The "Homeric Hymn to Hermes"

The Hymn to Hermes, while surely the most amusing of the so-called Homeric Hymns, also presents an array of challenging problems. In just 580 lines, the newborn god invents the lyre and sings a hymn to himself, travels from Cyllene to Pieria to steal Apollo's cattle, organizes a feast at the river Alpheios where he serves the meat of two of the stolen animals, cunningly defends his innocence, and is finally reconciled to Apollo, to whom he gives the lyre in exchange for the cattle. This book provides the first detailed commentary devoted specifically to this unusual poem since Radermacher's 1931 edition. The commentary pays special attention to linguistic, philological, and interpretive matters. It is preceded by a detailed introduction that addresses the Hymn's ideas on poetry and music, the poem's humour, the Hymn's relation to other archaic hexameter literature both in thematic and technical aspects, the poem's reception in later literature, its structure, the issue of its date and place of composition, and the question of its transmission. The critical text, based on F. Càssola's edition, is equipped with an apparatus of formulaic parallels in archaic hexameter poetry as well as possible verbal echoes in later literature.

Auteur

Athanassios Vergados, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany, and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Résumé

"Book projects such as this ought to be congratulated and set an example for respective undertakings [...]"
Marios Skempis in: Museum Helveticum. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für klassische Altertumswissenschaft Vol. 73 (2016), Fasc. 2: 223

"[...] the overall impression is that this commentary certainly succeeds in answering many of the various kinds of questions on a structural, interpretational, and lexical level that arise when reading the poem. [...] it is absolutely beyond doubt that this book is a learned and valuable contribution to the study of the Homeric Hymns in general and this specific poem in particular."
Jacqueline Klooster in: Gnomon, Band 89 (2017), Heft 2, 107-110