Homeric Hymn Research Articles

O “Hino a Hécate” de Hesíodo

Poucas divindades gregas possuem uma diversidade de representação tão ampla quanto Hécate. Enquanto nos períodos clássico e helenístico a imagem que parece dominar é a da Hécate deusa da magia e protetora das feiticeiras, no período arcaico sua ambiguidade é bem mais marcada: a Hécate que nos é apresentada no Hino Homérico a Deméter tem pouquíssimo em comum com a Hécate de Hesíodo. Nesse sentido, este texto tem por objetivo analisar a representação de Hécate na Teogonia (versos 404-452), tentando compreender os pontos de aproximação (e também afastamento) com outras representações da deusa na literatura grega.

From Choral to Monodic Hymns: Some Evidence from theHomeric Hymns

AbstractThis paper investigates internal evidence from the Homeric Hymns in order to trace the development from choral to monodic hymns. A study of the words humneo and humnos and the analysis of the embedded choral theogonic songs in the corpus of the Homeric Hymns show that women’s choral songs about gods are always identified as hymns, while the monodic theogonies, which are described in this corpus, are not identified as such. This division between choral and monodic hymns, reflected to some extent in the diction, is reconciled in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, in which the poet, representing a different genre, addresses and praises the Delian Maidens – the choral singers par excellence. As the Homeric Hymns evolve from cultic, choral hymns, they turn the local praise of gods into panhellenic encomia. Such transition is also alluded to in other sources, in which hymns are disseminated and adapted by male performers, as a result of a female chorus’ instruction.

Myth, Allegory and Inspired Symbolism in Early and Late Antique Platonism

Abstract The idea that mythos and logos are incompatible, and that truth is a product of scientific and dialectical thinking, was certainly disproven by later Platonic philosophers. Deploying the works of Hesiod and Homer, Homeric Hymns and other such literature, they considered myth a valuable and significant augment to philosophical discourse. Plato’s denigration of myth gave his followers an incentive to read myth as allegory. The Stoics and first-century philosophers such as Philo, treated allegory as a legitimate interpretive strategy. The Middle Platonists incorporated myth, for example, deifying the Monad and Dyad, as did 2nd century Platonists. Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris (2nd century CE), for example, equates Isis and Osiris with form and matter: the god (Osiris) sows in matter (Isis) logoi (forms or ideas) from himself (De Iside. 372F). Porphyry’s allegorizing of Plato’s Cave of the Nymphs is another example. Plotinus is a strong influence on how the late Neoplatonists regarded myth. This paper argues that these philosophers’ use of allegory prepared the way for the Neoplatonists treatment of myth as inspired symbolism. Proclus and Syrianus, as reported by Hermias, did something more extreme by using mythology to construct inspired symbolic argument. Mythos becomes another type of logos, a vehicle for representing the invisible world of being, another kind of truth that can even serve a function in anagogic ascent.

The Fourth Level of Life: White Noise in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Plato’s Phaedrus

The noise machine is dead.How shall we hear our dreams?Where are the crickets now?Slain by what frost? The streamsWith pebbles in their mouths,The ovation of the rain,The stations of unconsciousWe travelled to by train,The ghosting of the wind,The seashell’s undertow,Where have they gone? The nightFills with a sound like snow. -A. E. Stallings.1

Cave hominem

Abstract This article explores two episodes from Pseudo-Oppian’s Cynegetica which both feature domestic animals: the horse in 1.239-270 and the dog in 4.354-376. Both of these episodes are highly intertextual, alluding to, respectively, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and the abduction narratives from Moschus’ Europa and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. I argue that the poet of the Cynegetica invites his readers to reflect on the potentially problematic nature of the power dynamic for these animals through sophisticated allusions to the poetic tradition, through which the relationship between man and animal is compared to that between the gods and humans.

