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)
Related papers
Commenting on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Between Philology and History
Les hymnes constituaient en Grèce antique un vaste ensemble, la plupart des cérémonies reli gieuses donnant lieu à des chants qui célébraient les divinités. De cette masse poétique et musicale, il ne nous reste cependant que des bribes, gravées dans la pierre des temples ou transmises par le papyrus et le manuscrit. Leur interprétation se prête tout particulièrement à un débat interdisciplinaire, car ces poèmes obéissent à des conventions formelles tout en ayant connu, pour certains, une utilisation rituelle avérée, et sont donc à la fois des objets pour les commentateurs de la poésie grecque et des sources pour les historiens des cultes. Leur étude oblige chacun à définir avec précision sa conception des champs respectifs de la littérature et de la religion, notions qui, dans le contexte du polythéisme grec, demeurent problématiques.
The Reception of the Homeric Hymns
2016
The Reception of the Homeric Hymns is a collection of original essays exploring the reception of the Homeric Hymns and other early hexameter poems in the literature and scholarship of the first century BC and beyond. Although much work has been done on the Hymns over the past few decades, and despite their importance within the Western literary tradition, their influence on authors after the fourth century BC has so far received relatively little attention and there remains much to explore, particularly in the area of their reception in later Greco-Roman literature and art. This volume aims to address this gap in scholarship by discussing a variety of Latin and Greek texts and authors across the late Hellenistic, Imperial, and Late Antique periods, including studies of major Latin authors, such as Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, and Byzantine authors writing in classicizing verse. While much of the book deals with classical reception of the Hymns, including looking beyond the textual realm to their influence on art, the editors and contributors have extended its scope to include discussion of Italian literature of the fifteenth century, German scholarship of the nineteenth century, and the English Romantic poets, demonstrating the enduring legacy of the Homeric Hymns in the literary world.
The Classical Review 71.1 (2021), 23-25
the second on reception in the time of the Muslim Ottoman Empire up to the present (replete with discussion of translations of Homer into Armenian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Turkish and Arabic, inspired by nation building and moves towards modernisation). J. Wolfe tells the fascinating story of Homeric editions, translations and artistic adaptations from 1488 (Chalcondyles' editio princeps) to 1649 (Homer in various art forms), followed by K.L. Haugen's essay on 'Homer in Early Modern Europe', which bookends with extended analyses of F.A. Wolf and J.J. Winckelmann. T.E. Jenkins shares his essay on Homer from 1900 with short entries on 'Homer and War' (P. Meineck), 'Gendered Reception' (L. Doherty), 'Homer in Social Thought' (Jenkins), 'Homer in Greece' (G. Syrimis), 'Postcolonial Perceptions of Homeric Epic' (E. Greenwood), 'Homer and Homerica on Screen' (M.M. Winkler), Homer in comics, TV and new media (Jenkins) and Homer in scholarship (A. Beecroft). H.A. Shapiro closes out the essays with 'Homer: Image and Cult'. Articles in this section include: 'Allegory' (Lamberton), 'Aristotle and Homer' (Lamberton), 'Chaucer and Homer' (D. Lawton), 'Dante and Homer' (B.E. Stevens), 'The Homeric Question' (Dué and Marks), 'Jean de Sponde and Homer' (C. Deloince-Louette), 'Vergil and Homer' (T. Keeline), with the last fittingly on 'Simone Weil and the Iliad' (A. Hall). The index is unfortunately very spotty, especially for subjects in Parts 2 and 3; an index locorum would have been useful. Other than the narrow focus of Part 1, the editors are to be commended for the great range and tripartite structure of this guide and for its mixture of essays and articles, covering many of the diverse pathways we take when reading and enjoying Homer. This is a valuable resource.
Poetic Language and Religion in Greece and Rome (ed. with J. V. García)
Poetic Language and Religion in Greece and Rome, 2013
This volume contains twenty-five contributions adapted from papers presented at the International Conference on Poetic Language and Religion in Greece and Rome, held at the University of Santiago de Compostela on 31tst May - 1st June 2012. The book fulfils two principal aims: to highlight the impulse and continuity of a research field that combines Indo-European and Classical Studies, which has generally been recognised for several decades as a very fruitful collaboration, and to provide the academic community with the current results of one of the most important topics of Classical Studies. The first part of the book focuses on the Indo-European tradition, tracking its remnants, particularly in the Classical languages. The Indo-European poetic tradition can be traced through linguistic reconstruction (formulae, onomastics) and some scattered mentions in literary texts. In the second part, the focus is placed on the poetic language in Greece and Rome. The rich and complex tradition of Classical literatures makes a clear-cut description of the inherited or innovative aspects of the religious and literary development more problematical. Ritual or cultic poetry, onomastics, phraseology, paeans and hymns, oracles as divine language, and magic all receive deep and thorough treatment from a reliable ensemble of scholars.
