Wounding the Gods. Diomedes' Aristeia in Iliad 5 and Homer's Anthropology, in Human and Non Human..., 25-55 (2025)

Wounding the Gods. Diomedes' Aristeia in Iliad 5 and Homer's Anthropology

Human and Non Human in Homeric and Archaic Epic, 2024

In the fifth book of the Iliad, Apollo affirms the irreducible opposition between gods and men (circa 441-442). The whole of the song allows with the aristeia of Diomedes to draw an overall picture of homeric anthropology: mortality vs immortality walks on earth vs ubiquity and stay in the Olympus food: meat and cereals vs nectar and ambroisie drink: wine and milk vs nectar and ambrosia The consolation of Dione to Aphrodite wounded by Diomedes gives a list of exempla of gods injured by humans. The conclusion is about the role of the warnings of Athena and Apollo as elements of memorization in the composition of the book 5.

Victory and Virility in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: at whose cost?

Greek Hymns. P. Brillet et al., eds.

THE VOICE OF TRADITION: REPRESENTATIONS OF HOMERIC SINGERS IN ATHENAEUS 1.14a–d

The Classical Quarterly, 2007

The passage concerning the heroic lifestyle, surviving in the Epitome version of Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, is an area full of controversy. Scholars debate over the source(s) used by Athenaeus here and speculate about the relationship of the summarized version of the text to its original unepitomized form, which is lost to us. These two modern approaches to this part of the first book of the Deipnosophistae aim at general clarification of the content and the structure of the discussion of the Homeric lifestyle. I shall instead pay attention to one, relatively short, piece of the text preserved by the epitomator, namely the passage in which the question of the position and functions of archaic singers is addressed (1.14a-d). This passage as a self-contained whole has not yet received serious attention from scholars, although a more detailed analysis of some of its components has occasionally been offered. It seems that a closer examination of individual segments of this text as well as of the linkage between them allows us to elucidate some points of ancient Homeric scholarship and to detect traces of the structural devices used by the author of the Deipnosophistae. The topic is, then, worthy of consideration. The passage is a part of the discussion in which Athenaeus pursues the question of the simplicity of the life of the ancients and shares with other intellectuals an interest in the customs connected with feasting. Drawing illustrations of the ancient way of life from Homer's poems was commonplace in many works written by critics from the Alexandrian age onwards. 1 After the publication of Malcolm Heath's important article, 2 Isaac Casaubon's assumption 3 (widely accepted by scholars of the nineteenth century 4 and still adhered to by some modern classicists 5) that the only source for Athenaeus' description of feasting activities of Homeric heroes was Dioscorides, 6 the author of an exclusively 231 1 The beginnings can be, however, traced as early as Plato's writings (Resp. 3.404B10-C7). On the importance of Homer's poems for ancient considerations of the simplicities of early generations' life see R. Vischer,

‘Hail and Take Pleasure!’ Making Gods Present In Narration Through Choral Song and Other Epiphanic Strategies in the Homeric Hymns to Dionysus and Apollo, in: C. Tsagalis, A. Markantonatos (ed.), The Winnowing Oar. New Perspectives in Homeric Studies, Berlin/New York: 2017, 231–266, corrected proofs

This paper explores how the complementary gods Dionysus and Apollo, in their very specific manner reflecting their essence, become present through song. It shows how, in both Homeric Hymns (7 and 3), song is the medium and the kernel of the inner story, while the choral performance of the diachronic past blurs with the present rhapsodic hymn in synchrony. Dionysus is focused as the epiphanic god per se, appearing all of a sudden, in a sketchy and enigmatic Hymn that elicits the recipient to decode his signs on the pattern of mysteries, whereas the long and winding Hymn to Apollo, put in several frames and pursuing Apollo’s career from his birth to his rise to full power, reflects his “palintropic harmony of bow and lyre” fusing in poignant and violent immediacy. corrected proofs

Commenting on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Between Philology and History

Les hymnes constituaient en Grèce antique un vaste ensemble, la plupart des cérémonies reli gieuses donnant lieu à des chants qui célébraient les divinités. De cette masse poétique et musicale, il ne nous reste cependant que des bribes, gravées dans la pierre des temples ou transmises par le papyrus et le manuscrit. Leur interprétation se prête tout particulièrement à un débat interdisciplinaire, car ces poèmes obéissent à des conventions formelles tout en ayant connu, pour certains, une utilisation rituelle avérée, et sont donc à la fois des objets pour les commentateurs de la poésie grecque et des sources pour les historiens des cultes. Leur étude oblige chacun à définir avec précision sa conception des champs respectifs de la littérature et de la religion, notions qui, dans le contexte du polythéisme grec, demeurent problématiques.