Metrical and morphological observations on the use of ἔθηκε(ν) and θῆκε(ν) in the Iliad

Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis » 2020 » Volume 137, Issue 1 » Metrical and morphological observations on the use of ἔθηκε(ν) and θῆκε(ν) in the Iliad A A A

Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips

Reviewed by: Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece ed. by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips Joel Lidov Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips (eds.). Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 315. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880582-3. The editors invite us to consider how we can appreciate the "literary" character of archaic Greek poetry. They open with a quote from Bowra that expresses his enthusiasm for the pleasure given by Sappho's artistry, emotional and imaginative power, and her exceptional character, and they suggest that, however out-of-date, it points our attention to the ways in which poetry fascinates, engages, challenges, and changes us when we experience it as audiences or readers. They urge such an appreciation as a complement to what they consider the now dominant "anthropological paradigm" (3; it includes the "New Historicism"), which focuses on the social function of performance and which they and other contributors associate especially with Bruno Gentili. Some contributors place themselves more in opposition to what Mark Payne defines as the paradigm's "characteristic hermeneutic position . . . the assumption that the discursive ambitions of Greek lyric poetry were so radically constrained by their original performance context that valid interpretation consists solely in relating them to that context" (257). The apologetics for different methods can seem excessive or unnecessary, but I found particularly valuable Anna Uhlig's extended critique (chapter 3). She starts from an analysis of the confusion of context and content in interpretations of Alcaeus's maritime poem as metaphors for the symposium, and then demonstrates the weaknesses of the scholarly justification and of the historicist argument in the allegorical mode central to Gentili's thesis. All eleven contributors respond to the editors' call for an investigation of the audience's encounter with lyric—the "event" of the title—with distinctive theses and emphases, and they select a variety of proof texts for illustration. Two overlapping procedures are recurrent. One looks at the internal dynamics of a poem: the relation among its parts rather than between the poem and its context, and the ways it draws the audience's attention to its status as a constructed object. The other rebuts a corollary of the performance paradigm, that a reperformance of a written text requires an interpretation different from the original. I will mention here the chapters I found most broadly useful. The first section of the book, "Occasionality," emphasizes the problem of context. Uhlig supplements her critique of previous theory with a "superficial" reading in which Alcaeus's attention to detail in imagined scenes creates a compelling "maritime aesthetics." The sea's mobility and the poems' lack of specific geographical position provide, by contrast and similarity, a means of expressing various experiences of terrestrial life. Gregory Hutchinson takes on the question of a poem's "setting," the internal placement often used as an index of its context. He demonstrates how writers in fact alter the setting within the poem as an expressive device, and illustrates this with insightful readings of Alcaeus and Horace. Somewhat oddly, he takes his readings as a prompt to propose that we [End Page 223] look for those "underlying features and forms" (132) that make literary analysis possible as if this were a new thing. The second section, "Conceptual Contexts," looks to implicit literary history. Henry Spelman's study, one rich in implications for the history of texts, takes on the core problem of reperformance. Starting with the poet's self-presentation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, he demonstrates how it illustrates the way in which a lyric, even one which must have had an original presentation, presents itself as an instance in a tradition of performances, making the distinction between an original and later readings moot. Tom Phillips, in a dense reading, takes up the opening description of the terror of a past eclipse as if it were present in Paean 9, and the shift to a mythic narrative and prayer. He teases apart the multiple voices inherent in the poetic language that alert the audience to the paean's artistic expansion of the tradition of eclipse poems and to its own...

Un nuevo comentario del <em>Himno a Hermes</em>

La presente nota consiste en una reseña crítica del libro de J.-M. Schenck zu Schweinsberg, Der pseudohomerische Hermes-Hymnus. Ein interpretierender Kommentar (Heidelberg 2017), el cual, editado a continuación de un gran comentario del himno a cargo de A. Vergados, The Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Introduction, Text and Commentary (Berlín-Boston 2013), podría en principio parecer redundante y al final se revela como un útil complemento del anterior, salvados, entre otros, sus puntos más controvertidos: la datación adjudicada al himno y el componente hesiódico de su dicción formular.

PROSERPINA IN PIECES: CLAUDIAN ON HER RAPE

antra procul Scyllaea petit, canibusque reductispars stupefacta silet, pars nondum exterrita latrat.(Claud. Rapt. 3.447f.) [The torch-light], farther away, reaches the cave of Scylla—her dogs drawn back,one part is silent with amazement, one part barks, still undaunted. With this climactic scene, the Latin epic poem De raptu Proserpinae by Claudius Claudianus (fl. c.400 AD) ends just as Ceres sets out to search for her lost daughter. The poem relates the myth primarily known from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter with a great deal of variations, the most crucial one being that mother and daughter, Ceres and Proserpina, are still not reunited when the poem comes to a close.

