The Anatomy of Myth: The Art of Interpretation from the Presocratics to the Church Fathers by Michael W. Herren

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 397 Callimachus. When discussing Homeric Hymn to Ares, attributed by some to Proclus, van den Berg argues (pace West)2 that it lacks any trace of technical Neoplatonic vocabulary (although it does exhibit a longing for peace and a fear of madness found in other late pagan texts) and he sides with those who believe that the hymn was deliberately inserted into the Homeric collection in late antiquity. Gianfranco Agosti concludes this section, positing that a corpus of the Hymns, quite like the collection seen in medieval manuscripts, already existed in the fourth and fifth centuries c.e. Poets of the period liked to sprinkle in phrases and epithets from them for coloring. While Christians had their own tradition of hymnography, Agosti offers several examples of Christian hymns “usurping” a narrative structure from a Homeric hymn when celebrating the true religion. No manuscripts of the hymns from the Byzantine period survive; nor are there explicit references to them. In Part IV, Christos Simelidis explores the difficulties in looking for borrowings; he also discusses John Eugenikos’s inclusion of the Hymns with the Iliad and not within a hymnic corpus (see Bessarion, below) while Andrew Faulkner considers the Hymns in the context of Theodorus Prodromos’s praise poetry of twelfthcentury historical events. In Part V, Oliver Thomas lucidly delineates two Renaissance approaches, one placing the Hymns within the tradition of pagan Greek theological poems, the other, initiated by Bessarion, placing them at the end of Homer’s works. The latter prevailed. M. Elisabeth Schwab skillfully discusses the hAphrodite in the context of Poliziano’s Stanze per la giostra. Next, in a masterful chapter, Nicholas Richardson examines the Hymns as seen through the eyes of three English translators, one of whom, George Chapman, was the first to translate the Iliad and the Odyssey into English. Years later, turning to the Hymns, the Batrachomyomachia, and Epigrams ascribed to Homer, Chapman writes in 1624 that the work he was “borne to doe is done” (epigram at the end of The Crowne of all HomersWorkes, line 1). Richardson also discusses William Congreve’s Homer’s Hymn to Venus (1710) and Shelley’s Hymn to Mercury (1820). Andreas Schwab ends the volume with a look at Johann Heinrich Voss’s (1826) German translation and commentary of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (discovered in 1777), which Voss regarded as “the oldest memorial of holy bonds” (quoted by Schwab [356]). While much of the study of the Hymns’ reception in the ancient world is speculative, posing the question of their reception in the context of archaic art, Hellenistic and Augustan poetry, and prose from the imperial period and late antiquity stimulates rich observations both about the Hymns and the later compositions. When the question of reception is on firmer ground from the Renaissance to the 1820s the chapters in this volume are even richer. Boston University Stephen Scully The Anatomy of Myth: The Art of Interpretation from the Presocratics to the Church Fathers. By Michael W. Herren. New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. xi, 231. Herren explains his title from the etymological sense of “anatomy,” as the cutting up of myth to see what is inside, and his work intends to trace the different kinds of anatomies of myth, the kinds of interpretations made of myths from the time of Homer 2 M. L. West, “The Eighth Homeric Hymn and Proclus,” CQ n.s. 20 (1970) 300–304. 398 PHOENIX to the early Christian period. There is certainly a need for a good scholarly analysis of techniques of myth interpretation, but this book, alas, is not that, nor does it even take advantage of the recent developments in the scholarship on mythography and allegoresis to position interpreters within the larger context of myth collection and interpretation. Instead, this study tells a teleological story of myth interpretation as the gradual liberation of humankind from the tyranny of religion, led by a few bright lights from classical antiquity who pierced the veil of obfuscation that myth drapes over people trying to figure out how the world really works. The “new atheists” and Dawkins in particular are held up as the natural culmination of this centuries...