The Hymn to Apollo: an Essay in the Homeric Question Author(S): A

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The Hymn to Apollo: an Essay in the Homeric Question Author(S): A The Hymn to Apollo: An Essay in the Homeric Question Author(s): A. W. Verrall Source: The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 14 (1894), pp. 1-29 Published by: The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/623960 . Accessed: 24/12/2014 19:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Hellenic Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 24 Dec 2014 19:39:31 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE HYMN TO APOLLO: AN ESSAY IN THE HOMERIC QUESTION.* IF theOH ymns of Homer are, as probably they are, comparatively little regarded as a rule even by those who take a general interest in Greek literature and its history, this is certainly not for want of artistic merit, and still less for want of historic importance. However widely students have differed, or may differ, in their conclusions about this enigmatic collection, it is an undoubted fact, and worth insisting upon when every day a wider and more popular audience is invited to form a judgment on matters of criticism, that any theory of' Homer', to be entertainable, must make its account with the Hymns not less than with the more celebrated epics. For the sake of this larger bearing, if not for the sake of the poem itself, the reader may be disposed to consider and weigh the following reflexions upon Homer's Hymn to Apollo. 11 [I add here a word to indicate the relation about v. 176, what was originally composed as between my view of the subject and that of Dr. a conclusion, and that in what precedes this con- Gemoll, whose excellent commentary I had not clusion we have substantially one genuine work seen when the paper was written. To an im- of art. However, this question is of little sig- portant extent we are agreed. Dr. Gemoll holds nificance. To the main proposition of this essay (and so do I) that the Hymn is in a sense one Dr. Gemoll, though he does not advance it, whole, that is to say, the framer intended it to furnishes, as I think, important confirmation. b1eso taken. He holds further (and I agree) About the date of the compilation as a whole that traces of compilation, or of handling not his conclusion practically is, that the evidence original, can be found in all parts of it. In is hard to reconcile. On one side we have opposing the hypothesis that two original docu- (among other things) what prima facie looks ments can be obtained by cutting the piece into like an allusion to the Crisaean war; on the 'Delian' and 'Pythian' sections, Gemoll has been other side we have at least one passage, the dis- led, I think, to make too little of the real differ- course of Telphusa about horses and chariots, ence in texture between these two parts, by which which seems to require a date earlier than the Ruhnken's hypothesis was suggested. That the new foundation of the Pythian Games. It will conclusion of the Delian Hymn can be read as a be seen that I offer a solution of this difficulty, transition to what now follows it, I readily and a solution which explains precisely those allow. There is in the present arrangement the points of detail (for example, the application of sort of continuity, or appearance of it, which the name Delphios) which are marked by Gemoll satisfied the compiler. But it seems to me, as as requiring fresh light.] to most readers, that we certainly have, at or II.s.-VOL. xIV, B This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 24 Dec 2014 19:39:31 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2 THE HYMN TO APOLLO: In general outline, the history of the Hymns is parallel to that of the Iliad and the Odyssey. These and the hymns alike, whatever else they may be, are remains out of a vastly larger mass of hexameter poetry, which at the time when Greek literature, in the form of books and as the object of deliberate study, first began to be diffused (say, for a date, between 540 and 460 B.c.) passed at Athens under the name of Homer. How much of it, or what other like poetry, was current anywhere else, in what form, and under what name, no one knows, nor indeed is it very important to know. The history of Greek books, from this period and in the main for long after, is the history of Athenian books; and that our 'Homer', as a boo1,,is derived from the ' Homer' of Athens is perhaps one of the few assertions on the subject which is practically beyond dispute. About the year 450 B.c., and in Athens, we can first ascertain in part at least the contents of a Homer. In a Homer, as then popularly conceived, and apart from any critical doubts, there would have been a portion already distinguished and cited by the name of the Iliad, another portion named the Odyssey; also other portions of narrative, more or less connected with these two, named Cypria, Thebais, Epigoni; also other works not narrative, and among these last-better warranted, as it happens, for 'genuine Homer' of the fifth century than any other part of the mass-a Hymn to Apollo, identical either with the whole or with some part of the poem so-called in the extant collection. There is every reason to believe that the Homeric volume, or rather library, would then have contained much more, and many times as much; but these it would certainly have contained, as is shown by Herodotus and Thucydides in passages too familiar to cite. With regard to the rest of Homer's Hymns we are not able, as in the case of the Hymn)nto Apollo, to cite positive testimony that they would have been found in the Homer of Thucydides. This however in the state of the evidence is no argument to the contrary. Much more important on the other hand is it to observe that, among the two or three thousand lines which they contain, there is perhaps not a verse or an expression which may not perfectly well date from the very earliest time at which' Homer' can have acquired a literary definition and fixity, that is to say, from the latter part of the sixth century B.C. When we consider what the limits of the critical faculty were, even in the best period of ancient scholarship, nay indeed what still they are, and how numerous are the pitfalls besetting the investigator who endeavours in a doubtful case to discriminate the genuine from the spurious, this fact is in itself strong evidence that the whole collection, as a is collection, Homeric in the only useful sense which can be put upon the word; that is to say, it has come down labelled as 'Homer' from the earliest times of Greek book-literature. External evidence confirms this supposition, if only by not impeaching it. There is not in the case of the Hymns, any more than in the case of that much vaster collection of 'Homeric'narrative in which the Iliad and the Odysseywere once included, any testimony whatever which attributes the act of collecting to time, place, or person in those ages after 500 B.C., of which the literary history was This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Wed, 24 Dec 2014 19:39:31 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions AN ESSAY IN THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 3 fairly well known to the ancient world, and is even to us known not very ill: and of this the simplest and most obvious explanation is that in fact the collecting took place before that date, and at a time which for the history of book-literature must be called prehistoric. It may be added that thus, and thus only, can we understand without difficulty how the name 'Homer' came to be attached to these collections. Herodotus and Thucydides may have known, and known as Homer's, we shall here assume that they did know, the collection of Hygmns substantially as we have it. But we may doubt whether even Herodotus, to judge by his remarks on other Homeric questions, would have asserted, as a matter of personal opinion, that all the hymns in the collection were by one individual and historic Homer; we may say with confidence that Thucydides would not; and still less would any one worth notice in subsequent ages, the ages of scholarship. Therefore since the whole collection actually is entitled 'Homer's', the presumption is that it was formed before criticism had so far awakened as to make the title generally incredible and unsatisfactory. As the Hymns are not universally familiar, and the name to a modern ear is misleading, a word or two of general reminder may not be unwelcome.
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