The augment use in theHomeric Hymn to Demeter(HH 2)

This article analyses the use and absence of the augment in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (HH 2). This is done in three steps: first, a corpus of forms with a metrically secure presence or absence of the augment is established based on metrical bridges and caesurae. Then, the forms without a secure augment are analysed and an attempt is made to determine the augment presence or absence in those forms via internal reconstruction and comparison. After establishing a corpus of forms with and without an augment, the article proceeds to analyse the use and absence of the augment, based on previous scholarship. The article will show that the function of the augment is determined by an interaction of different metrical, morphological, syntactic and semantic factors, and it confirms the augment as focus marker or emphasising tool for recent and new information

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse Michael Skafidas (bio) Literary self-expression is as old as literature. Autobiographical poetry, which until now has been an underrepresented research area, constitutes an underlying influence rooted in antiquity. As this article will demonstrate, autofiction—a neologism of the modern era—existed long before Serge Doubrovsky coined the term in the 1970s. The first-person narrative prose is not disengaged from the confessional subtleties of the lyric “I” that preceded it. Distinct though the standards of the two traditions are, they both rely on the authority of subjective experience in personal storytelling. Indeed, as argued by current scholars, autofiction is an intergeneric practice that is already ancient. How ancient? We can detect early traces of the weakening of the boundary between the self and the outside world in the works of Hesiod and in The Homeric Hymns. After them, Sappho appears as an example of an archaic poet whose intimate lyrical confessions generated an autofictional testimony driven by secret passions. In addition, as an early case of an autofictional poet, Sappho demonstrated in her poetry some of the generic features ascribed today to autofiction in that she tended to be both the narrator and the central character in her poems, used her real name, described “daily life often [End Page 85] inventing or modifying certain facts,” and did so “in search not only for truth and justice but for the self” (Tuck 1). Most significantly, I will juxtapose two foundational modern voices whose private and emotional verses, in harmony with Sappho’s unfettered lyricism, conveyed homoerotic desire as a legitimate autobiographical literary theme. As I see it, Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy, two poets standing on the two opposite ends of the world, the old and the new, east and west, in the crossroads of modernity, authored autofictional testimonies of the self and the body that anticipated the psychoanalytic inflections of the twentieth century and depicted desire as the kernel of existence, the “afflatus of the body,” in Whitman’s terms, that surges and surges into memory. Both poets rose above and beyond the general and the impersonal to remember the experience of the body and by doing so they ended up poeticizing the history of their personalities. Unlike autobiography, autofiction accepts the malleability and evasiveness of memory, as well as its inability to “provide an accurate representation of the past, even if identity is constructed largely based on our mnemonic capacity” (Ferreira-Meyers 213). Yet, as poets know since the days of Homer, memory is the ark of lost time, and literature is the art of reviving and exteriorizing memory that contains both fantasy and history. Long before the term was coined, the personal writing of Whitman and Cavafy prefigured the essence of autofiction as a “border area” (cited in Ferreira-Meyers 206), where recollections, fantasies, illusions, aspirations, cultural imagery rooted in the writer take form and content. Cavafy in particular came of age with the determination of the early twentieth century modernist artist to turn the imprecision of memory into the most trustworthy revelation about the meaning of a life lived amidst the negations of modernity. In Whitman’s and Cavafy’s autofictional poems the poets’ recollections form a narrative of confession. In Foucault’s analysis, the act of confession is described as a disclosure of knowledge “extracted from the body” (59). The confessional tone of Whitman and Cavafy and the emotional reciprocity their poems elicit activate the sensory channels of the reader. If reading, as Proust contemplated, is the “urging force” (49) that unlocks the gates of spaces we could not otherwise enter, the enterprise of reading Whitman and Cavafy entails a process of illumination in which the reader intuits feelings, sensations, and spaces previously unknown or beyond reach. Reading the two poets is a sensual act itself; the reader is drawn into a reverie that often awakens private notions of desire, and thus reading [End Page 86] triggers a response to an iconic language that involves both thoughts and senses. In the last section of this essay I will consider the intimacy between autofictional poetry and twentieth-century visual...

Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth by Ariadne Konstantinou

Reviewed by: Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth by Ariadne Konstantinou Vanda Zajko Ariadne Konstantinou. Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. xiv + 189 pp. 1 black-and-white map. Cloth, $102. Since feminism began to make its presence felt in the 1970s, and certainly since the publication of Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Greece in 1975, the question of the access of ancient Greek women to public space has been fiercely debated. What counts as reliable evidence for the experiences of women? How do the representations of women in literary texts relate to the material realities of their lives? And what is the relationship of myth, as broadly conceived, to other kinds of data? This book both summarises and evaluates these discussions by painstakingly working through a wide range of material relating to female characters in myth and mapping their trajectories through domestic, civic and natural spaces. The methodological issues familiar to classicists are foregrounded throughout the four main chapters, to the extent that at times the explication of approach distracts from the overall argument; the interesting theoretical perspectives from the emergent fields of space and mobility studies are, for the most part, restricted to the introduction and the final chapter. This is a shame because it means that insights derived, for example, from the conceptualisation of space as socially produced, or the contemporary focus on the moral effects of mobility are tantalisingly alluded to (e.g., 9, 11) but never allowed fully to irrigate the ancient texts. The desire to avoid the anachronistic use of conceptual vocabulary, explicitly articulated and presented as a virtue (11), positions the work within a tradition of scholarship that privileges a certain [End Page 367] kind of historicism over other approaches. While there is nothing wrong with this per se, when dealing with myth and the ancient Greek imagination, a more relaxed attitude towards creative hypothesis tends to produce more engaging results. The book is divided into two halves, the first devoted to female deities and the second to mortal heroines. Within these sections there is further division into chapters on virgin goddesses, Olympian wives and mothers, mobile heroines in Greek tragedy, and female mobility and gendered spaces between myth and ritual. Each chapter has its own introduction and conclusion and is comprehensively annotated with accurate references to up-to-date bibliography and relevant primary sources. From this perspective, the book will be invaluable to students and scholars wishing to familiarise themselves with the current state of play regarding discussions of gender and space in archaic and classical Greece. In the first chapter, the famous description of Athena, Artemis and Hestia from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite is used as a springboard for discussion of the connection between the three goddesses' sexual status, their gender, and their mobility. There is much that is familiar here, from the association of Hestia with the domestic and public hearth, to the exploits of Athena in the Trojan war, and the characterization of Artemis as a mountain-dwelling huntress. The critique of Vernant's hugely influential article on Hestia and Hermes (Vernant, J.-P., 1963, "Hestia-Hermès. Sur l'expression religieuse de l'espace et du mouvement chez les Grecs," L'Homme 3:12–50) results in an adjustment of the view that Hestia's fixity is a result of her femininity and suggests instead that her lack of mobility results from the divine privileges which involve receiving honours in both private and public spheres and which identify her primarily with "the centre." Otherwise, the chapter reaffirms the idea that virginity for these female deities does not automatically entail any kind of restriction of movement and thus argues that they cannot be regarded as paradigmatic for human women. The second chapter continues the discussion by focusing on Aphrodite, Demeter, and Hera and concludes similarly that in epic contexts, divine wives and mothers are free to move where they want to, apart from in the case of Hera, whose limited mobility is either the result of her superior position in the divine hierarchy or a form of punishment by Zeus. These...

Sponsoring the Arts: Melic Perspectives

This paper explores the melic poets’ take on art and its sponsors. Since much has been written on the relationship of epinician poets with their patrons, this paper broadens the focus of enquiry to include other melic genres and, in addition to the verbal, to look at the visual arts as well, i.e. melic representations of communities that sponsor songs and of communities or individuals that sponsor other art-forms such as sculpture, architecture, and precious objects. Taking as starting point Xenophon’s depiction of Simonides in Hiero, I discuss epigrams XXVII and XXVIII Page and relevant testimonia that show Simonides’ keen interest in Athenian dithyrambic contests; Bacchylides’ Ode 19, probably composed for the Great Dionysia; Pindar’s Pythian 7, Paean 8, and fragment 3 in conjunction with Homeric Hymn to Apollo 281-99, Herodotus 1.31, Cicero, De oratore 2. 86. 352-353, [Plutarch] Consolatio ad Apollonium, and Pausanias – all of which offer precious insights into Pindar’s views on sponsoring monumental sculpture and architecture; and Bacchylides’ description of the golden tripods that Hieron offered to Apollo in Ode3. On the basis of this evidence I argue that whatever the nature and the range of remuneration of poets and artists may have been, melic rhetoric shows that it was the relationship of poets, artists and their sponsors with the gods that was ultimately at stake. This is why both the poetry and the traditions about Simonides, Pindar and Bacchylides privilege the divine favour that poets, artists and patrons alike either obtained or were hoping to obtain by offering masterpieces to the gods.

