Poems without Poets

Approaches to anonymous ancient poetry

Boris Kayachev

• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781913701413
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria antigua y clásica

The canon of classical Greek and Latin poetry is built around big names, with Homer and Virgil at the center, but many ancient poems survive without a firm ascription to a known author. This negative category, anonymity, ties together texts as different as, for instance, the orally derived Homeric Hymns and the learned interpolation that is the Helen episode in Aeneid 2, but they all have in common that they have been maltreated in various ways, consciously or through neglect, by generations of readers and scholars, ancient as well as modern. These accumulated layers of obliteration, which can manifest, for instance, in textual distortions or aesthetic condemnation, make it all but impossible to access anonymous poems in their pristine shape and context. The essays collected in this volume attempt, each in its own way, to disentangle the bundles of historically accreted uncertainties and misconceptions that affect individual anonymous texts, including pseudepigrapha ascribed to Homer, Manetho, Virgil, and Tibullus, literary and inscribed epigrams, and unattributed fragments. Poems without Poets will be of interest to students and scholars working on any anonymous ancient texts, but also to readers seeking an introduction to classical poetry beyond the limits of the established canon.

PART I

collections

1

The evolving arrangement of the Homeric Hymns

Alexander E. W. Hall

The Homeric Hymns were not composed by Homer. Despite the attribution of the Renaissance manuscripts and the testimony of some early citations of the collection, the judgment of the Hymns as ‘inauthentic’ was already commonplace in the ancient world. In the modern world it has become a unanimous verdict, even as the notion of authorship itself has been broadened and problematised, especially in application to orally composed works. Who might have composed the poems and when remains an unanswered (and probably unanswerable) question. A scholiast on Pindar identifies Cynaethus of Chios, a prolific interpolator, as the true author of the ‘hymn to Apollo attributed to Homer’. Even if that is true, however, establishing the composer of this one Homeric Hymn tells us nothing about the origin of the others. It is virtually certain that the single name ‘Homer’ conceals many different authors, perhaps as many as there are Hymns. This anonymity (pseudonymity) is the result both of the involvement of many generations of editors and also of the very different notions of ‘authorship’ at play in an oral literary culture, and the impact of both these factors is magnified by the diversity of the collection itself.

Indeed, what principally unites the Homeric Hymns – apart from their shared attribution to Homer, of course – is their diversity. These thirty-three poems vary tremendously in length, language, tone. This is not to say, however, that the Hymns are merely a hodgepodge or miscellany. They evince a great deal of thematic coherence, as demonstrated most clearly by Clay (2006). They are also, though it may not seem so at first glance, very carefully organised. It will be the work of the chapter that follows to outline that organisation, and to explore its implications for our understanding of the ‘Homeric’ nature of the Hymns.

An examination of the conclusions of the Homeric Hymns reveals a pattern. This pattern is connected with the arrangement of the collection: groups of similar Hymns begin and end with poems which deploy identical or nearly identical closing formulae. These formulae are peculiar to the paired Hymns in which they appear, not only in that they are not found in other Homeric Hymns, but also because their content is appropriate to the poems in which they appear, as well as the larger group those poems bracket. This suggests that the appearance of these parallel endings is not merely coincidental, but rather is intended to emphasise the connections between the paired Hymns, and thereby to mark the beginnings and endings of distinct groups within the larger collection.

The usefulness of this pattern is not mostly in decoding the arrangement of the Hymns, however. For one thing, the groups marked by the pattern are essentially identical to those observed by Torres 2003, based on the narrative content of the poems. For another, the pattern is not present for the whole length of the collection: we can be certain of its presence for three groups of Hymns (1–7, 9–14, 15–20) and perhaps a fourth (21–6), though for this last the indicators are less clear. In the final seven Hymns in the collection (27–33) the pattern breaks down entirely, with five of seven poems using the same or similar conclusions.

It is actually from this breakdown that useful insights arise, and they concern not the arrangement of the collection but its evolution. I believe that our collection of thirty-three Homeric Hymns was created from an earlier group of twenty-four poems, a collection that was not only smaller but more tightly organised than the one we possess. The parallel endings described above were part of the organisation of this ‘proto-collection’. The remaining nine Hymns were added at some later date or dates, by a compiler or compilers who either did not notice the existing system of groups marked by parallel concluding formulae or chose not to continue it, leading to the breakdown mentioned earlier.

In what follows, I will first outline how the pattern works in those groups where it is readily observable and explore why such a system might have been employed. Next, I will turn to the later groupings of Hymns where the pattern first becomes hazy and then disappears entirely, making the case that this section contains the end of the earlier protocollection and the beginning of a later ‘appendix’. By way of a conclusion, I will offer a sketch of this evolutionary process and turn in earnest to the issue of authorship. Indeed, I will argue that one of the organising principles of the structure outlined is a sorting of poems into markedly ‘Homeric’ and ‘non-Homeric’ groups, while at the same time creating a collection that fused them into a ‘Homeric’ whole. This is consistent with the nature of ‘Homeric’ authorship, at least as it was understood in some periods in the ancient world.

