The Reception of the Homeric Hymns by Andrew Faulkner Athanassios Vergados Andreas Schwab

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 395 its own sometimes cumbersome and inelegant subtitle. The rationale for this is clear, but it does have the undesirable effect of significantly disrupting the reading process, a paradoxical quality in a work which seeks to deepen our fascination with the immersive potential of stories. University of Bristol Vanda Zajko The Reception of the HOMERIC HYMNS. Edited by Andrew Faulkner, Athanassios Vergados, and Andreas Schwab. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2016. Pp. xiv, 409, 17 figures. As the HOMERIC HYMNS offer stories and epithets about the gods not found elsewhere in ancient literature, and as they were often (but not always) ascribed to Homer, one might have suspected that they enjoyed a wide circulation in the Greco-Roman world. But that was not necessarily the case. The longer hymns are certainly part of performance in the archaic and classical periods but, other than Thucydides’ reference to the hApollo at 3.104.2–6, direct quotations or clear allusions to them are scarce in the classical period. Plato, for example, never mentions them in spite of his frequent reference to hymnic poetry. The Library at Alexandria most likely preserved a collection of the Hymns in some form (although certainly not in the form we have today) but there is no clear reference to them by Hellenistic scholars. In Callimachus and Apollonius one can occasionally detect learned quotations or strong verbal echoes, again mostly to the longer hymns, but here again verbal evidence is far more scant than one might have expected. Philodemus in the first century b.c.e. “may have brought the collection to Rome,” as the editors write (21). But, again, in what form? Even then the relative paucity of strong verbal echoes in Latin literature is noteworthy. A single copy of thirty-one hymns survives into late antiquity, it being the sole ancestor of the later Renaissance manuscripts, but our understanding of the transmission of the Hymns in the Byzantine period is limited. Only from the Renaissance forward can we clearly speak of influence and imitation. All this makes the study of reception, prior to the Renaissance, spotty and problematic. The volume consists of an Introduction by its three editors and seventeen chapters arranged in five parts. Part I on “Narrative and Art” comprises a single chapter, by Jenny Strauss Clay, containing a fine discussion of “representation” of stories in texts and on Greek vases. Focusing primarily on the hHermes, Clay suggests that a Caretan blackfigure hydria (circa 530 b.c.e.) “combines and compresses” (46) numerous scenes from the hymn (the theft and hiding of the cattle, the dais, and Apollo’s attempt to bind his brother, among others) into a compelling narrative of its own. She also proposes that the hymn was performed in the context of the symposium. Part II on “Latin Literature” (five chapters) jumps abruptly to the Roman period, followed by Part III on “Imperial and Late Antique Literature” (five chapters) and Part IV on “Byzantine Literature” (two chapters) before the study of reception gains firmer ground in Part V on “Renaissance and Modern Literature” (four chapters), which in this volume ends in 1826. To the editors’ credit, all of the chapters are unusually well integrated, due to a gathering of all the contributors to discuss pre-circulated papers. Prior to the Renaissance, much in this reception story remains speculative. Hard evidence is often lacking; attested parallels are more often than not thematic or structural rather than verbal or textual. One frequently reads contributors describing influences or reworkings as “plausible,” “possible,” “detected,” or even “weak.” With the paucity of 396 PHOENIX firmer evidence, the editors in the Introduction are overly confident, in my judgment, in asserting the Hymns’ popularity in the Hellenistic period and in making claims about intertextuality in this period. In particular, they are too quick to dismiss S. Douglas Olson’s detailed argument (8, n. 35)1 that many of the repeated phrases detected in this period stem from commonplace archaic hexameter phrasings. In short, the volume would have been stronger with a full chapter devoted to reception in the classical and Hellenistic periods (rather than the brief summary it offers, 4–15). Especially when dealing with...