D’Annunzio ‘grecista’ in appendice a Primo vere

The first time Gabriele d’Annunzio’s literary activity dealt with the classical antiquity dates back directly to 1879, when the author published his first poetic collection: Primo vere. It only includes four poetic translations from Horace Odes, but a new improved edition was republished in 1880 including twenty-three translations of nineteen Latin poems (from Catullus, Tibullus and most importantly from Horace) and of four Homeric hymns. A thorough analysis of the translations from ancient Greek allowed to discover the stylistic tendencies of the poet-translator and food for the though concerning the relationship between ancient Greek poetry and Dannunzian works.

A Study on the Goddess Demeter in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

A Study on the Goddess Demeter in The Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Searching for a Foil to Charicleia

Abstract Set at a narratologically crucial moment of Heliodorus’ novel, the hymn to Thetis precedes and foreshadows the appearance of the protagonists, Theagenes and Charicleia, within the religious festival at Delphi. While the parallel between Neoptolemus and Theagenes is rather clear and explicit, the hymn honours Thetis in a distinctive way which does not correspond symmetrically to the depiction of Charicleia. The paper will argue that this hymn alludes to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and contrasts the various figures of Thetis, Demeter and Persephone to Heliodorus’ heroine. This interpretation explains the meaning of the hymn to Thetis both in its immediate context and within the larger ideology of the novel.

The Augment Use of Εειπε and Ειπε in Early Epic Greek: An Evidential Marker?

This article is part of an ongoing investigation into the meaning, origin and use of the augment in Early Greek prose and poetry and discusses the use and absence of the augment in the forms of the simplex ἔειπον/εἶπον in early epic Greek (Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns). I first explain why this verb was chosen and then proceed to determining the corpus. I start by listing the criteria to determine which forms are metrically guaranteed; when a form is not secured by the metre, I use the “Barrett–Taida” method, which analyses metrically insecure forms by comparing them to the metrically secure forms of the same paradigm and to the attestations and positions in the verse. The corpus that is thus established is then analysed by using previous scholarship on syntactic constraints (Drewitt–Beck’s clitic rule and Kiparsky’s “conjunction reduction” rule) and on the semantics (Koch–Basset’s distinction of narrative versus speech and Platt–Bakker–Mumm’s theory of recent past versus Hoffmann’s remote and timeless past); special attention is also paid to the exceptions. At the end, I investigate if the augment use in epic Greek can be explained as a visual evidential marker.