Revisiting the Harmodios Song in Aristophanes' Acharnians

Mnemosyne 69 (2016) 1034-39: "Revisiting the Harmodios Song in Aristophanes' Acharnians" , 2016

At 977-979, following Dikaiopolis's example, the chorus of Acharnians welcomes peace and rejects the presence of War: οὐδέποτ᾿ ἐγὼ Πόλεµον οἴκαδ᾿ ὑποδέξοµαι, οὐδὲ παρ᾿ ἐµοί ποτε τὸν Ἁρµόδιον ᾄσεται ξυγκατακλινείς, ὅτι πάροινος ἁνὴρ ἔφυ·

Divine and Human in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite

Hymnes de la Grèce antique: approches littéraires et historiques, 2012

Les hymnes constituaient en Grèce antique un vaste ensemble, la plupart des cérémonies reli gieuses donnant lieu à des chants qui célébraient les divinités. De cette masse poétique et musicale, il ne nous reste cependant que des bribes, gravées dans la pierre des temples ou transmises par le papyrus et le manuscrit. Leur interprétation se prête tout particulièrement à un débat interdisciplinaire, car ces poèmes obéissent à des conventions formelles tout en ayant connu, pour certains, une utilisation rituelle avérée, et sont donc à la fois des objets pour les commentateurs de la poésie grecque et des sources pour les historiens des cultes. Leur étude oblige chacun à définir avec précision sa conception des champs respectifs de la littérature et de la religion, notions qui, dans le contexte du polythéisme grec, demeurent problématiques.

The Assonance of Athena and the Sound of the Salpinx: Eumenides 566-571

1979

Aeschylus is well-recognized for the boldness, originality and variety imagery, and so the critical literature on his plays includes some works deal with his use of musically-inspired imagery,1 and some which discu imagery in general as an important element in his style.2 It is my intentio

A. Vergados, The Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Introduction, Text and Commentary, Berlin/Boston 2012, CW 107.3, 2014, pp. 415-417

Callimachus' Sexy Athena: The Hymn to Athena and the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite

Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici, 2008

Reviewed Work: \u3cem\u3eThe Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in the Odyssey\u3c/em\u3e by Jenny Strauss Clay

1985

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite

Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture, 2018

In 1976, I travelled to Greece. I was a young feminist and had read Helen Diner's Mothers and Amazons and while in Greece I read up on the Greek Myths. Travelling to Crete really turned my head and upon returning to Australia I decided to learn Greek. Initially it was Modern Greek but after a year of so I decided to learn Ancient Greek as my passion for mythic stories exploded. In 1981, I wrote a 10,000 word thesis entitled 'Women and Power: A Feminist Reading of the Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite and Demeter'. This work has sat in my drawers for all these decades because at the time there was nowhere to put out such a work. This essay comprises about half of the original and I have altered it only slightly to improve it, but I have not changed the argument in any major way. The original essay used untranslated Greek and for the purpose of publication I use Thelma Sargent's The Homeric Hymns: A Verse Translation published in 1975 as the source of the poetic text that I quote. It is an analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and in it I argue that the hymn demonstrates the historical shift of power that occurred from matrifocal societies in which women – and goddesses as symbolic representations of women – held more power than they did once patriarchy became firmly established.

Power Divine: Apollonius’ Medea and the Goddesses of the Homeric Hymns

Women and Power in Hellenistic Poetry (Hellenistica Groningana 26), 2021

Apollonius’ evocation of Homeric characters as allusive models is one of his best recognized techniques of characterization. As a rule, these models are both comparative and contrastive: a character’s departure from the Homeric paradigm is often more illuminating than its adherence to it; superficial similarities throw more serious differences into relief. This paper applies this approach to an analysis of Apollonius’ Medea, but it expands the pool of her potential ‘Homeric’ models to include the goddesses from the Homeric Hymns, a critical but understudied poetic corpus within the literary archaeology of the Argonautica. Just as a program of allusions to the Odyssey positions Apollonius’ Medea as a “Mephistophelean” Nausicaa, so I argue that Apollonius alludes to Homer’s other body of hexametric poetry in order to characterize Medea as a sort of chthonic inversion of the Olympian goddesses of the Homeric Hymns. Through a series of paradigmatic readings of allusions to the hymns to Athena (28), Demeter (2), and Aphrodite (5), I show that Apollonius stresses Medea’s awesome magical powers, which are literally godlike, but consistently portrays the effects thereof as far more destructive and violent than those of her hymnic antecedents.

