Praising the God(s) Homeric Hymns in Late Antiquity, in A. Faulkner, A. Vergados, and A. Schwab (eds.), The Reception of the Homeric Hymns, Oxford 2016, 221-240, (original) (raw)

This paper studies the reception of the Homeric Hymns in some pagan and Christian poets of Late Antiquity. It offers some methodological remarks on ‘quotations’ or ‘allusions’ and re-use of epic code; and on the need to distinguish between instances of epic language reused by Late Antique poets and actual quotations or borrowings from the Homeric Hymns. After an overall view on the presence of the Hymns in some major poets of Late Antiquity (especially Nonnus of Panopolis, Proclus, the Orphic Argonautica), I deal with the reception of the Hymns to Hermes, whose presence can be detected in papyri, inscriptions and highbrow poems (either pagans or Christians) from the second century until the fifth century AD. I argue that in Late Antiquity the concept of epic code was extended to the whole Homeric corpus, probably by the influence of school education.