Homer by Barbara Graziosi

Reviewed by: Homer by Barbara Graziosi Bruce Whiteman Barbara Graziosi. Homer. Oxford University Press, 2016. No one knows precisely when or even if Homer lived, nor when exactly the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, nor if the same poet wrote both epic poems. An old joke among classicists has it that Homer demonstrably did not write the poems, that it was some other guy named Homer. Since Friedrich August Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad Homerum of 1795, and with the examination during the early twentieth century of the oral composition of epic poems in eastern Europe by Milman Parry and Alfred Lord, many scholars have come to believe that the Homeric texts are conglomerations of stories by many “writers” or story-tellers, and that “Homer” is just a convenience for publishers, since a name has to go on the almost infinite number of editions and [End Page 33] translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that have appeared since the Greek text was first published in 1488 in Florence. There is rough agreement that the poems date from the late eighth or early seventh century BCE; by the classical period they were already the central texts of Greek culture and were being studied assiduously by textual scholars and philologists, not to mention schoolboys. Their influence on western literature has been profound and continues. Homer Simpson is not called Homer Simpson for no reason. Like editions of the poems, the literature on Homer is also immense. The vocabulary, dialect, and style of the poems have been extensively analyzed. Heinrich Schliemann, famously taking the poems as truth rather than fiction, discovered the remains of Troy in present-day Turkey and revolutionized how we read Homer. Victor Bérard, more contentiously, sailed around the Aegean and Adriatic Seas in an attempt to determine the exact locations of all of Odysseus’s adventures. Scholars continue to write dissertations on Homer (over a hundred in English during the last decade alone), and they and others write both specialized studies and books for the general reader. Like the literature on Dante and Shakespeare, the Homeric literature is so vast that it would be the work of several lifetimes to read all of it. Barbara Graziosi, who has a PhD from Cambridge and is a professor of Classics at Durham University in the north of England, has added a brief and useful book to the Homeric shelf in her Homer, a book that could easily fit into Oxford University Press’s growing “Very Short Introduction” series, and perhaps will at a later date. In four introductory chapters, Graziosi genially explores the Homeric Question (Analysts, who see the poems as a quilt of stories by different hands and even from different eras, in one corner, Unitarians, arguing from style and cohesiveness for a single “Homer,” in another); the evidence from the text itself (how, for example, the Homeric epithets like “wine-dark sea” support oral composition); the evidence from archaeology, with the complications that inhere in the fact that, while probably composed not “much before 700 BCE,” the story itself takes place 500 years earlier; and what she calls “The Poet in the Poems,” including the importance of Demodocus, an actual poet or singer in the Odyssey, whose blindness may have contributed to the contention that Homer himself was blind (“And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,” as Pound put it in Canto 2). There follow three short chapters each on the Iliad and the Odyssey. (The Homeric Hymns get only a passing mention, and the Batrachomyomachia, like the hymns, falsely attributed to Homer, gets none at all.) In “The Wrath of Achilles,” Graziosi explores Achilles’s evolution from sulky warrior benched on his own recognizance, caring more about survival than glory and angry with Agamemnon for stealing his girl, to fully engaged hero more concerned about revenge than death itself. “A Poem About Troy” examines death and the shortcomings of leadership on both sides in the Trojan conflict. Graziosi notes how every fallen soldier in the poem is named (a fact which the English poet Alice Oswald embraced for her remarkable Iliadic poem Memorial), and how graphically the deaths are described. The last of the...