SEASIDE ALTARS OF APOLLO DELPHINIOS, EMBEDDED HYMNS, AND THE TRIPARTITE STRUCTURE OF THE HOMERIC HYMN TO APOLLO

“Seaside Altars of Apollo Delphinios, Embedded Hymns and the Tripartite Structure of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo” Greece & Rome 65 (2018) 15-33.

Androulaki, M. "Sing Goddess of the Wrath of Achilles":From the Homeric Incipit to the Concept of the Musical Term Skopos and to the Mandinadha in Greek Folk Music

Narratives Across Space and Time Transmissions and Adaptations. Proceedings of the 15th Congress of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (June 21-27, 2009 Athens). Academy of Athens. Publications of the Hellenic Folklore Research Centre-31. vol. 1. Athens, 2014

An Athenian Tradition of Dactylic Paeans to Apollo and Asclepius: Choral Degeneration or a Flexible System of Non-Strophic Dactyls

Th e diff erent epigraphic versions of the so-called Erythraean Paean date from the early fourth century BCE to the mid-second century CE and are generally thought to trace the degeneration of an original monostrophic lyric poem attested in the eponymous late-classical version. I argue that such an approach is inadequate and that the later versions of this poem are witnesses to a hitherto unappreciated genre of paean to Apollo and Asclepius composed almost entirely in dactyls and organized into segments of varying length, which generally begin with a dactylic tetrameter and end with a version of the traditional paeonic cry (the so-called epiphthegma): ἰὲ Παιάν or ἰὴ Παιάν. Th e space between the opening tetrameter and the closing cry can, however, accommodate between four to eight additional dactylic feet. Th e late Hellenistic paean composed in Athens by Macedonicus of Amphipolis is yet another witness to this tradition, which probably dates back at least as early as a famous—albeit almost entirely lost—paean of Sophocles and is refl ected in the fi rst two strophes of the parodos of his Oedipus Rex. Th e diff erent epigraphic versions of the so-called Erythraean Paean date from the early fourth century BCE to the mid-second century CE and are generally thought to trace the degeneration of an original monostrophic

Myths as Exempla in Archaic Greek Melic Poetry: Paideia and Poetic Tradition Book Title: Paideia and Performance Book Subtitle: Selected Essays from the 7th Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy Book Editor(s

Parnassos Press, 2023

In this paper, I shall analyze how the mythical exemplum is used for this purpose in three archaic melic songs by two melic poets: Sappho and Pindar. For that end, I intend to expose the general form and use of the exemplum, how it relates to the performance of these three melic songs, and how it can reinforce the semantic intention of these poems in the educational context of “song culture.”

Praising the God(s) Homeric Hymns in Late Antiquity, in A. Faulkner, A. Vergados, and A. Schwab (eds.), The Reception of the Homeric Hymns, Oxford 2016, 221-240,

This paper studies the reception of the Homeric Hymns in some pagan and Christian poets of Late Antiquity. It offers some methodological remarks on ‘quotations’ or ‘allusions’ and re-use of epic code; and on the need to distinguish between instances of epic language reused by Late Antique poets and actual quotations or borrowings from the Homeric Hymns. After an overall view on the presence of the Hymns in some major poets of Late Antiquity (especially Nonnus of Panopolis, Proclus, the Orphic Argonautica), I deal with the reception of the Hymns to Hermes, whose presence can be detected in papyri, inscriptions and highbrow poems (either pagans or Christians) from the second century until the fifth century AD. I argue that in Late Antiquity the concept of epic code was extended to the whole Homeric corpus, probably by the influence of school education.

Dionysos in the Homeric Hymns

Hermetically Unsealed: Lyric Genres in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes

Most of the other chapters in this book centre on lyric texts; Spelman's explores parallelisms between the address to the Deliades in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and passages from lyric on issues such as the presentation of authorship and of textual fixity across multiple performance events. I too will discuss a Homeric hymn, namely the Hymn to Hermes, but what this hymn offers is, by contrast, a late archaic or early classical Greek viewpoint on lyric 'from the outside'.