The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Introduction, Text and Commentary

733 Pages·2012·11.55 MB·English

by  Athanassios Vergados

I
Athanassios Vergados
TheHomeric Hymn to Hermes
II
TEXTE UND KOMMENTARE
Eine altertumswissenschaftliche Reihe
Herausgegeben von
Siegmar Döpp, Adolf Köhnken, Ruth Scodel
Band 41
De Gruyter
III
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes
Introduction, Text and Commentary
by
Athanassios Vergados
De Gruyter
IV
ISBN 978-3-11-025969-8
e-ISBN 978-3-11-025970-4
ISSN 0563-3087
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Table of Contents V
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII
Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IX
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Summary of the poem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Music, poetry, and language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1 Hermes’ two songs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 Hermes’ songs asmise en abyme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2.3 Semata, poetry, and prophecy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.4 Hermes’ deceptive language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3. Humour in theHomeric Hymn to Hermes . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4. Relation to archaic literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.1 Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
4.1.1 Vocabulary:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Words attested thus far only in h.Herm. (42) – Words
which h.Herm. shares with Hesiod but not with Homer
(42)– Words and phrases used inh.Herm. differently than
in Homer and/or Hesiod (42) – Words not attested in
Homer and Hesiod (43)– Miscellaneous: atticisms, use of
special vocabulary, further peculiarities (45)
4.1.2 Formulaic Phrases:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Doublets withinh.Herm. (48)– Meaningful substitutions
(49)– Verbal echoes of other archaic hexameter poems in
h.Herm. (52)– Formulaic phrases confined toh.Herm. (56)
4.2 Metre and prosody . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Dactyls and spondees (57)– Caesurae, bridges, word-ends
and enjambment (59)– Other prosodic features (62)
4.3 Thematic correspondences betweenh.Herm.and other ar-
chaic hexameter poems: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
VI Table of Contents
H.Herm. and the Odyssean tradition (65)–H.Herm.
and Hesiod (67)–H. Herm. andh.Apol. (70)
Appendix: oral or literate composition?. . . . . . . . . . . . 73
5. Relation to other literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.1 References to the story ofh.Herm. in other authors . . . 76
Alcaeus (76)– Hellanicus (78)– Sophocles (79)– Aratus
(86)– Nicander (87)– [Eratosthenes] (88)– Eratosthenes
(89)– Hyginus (92)– [Apollodorus] (93)– Lucian (97)–
Philostratus (100) – Antoninus Liberalis (101) – Metio-
chus and Parthenope (103) – (cid:2)D on Il. 15.256 (104) –
Pausanias (105) – IG XIV 2557= Epigr.Gr. 1032 Kaibel
(105) – P.Oxy. VII 1015 (105) – Nonnus (107) – Sum-
mary and Conclusions (108)
5.2 Allusions toh.Herm. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
h.Hom.Pan (110) – Antimachus (111) – Sotades (112) –
Antigonus Carystius (113)– Apollonius Rhodius (113)–
Callimachus (117)– [Theocritus] (119)– Marcus Argen-
tarius (124)
6. Structure and arrangement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
7. Date and place of composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
7.1 Date of composition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Voss, Mythologische Briefe (131) – The seven-stringed
lyre (133)– Delphi (135)– Allusions to social or political
issues (136) – Rhetoric and music (138) – The glotto-
chronologic approach (142)– Other considerations (145)
7.2 Place of composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
8. The transmission of the text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
6Y(cid:3)(cid:4)(cid:5)« (cid:6)(cid:7)« (cid:8)E(cid:9)(cid:3)(cid:10)(cid:4) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Commentary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587
Illustrations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 647
Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 657
Table of Contents VII
Acknowledgments
This book, like the god who forms its subject matter, has travelled con-
siderably. It began life in the United States as a doctoral dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Vir-
ginia. It acquired its penultimate form in Lancaster, PA, where I was
working as a visiting assistant professor of Classics at Franklin & Mar-
shall College. And it assumed its final incarnation at the Seminar für
Klassische Philologie in Heidelberg.
My deep thanks go to my dissertation advisor Jenny Strauss Clay