The pattern in practice

To demonstrate the system of parallel concluding formulae acting as markers for the beginning and end of a group of Homeric Hymns, I would like to begin not with Hymn 1 and the start of the collection, but instead with Hymn 9, a nine-line poem dedicated to Artemis. The reasons for this are two. First, the group of poems which this Hymn to Artemis inaugurates – Hymns 9 through 14 – is probably the most coherent group in the collection, no matter the organisational principle applied: all six poems are short (3–9 lines);1 all are attributive, with central sections describing their dedicatees in the present tense;2 and all are dedicated to important Olympian goddesses.3 Thanks to this coherence, we can be confident that these six poems constitute a distinct group, even without the evidence of parallel concluding formulae.4 But such evidence is ready to hand as well, and that is the other reason for beginning with this group and this Hymn: the pattern we are tracing can be discerned with particular clarity here.

The Hymn to Artemis concludes as follows (9.7–9):

καὶ σὺ μὲν οὕτω χαῖρε θεαί θ᾽ ἅμα πᾶσαι ἀοιδῇ·

αὐτὰρ ἐγώ σε πρῶτα καὶ ἐκ σέθεν ἄρχομ᾽ ἀείδειν,

σεῦ δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἀρξάμενος μεταβήσομαι ἄλλον ἐς ὕμνον.

And so rejoice, and all the goddesses with you, in my song; but I first of all begin to sing you and from you, and having begun from you I will pass on into the rest of the song.

The first of these lines is repeated verbatim in Hymn 14, where it forms the entirety of the conclusion (14.6). This line, and specifically the second half-line with its reference to ‘all the goddesses together’, is found only in these two Hymns. Interestingly, neither poem refers to any goddess apart from the dedicatee and the singular, unnamed Muse invoked at the outset.5 These references to ‘all goddesses’, though puzzling in the individual Hymns, make perfect sense in the context of the larger group, which consists as we have seen of poems dedicated to goddesses. This line, I suggest, serves as a marker for the start and end of the group.

Nor is the parallel line the only part of the conclusion with significance for the arrangement of the collection. As noted above, the Hymn to Artemis also describes the singer ‘beginning from the goddess’ and then transitioning to ‘another song’ or ‘the rest of the song’. The last line of the Hymn appears in two other poems in the collection: Hymns 5 and 18.6 Neither of these includes a line like line 8 of the Hymn to Artemis. It is essentially superfluous, repeating (three times, in three different ways) the idea expressed by the participle ἀρξάμενος in the line that follows (Olson 2012: 289). I believe that this particular stress on ‘firstness’ is itself organisationally significant, marking the beginning of a distinct group of poems.

These same features – the parallel conclusion in the first and the last poem, combined with an assertion of ‘firstness’ at the close of the earlier poem – are also observable in the groups of Homeric Hymns immediately preceding and following the poems to goddesses we have just considered. Let us turn now to the beginning of the collection and Homeric Hymn 1, which ends (1D.8–10):7

ἵληθ᾽, Εἰραφιῶτα γυναιμανές· οἱ δέ σ᾽ ἀοιδοί

ᾄδομεν ἀρχόμενοι λήγοντές τ᾽· οὐδέ πῃ ἔστιν

σεῖ᾽ ἐπιληθόμενον ἱερῆς μεμνῆσθαι ἀοιδῆς.

Be propitious, Sown one, maddener of women; we singers sing you as we begin and end; it is not possible for one who has forgotten you to remember holy song.

A nearly identical concluding formula is found in Hymn 7, also to Dionysus (7.58–9):

χαῖρε, τέκος Σεμέλης εὐώπιδος· οὐδέ πῃ ἔστι

σεῖό γε ληθόμενον γλυκερὴν κοσμῆσαι ἀοιδήν.

Rejoice, child of beautiful-eyed Semele; it is not possible for one who has forgotten you to adorn sweet song.

Although the syntax and specific wording differs slightly, this is broadly the same conclusion as appears in Hymn 1. It is found in no other Homeric Hymns. This matches, then, the pattern of parallel endings already observed in Hymns 9 and 14. What is more, the fact that both of these Hymns are dedicated to Dionysus suggests that the second part of the pattern is satisfied as well: Hymn 1 describes bards singing the god ‘as they begin and as they end’. Like the insistence on ‘beginning from’ Artemis found in Hymn 9, I believe that this statement is meant to signal the beginning of a distinct group of poems and promises that the group will end with another Hymn dedicated to the same god.8

Such a signal is particularly helpful for the first group in the collection, which shows more variation in length, dedicatee and narrative style than the group of goddess Hymns considered first. Length is the most obvious commonality of these poems: Hymns 2 through 5 are all hundreds of lines long, dwarfing the other members of the collection, and Hymn 1 is likely to have been similarly extended.9 But Hymn 6 is considerably shorter and is generally categorised as ‘mid-length’ rather than ‘long’ (...