Female Gaze and Desire in the Europa and Carmen 64

Female Gaze and Desire in the Europa and Carmen 64 Florence Klein (bio) The Europa, a Hellenistic poem written by Moschus, relates the well-known myth of the princess's abduction by Zeus in the shape of a bull; it thus belongs to the literary tradition that depicts young virgins sexually violated by gods. However, a striking feature of this poem is that it portrays the girl as fully consenting to her abduction. To summarize the narrative: Europa has been warned twice of her destiny—through a dream sent by Aphrodite, and through an image depicted on her golden basket (the abduction of her ancestress Io, whose rape/love-affair with Zeus announces Europa's erotic future). Thus informed, far from having negative feelings, she experiences the stirrings of desire and longs for the erotic adventure that awaits her. In more than one way, the poet implies that, at some level, Europa consents to her future union with her abductor and even provokes it.1 Now, as it appears, the issue of feminine 'willingness' that pervades Moschus's epyllion strongly depends on the emphasis placed by the poet on Europa's gaze as the focalizer of the text as a whole. In this paper, I seek to explore this link between viewing through a woman's eyes as represented in the Europa and the assertion of her desire, or, more precisely, the assertion of her consent to male erotic abduction (be it a wedding or a rape), in order to contend that it might have inspired one of Moschus's Roman readers—Catullus. I will thus suggest that the framed epyllion in Carmen 64, foregrounding Ariadne's desiring gaze at Theseus, can be read, inter alia, as a reaction to Moschus's particular treatment of these issues. I. Europa The link between desire and gaze is asserted at the very beginning of the poem. The text features the young virgin in her bed enjoying a sweet slumber, as the goddess of love sends her a dream in which she sees herself being fought over by two women (who embody the continents Asia and the future Europe). Whereas the first woman, claiming to be her mother, is described as having held on tightly to the girl, "the other, [End Page 109] using the force of her strong hands, drew her not unwillingly along" (ἡ δ' ἑτέρη ϰϱτερῇσι βιωομένη παλάμῃσιν / εἴϱυεν οὐϰ ἀέϰουσαν, Eur. 13–14). As Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter (2004, 217–218) suggest, the paradoxical assertion that Europa is abducted by force and violence and nontheless consents to this violence relies on "a familiar feature of the male view of female sexuality." As to the wording οὐϰ ἀέϰουσαν (not against her will), it has long been interpreted as creating a contrast with the text's own model in the poetic tradition of divine rapes: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, in which Persephone is carried off ἀέϰουσα (Hom. Hymn. Dem. 19).2 Here, on the contrary, Moschus states Europa's 'willingness' and her (possibly innocent?) receptivity in erotically charged situations, which are both confirmed as the girl awakens from her sleep (Eur.18–27): ἐζομένη δ' ἐπὶ δηϱὸν ἀϰὴν ἔϰεν, ἀμφοτέϱας δὲεἰσέτι πεπταμένοισιν ἐν ὄμμασιν εἶχε γυναῖϰας.ὀψὲ δέ δειμαλέην ἀνενείϰατο παϱθένον αὐδήν;‛τίς μοι τοιάδε φάσματ' ἐπουϱανίων πϱοΐηλεν;ποῖοί με στϱωτῶν λεχέων ὕπεϱ ἐν θαλάμοισινἡδὺ μάλα ϰνώσσουσαν ἀνεπτοίησαν ὄνειϱοι,τίς δ' ἦν ἡ ξείνη, τὴν εἴσιδον ὑπνώουσα;ὥς μ' ἔλαβε ϰϱαδίην ϰείνης πόθος, ὥς με ϰαὶ αὐτὴἀσπασίως ὑπέδεϰτο ϰαὶ ὡς σφετέϱην ἴδε παῖδα.ἀλλὰ μοι εἰς ἀγαθὸν μάϰαϱες ϰϱήνειαν ὄνειϱον.' Sitting down, she kept a long time silent; and still she kept a vision of both women before her wide-open eyes. At last the girl raised her frightened voice: "Which of the gods in heaven has sent such visions upon me? What sort of dreams appearing above my covered bed have scared me as I slept so sweetly in my chamber? Who was the foreign woman whom I saw as I slept? How love for her seized my heart! How joyfully she herself welcomed me and looked on me as her own child! May the blessed gods bring this dream to fulfillment for me with a good result!"3 Now awake, Europa still has the vision of her dream before her eyes, while she is amazed at the "desire" (πόθος) that she feels for her abductor, and she hopes that the dream will come true for the best. As has been noted, Europa's sensual and 'positive' reaction to the images of her dream contrasts with the epic models that lie behind this first scene: the [End Page 110] dream sent by Athena to Nausicaä in Odyssey 6...

DESPARATE ROMANTICS: THE EVOLUTION OF HADES AND PERSEPHONE’S MYTH FROM ANCIENT GREEKS TO PRE-RAFAELITES AND A. BELIY

The myth about Hades and Persephone is analyzed in this article as an archetypical pattern, “characters’ structural precondition”. The pattern was widely used by artists and writers throughout the history of humankind. The paper is based on Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Metamorphoses by Ovid and a novel written by A. Beliy The Baptized Chinaman. Additional resources are the Renaissance and the Pre-Raphaelites art masterpieces and psychological work by C.G. Jung and С. Kerenyi Essays on a Science of Mythology. Methods such as comparative, mythological, psychological and linguistic analysis are applied in the paper. Cultural and philosophical ground of Hades and Persephone’s archetypes is examined. The most important characteristic among others is highly controversial relationship between gods and ambivalence of their characters, which demands a link component (mediator) to resolve the conflict. Pomegranate seeds are used as such symbolic mediators in the myth and a child narrator - in A. Beliy’s novel. The representation and embodiment of Hades’ archetype is Michael Letaev, while Kotik’s mother possesses Persephone’s traits. Plot allusions were distinguished and linguistic comparisons were made to prove the notion that neomyth about Hades and Persephone became the source of A. Beliy’s “desperate symbolism”. This neomyth contains archetypical motives and images which help Beliy to cross the line between reality and the world of unconscious, between words and symbols.