for her constructive criticism and encouragement that made the writing
of the dissertation an intellectually enjoyable experience and confirmed
my choice of a commentary as my topic. I am also grateful to the
members of my doctoral committee, David Kovacs, Edward Courtney,
and Gordon Braden, for their comments on my dissertation.
Nicholas Richardson generously made his material on theHymn to
Hermes available to me in advance of the publication of his Green and
Yellow commentary on three of theHomeric Hymns. He also read and
commented extensively on the dissertation as well as the revised manu-
script. William Furley read the final version of the entire manuscript
and made observations on all kinds of matters, from English style to
textual criticism. James Diggle, Douglas Olson, and David Sider also
commented on large sections of the book, for which I am grateful.
Parts of the introduction were presented at professional meetings:
at the 2006 Convention of the American Philological Association in
Montréal, where Nancy Felson and Ann Suter contributed construc-
tive comments, and at the 2006 CAMWS convention in Gainesville,
Florida. A draft of the commentary on lines 212–77 was discussed at
the Commentary Writing Workshop organized by Douglas Olson and
Alexander Sens at the University of Minnesota. My thanks go to both
the organizers and the participants (Marco Fantuzzi, John Gibert,
Kathryn Gutzwiller, Hayden Pelliccia) for the lively discussion and
helpful comments. Various sections of the introduction were also pre-
VIII Acknowledgments
sented in Lyon, at the conference “Les Hymnes de la Grèce antique:
Entre littérature et histoire” organized by Pascale Brillet-Dubois, Na-
dine Le Meur-Weissman, and Richard Bouchon, and at the symposium
“Fiction, Truth, and Reality” in Katowice, Poland.
My research was partly funded by a faculty research/professional
development fund at Franklin & Marshall College. I am also grateful to
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for granting me a two year
long research fellowship.
Nikoletta Kanavou, József Krupp, Cecilia Nobili, and Andreas
Schwab read shorter portions of the work. Zsolt Adorjáni, Cecilia No-
bili, Polyxeni Strolonga, and Oliver Thomas kindly shared their docto-
ral dissertations or their work on the Hymn to Hermes in advance of
publication; and Menelaos Christopoulos discussed theHymn with me
and shared some of his material on the poem.
I would also like to thank Piero Boitani and the Fondazione Lo-
renzo Valla for allowing me to use a modified version of F. Càssola’s
critical text and apparatus. For the images included in this book, I am
grateful for the help of Tyler Jo Smith (Virginia); Charles Arnold, Al-
lexander Villing, and Alice Moschetti (British Museum); Anne Coulié
and Céline Rebière-Plé (Louvre); Anne Schulte (bpk/Metropolitan
Museum of Art New York); and Daniel Dalet for the map of Greece
that I have used to illustrate Hermes and Apollo’s journeys in the
Hymn.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Senior Editor for
Classics at Walter de Gruyter, Sabine Vogt, to Katharina Legutke and
Katja Brockmann, and to the Editors of De Gruyter’sTexte und Kom-
mentare for including my book in their series, and especially Ruth Sco-
del for her remarks on the manuscript.
Heidelberg, August 2011
Abbreviations IX
Abbreviations
For Greek authors and works I use the abbreviations in LSJ9, with the
exception of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes which I abbreviate as
h.Herm. instead of h.Merc. to avoid the awkward combination of
Hermes and Mercurius in the same line; accordingly, for the sake of
uniformity, I abbreviate the majorHomeric Hymns as follows:h.Dem.,
h.Apol., h.Aphr. Roman authors and works are abbreviated according
to the OLD. For journals I use the abbreviations of L’Année Philol-
ogique. For papyrological sources I follow the Checklist of Editions of
Greek, Latin, Demotic, and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets
(http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/clist.html).
The following abbreviated references are also used:
An. Ox. Cramer, J. A. 1835–37. Anecdota Graeca e codd.
manuscriptis Bibliothecarum Oxoniensium, 4 vols.
(Oxford).
AS Allen, T. W. and Sikes, E. E. 1904. The Homeric
Hymns (London).
AHS Allen, T. W., Halliday, R., and Sikes, E. E.21936.
The Homeric Hymns. (Oxford).
Bechtel,GD Bechtel, F. 1921–24. Die griechischen Dialekte,
3vols. (Berlin).
Beekes Beekes, R. S. P. 2010. Etymological Dictionary of
Greek, 2 vols. (Leiden).
Bouché-Leclercq Bouché-Leclercq, A. 1963 (repr.) Histoire de la
divination dans l’antiquité, 3 vols. (Paris).
BuckGD Buck, C. D. 1955. The Greek Dialects. Grammar,
Selected Inscriptions, Glossary. (Chicago).
CA Powell, J. A. 1924.Collectanea Alexandrina. Reli-
quiae minores Poetarum Graecorum Aetatis Pto-
lemaicae 323–146 A.C. Epicorum, Elegiacorum,
Lyricorum, Ethicorum (Oxford).