International Journal of Diachronic Linguistics and Linguistic Reconstruction, 2021
In this article I discuss the use of the augment in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (HH 4). First, I determine which forms are secured by the metre, using permitted elisions, metrical bridges and caesurae, and these metrically secure forms are called "type A" (with a certain augment (absence)). In a second step I investigate the forms that are not secure and check if their value can be established by comparing them to other forms in the epic corpus and/or certain morphological and metrical criteria; forms that can be analysed as such are called "type B" (with a preferred augment (absence)) and the forms for which this is not possible are called "type C" ("insecure"). Once the corpus has been compiled, I proceed to the actual analysis and (briefly) discuss the previous scholarship and the morphological, syntactic and semantic factors influencing the presence and absence of the augment, using examples from this Hymn and occasionally also from other epic works. In the last paragraph I apply these findings to the entire Hymn. I argue that the augment is used in this Hymn when actions pertaining to Hermes and his "opponent" Apollon (and Zeus's intervention to reconcile both of them) are related, but that it is not used when or background events or facts are mentioned (such as the birth of heroes or the scenic descriptions against which the events occur). This article concludes that Bakker's analyses for the Iliad and HH 3 (and those by Mumm and De Decker) are valid to this Hymn as well, but at the same time it also finds that there is also a considerable number of exceptions and they cannot be easily overlooked. 1 1 This article was made possible by a fellowship BOF.PDO.2016.0006.19 of the research council of the Universiteit Gent (BOF, Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds), by a travel grant V426317N for a research stay in Oxford (provided by the FWO Vlaanderen, Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen, Science Foundation Flanders), a Mobility Grant for a research stay at the Universität zu Köln and by a postdoctoral fellowship 12V1518N, granted by the FWO Vlaanderen. It was finalised while working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Universiteit Gent and as a visiting scholar in Verona under the ERC Visiting Research Fellowship programme Pre-Classical Anatolian Languages in Contact, PALaC (Grant Agreement n. 757299), under
Homeric and/or Hymns: Some Fifteenth-Century Approaches
The evidence of the manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns for how the poems were read in the 15th century. Michael Marullus synthesises them with other Greek hymns. Francesco Filelfo did use them - particularly the Hymn to Hermes as a resource for reflecting on the activity of praise.
"All The Famous Deeds of Achilles Are Yours": Homeric Exemplarity in Late Antique Panegyric
Arethusa, 2021
Late antique panegyrists often raise up their laudandi by casting a shadow on Homer and his (mainly Iliadic) heroes. This paper traces the history of an increasingly irreverent attitude towards Greece’s foundational poet and his heroes within panegyric compositions and asks what motivates this flamboyant rejection. The impact of a Christian mode of exemplarity is incontestable, but cannot wholly account for this development. Christian encomia which engage the Hebrew Bible for their synkriseis generally shy away from undercutting the venerable biblical exempla. My suggestion is that the “aggressive” attitude towards Iliadic exempla in classicizing panegyric is bound up with the position of the Iliad as the didactic text par excellence and as a central, yet deeply problematic, text in debates around ideal rulership.
It could hardly be denied that 'la scelta di un metodo esegetico comporta automaticamente un'idea di poetica', 1 and for this reason 'pare assurdo pensare che Aristarco non avesse idee proprie sulla poetica'. The problem is that we struggle to find positive evidence of them. But that should not be a surprise, since 'è troppo ovvio trovare scarsi indizi su questioni teoriche ed epistemologiche nei frammenti filologico-esegetici conservati'. 2 The history of research on this topic shows that this difficulty has not led to discouragement -quite the contrary. Two approaches have been explored and remain fundamentally in play. The first is the historical reconstruction of the two phenomena -the Athenian Peripatos and the Alexandrian Museum -and their respective contexts, accompanied by a focus on figures, circumstances, and situations where the two overlap. The second approach consists in recovering methods and content specific to each of the two cultural experiences, in order to document and measure at a formal level their degree of affinity and relation. Interaction between these two points of view is useful, and methodologically desirable, in order to prevent partial and unbalanced readings. In other words, once we admit in general and intuitive terms the difference between the two realities (philosophy and philology), the comparison of Peripatetic reflection on the art of poetry with the practice of Alexandrian philology on literary texts in the Hellenistic period will gain by focusing on the corresponding historical, conceptual, and critical categories, and by translating the 1 Montanari 1987, 17 ('the choice of an exegetical method automatically brings with it an idea of poetics'). 2 Both passages are from Montanari 1993a, 263 ('it seems absurd to suppose that Aristarchus did not have ideas of his own about poetics', 'it is quite natural to find only a few indications of theoretical and epistemological questions in the philological-exegetical fragments which are preserved'), who continues (n. 62): 'Che la Poetica di Aristotele non sia citata negli scolii è un'ovvietà che non dimostra niente: perché dovrebbe esserlo, a commento di quale passo (soprattutto considerando la riduzione del materiale)? Fornì invece strumenti di pensiero e posizioni critiche' ('That the Poetics of Aristotle is not cited in the scholia is a self-evident point that proves nothing: why would it need to be, in comment upon which passage (above all considering the reduction of the material)? Yet it provided tools of thought and critical positions').