Remembering the God's Arrival

Abstract

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo is commonly believed by scholars to consist of two parts, one Delian, dealing with the god’s birth and his cult at Delos, and one Pythian, describing the foundation of his shrine at Delphi. Stylistic and thematic differences between the two parts are adduced to argue for their separate composition and subsequent joining. The partition is thought to occur at line 181, when the Hymn makes a new start after the poet seems to have taken leave of the god in good hymnic fashion. Although I believe that the (mostly analytic) arguments for such a division have to be thoroughly rethought in light of the recent advances in our knowledge of archaic Greek poetry, the separate origin of the two parts can not in itself be disproved. What is important, however, is that we stop concentrating on the act of joining, or on the joint, and direct our attention to the recomposition of the resulting complex hymn. In what follows, I will draw attention to the cognitive aspects of archaic Greek poetics as a dimension in which the “unity” of the two Apollos is as evident as the preexistence of his constituent parts. Following good hymnic practice, I will “start from the god.” In fact, the main subject of this paper is a starting point, the beginning of the Hymn (lines 1–13), which I have reprinted below (underlined phrases will be discussed later on):