‘Hail and take pleasure!’ Making gods present in narration through choral song and other epiphanic strategies in the Homeric Hymns to Dionysus and Apollo

Abstract

The Homeric Hymns,aheterogeneous collection of hexametrical hymns dedicated to various gods-most dated between the 7th and 5thc enturies BC,s ome rangingeventothe Hellenistic times-are situated in the sameorally-based performance tradition as the two monumental Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. They share all the samefeatures,especiallyformulaic dictionset in dactylic metre and the Homeric Kunstsprache that,insynchrony, shifts between diachronic stages. Both the Hymns and the Homeric epics developed in an evolutionary process. Large-scale festivals and assembliesa so ccasions for seasonal re-performance, like the Panionia and later the Panathenaea in Athens, wereimportant steps toward monumental growth through rhapsodic regularization and textual fixationb etween the late 9th and the 6th centuries BC.L iteracy,writing technique, and alphabetic record all would have helped to produce ac onsiderablystable transcript,while the rhapsodes re-composed in re-performances their parts taken from the whole storyinarelay-arrangement accordingtothe principles of the Lord-Parry school. These methodsw erer efined by modern orality scholarship, narratology,a nd approaches combiningo rality with neoanalysis.¹ Since Friedrich August Wolf at the end of the 18th century,t he Hymns have been commonlyread as preludes or προοίμια,songsdirected to divinitiesbefore shifting to largere pic poems.² Direct reference to the Iliad and Odyssey in the longer Hymns-thosew ith ad eveloped story-line-is an important component in theiraesthetic appreciation. Thus we can take first steps towards intertextuality,orana wareness of adialogical relationship between narrative traditions, regardless of the medium of the Homeric Hymn and its grade(s)o fl iteracy.³ In

Violence, Power and Religion in the South Etruscan Archaic City-State

“…The latter approach has proven particularly insightful for understanding the triangulation among the deity embodied in, even being, the statue, the worshipper viewing it and the craftsman representing it, ultimately leading to the problem of representation itself that is laid bare in the materialisation and human-like embodiment of a divine non-bodied being that affords its epiphany (Platt 2011: 10-23, 31-123). Such a materialisation, in fact, underlies the deliberately ambiguous boundary between the permissible and the impermissible in art production and craftsmanship insofar as representations of the human body are concerned, and the just as ambiguous boundary between the real and imaginary in the representation of the divine and its reception (Gordon 1979); while problematised by later Greek cultural discourses, such relationships and boundaries also characterised earlier religious traditions since the Homeric epic and the Homeric Hymns (Platt 2011: 31-72;Bierl 2017). As primarily visual, the reception of the divine, encapsulated by the Greek word theoria meaning viewing, beholding or 'sacred spectating' (Nightingale 2004: 45-47), was anything but a passive process (Neer 2010: 57-69): on the contrary, the act of viewing divine representations was itself a ritual performance and one in which the ontological difference between image and deity collapsed (Elsner 2000: 52-63;Tanner 2006: 40-67;Platt 2011: 20).…”