The Unity of Callimachus' hymn to Artemis

Abstract

At the start of the section entitled ‘structure’ in his commentary on Callimachus'Hymn to Artemis, Fritz Bornmann notes that the third Hymn has enjoyed less success among critics than any other. ‘They lament’, he says, ‘the lack of unity'. And indeed, beginning with Wilamowitz, this has been not only the dominant, but the only view of the hymn. The latter part of the poem, said Wilamowitz, ‘macht trotz allen Künsten den Eindruck eines gelehrten Nachtrages' und es ist das auch’, he adds. Some forty years later K.J. McKay put it this way: ‘If there is a stronger unifying principle in this straggling composition than the idea of weaving together a number of disparate strands into a ‘historic day’ in the life of Artemis (with vv. 183–268 as a possibly unfortunate addition), it still eludes us'. And recently, Michael Hasiam has remarked on the poem's ‘disjointed tail section’. The hymn, to his mind, ‘progressively disintegrates, as the clear structural framework with which it started fades totally from view’. Even Herter, in his famous and influential essay on the hymn, ‘Kallimachos und Homer‘, echoes this opinion of the final third of the poem. The commentator Bornmann concludes: ‘this estimation is essentially correct’.