disagree in important places about where precisely to draw the boundaries between the majors subgroups of Hymns.
Myths as exemplum in the archaic Greek Melic poetry: Paideia and poetic tradition in song culture.
Seventh Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy with special emphasis on paideia, 2022
It is well known that, in oral societies such as Archaic Greece, the songs played an important role in disseminating the history of the community, the stories about their gods and heroes, ethical values and knowledge, becoming one of the main sources of formation of new generations. Therefore, the myths presented in the melic songs – the lyric par excellence – are not merely descriptive, but are often used to thread a moral maxim that builds a bridge to the current moment of the performance, and draw conclusions about life, death, family and the polis dynamics. This compositional strategy is called exemplum, and it was already developed in the Meleagre’s history in Iliad 9. In this paper, will be analyzed three melic fragments from different poets who compose with this rhetorical device differently, having the Trojan Myth as a commun theme: Sappho Fr. 16 (Voigt), Ibycus Fr. S 151 (Davies) and Pindar Pythian 6 (Snell-Maehler). Through these fragments, we will discuss (1) how the myths are introduced; (2) their relation with the performance, and (3) what values, lessons and/or knowledge are being linked in the song for the audience that hears it.
Lyric in the Second Degree: Archaic and Early Classical Poetry in Himerius of Athens
The Classical Quarterly, 2023
This article reconsiders the methodological issues posed by the reception of archaic and classical poetry in imperial rhetorical texts. It argues that references to ancient poems and poets in the works of imperial sophists are always already the product of appropriation and rewriting, and that the study of sophists’ engagement with poetry should go beyond Quellenforschung to explore how and why poetic models were transformed in light of their new rhetorical and imperial contexts. To illustrate this approach and its contribution to our understanding of both ancient-reception phenomena and imperial rhetorical culture, the article focusses on Himerius of Athens, a fourth-century c.e. sophist and teacher of rhetoric whose fondness for lyric poetry has caused his Orations to be used as a quarry for lyric fragments and testimonia. Himerius’ treatment of carefully chosen lyric models is here discussed with attention to his self-presentation and rhetorical agenda to show how the sophist app...
Greek Christian Poetry and Hymnography (2):
Oxford Handbook to the Early Church
Greek Christian hymns are a massive part of the surviving literary record of the early church, but have rarely attracted the level of scholarly attention that they deserve. This article discusses Greek hymnody; the classical origins of the Greek Christian hymns; the Bible and the ancient liturgy; stages of Syrian influence on Byzantine hymnography; hymns of the heterodox-orthodox Struggles; littérateur poets in Greek late antiquity; and the flowering of Byzantine hymnography in the sixth to eleventh Centuries. In Greek hymnody, one can see creed, antiphon, poem, prayer, song, and sacrament welded to form a seamless unity: here Byzantine theology, mysticism, and liturgical chant merge into a profound symbiosis in a programme that already consciously understood itself to be a the ology of beauty and of culture. The ancient hymn is thus a potent symbol, still awaiting its full articulation.
This paper explores how the complementary gods Dionysus and Apollo, in their very specific manner reflecting their essence, become present through song. It shows how, in both Homeric Hymns (7 and 3), song is the medium and the kernel of the inner story, while the choral performance of the diachronic past blurs with the present rhapsodic hymn in synchrony. Dionysus is focused as the epiphanic god per se, appearing all of a sudden, in a sketchy and enigmatic Hymn that elicits the recipient to decode his signs on the pattern of mysteries, whereas the long and winding Hymn to Apollo, put in several frames and pursuing Apollo’s career from his birth to his rise to full power, reflects his “palintropic harmony of bow and lyre” fusing in poignant and violent immediacy. corrected proofs