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Home , Typhon

Poetry and Early Greek Religion

A well-known anecdote from (8.3.30) describes how the sculptor Pheidias designed his masterpiece, the great statue of in the sanctuary of Olympia, as a reflection of three verses from ’s (1.528-530). The most prestigious and authoritative cult image of the high god is there presented as the solid shape of epic verse, one medium appropriating the other, a massive monument of stone carved out of a great monument of poetry. The story is part of a recurrent trope of Greek literature concerning the prevalence of early epic poetry on the religious imagination of the other arts. ’s fascinating Olympicus, which discusses Pheidias’ Olympian Zeus at length, is a particularly rich example of that tradition, and of the many ways it could be interpreted in later centuries. But the locus classicus on the question of poetry as the template for divine forms is 2.53, where the historian famously writes that Homer and “taught the Greeks of the descent of the gods, and gave to all their several names, and honours, and arts, and indicated their outward shapes”. This statement is part of a wider criticism of poetic authority. For Herodotus in that passage, the point is that the poems of Homer and Hesiod, the oldest Greek poems, are in fact relatively recent, and much older sources are now available to actual scrutiny – a new, tangible knowledge opened by historiē over the territory previously held by the and the masters of truth. Other critics of Homer and Hesiod, such as Xenophanes (B 14-16 DK) or Empedocles (B 27-29 DK), contested the of epic in its depiction of divine bodies, and offered alternatives that emphasised their non-human form. The authority of the early poets was the great rival that had to be supplanted. Early historiography and the other forms of novel wisdom and science that flourished at the time, including the ethical and natural investigations that will come to be known as philosophy, had to break down the hold of the poets on alētheia in order to carve their own epistemic space, often through the language of poetry itself. That sustained contestation of the old foundations of knowledge constitutes a watershed in the history of Greek culture. Transformed into something else by the appropriations of exegesis, or reduced to fiction and confined to the aesthetic realm, the special claim of inspired poetry to access a privileged reality eventually lost its former predominance in the course of the classical period, although it never disappeared entirely. Poetry continued to play a major part in subsequent phases of Greek religion, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but the stage had been thoroughly changed. Still a fundamental medium for expressing the religious imagination, as well as a central presence in cult, its authority now derived mostly from the symbolic capital and the reinterpretations of the archive, not the production of new texts. was indeed an important religious thinker of his time, but no one could confuse him with Hesiod. The present chapter will be concerned with some of the religious roles of poetry before that fundamental cultural shift. It will attempt to answer one question: what kind of evidence does archaic and classical verse provide for the study of early Greek religion? It will not seek to assess the notoriously difficult task of using poetry as a source of religious realia, painstakingly mined in the hope of recovering echoes of ritual language, cult practices, sanctuary space, or even belief. Rather, it will be interested in poetry itself as an agent of religion. The impact of poetic texts on the religious imagination of their audiences is a particularly important aspect of the question at hand. One recurrent assertion in our sources is that poetry coloured what the Greeks saw when they saw a god, either in the mind’s eye or in their physical representations. The vivid narratives of epic, the catalogues of didactic poetry, hymnic evocations, oracular hexameters, the sumptuous tableaux of monodic lyric, the marriage of movement and verbal image enacted in choral performance, or the three-dimensional mimesis of drama, all forced their audiences to conjure synesthetic images of divinity. Sometimes a single adjective can serve as the support of that vision, as the epithet glaukōpis so commonly applied to , or boōpis for , words that were interpreted in wildly different ways early on, as the scholia attest. A whole passage will trace the particular contours of the god’s shape on other occasions, as in the description of Typhon in 823-835. But most of these texts often contained precious little descriptive detail of divine bodies, and the imagination of the individual audience member was left to its own devices for supplying the missing details. Still, it regularly had to conjure these forms in the mind’s eye through the exigencies of narrative, with their attributes and specificities. The smallest point, such as the dark ichor that trickles out of ’s body (Iliad 5.340; 416), could serve as a basis for further reflections on the divine, and the special, marked nature of the immortal presence, invariably characterised by prodigious beauty, provoked the imagination of the members of the audience, which was often asked to “see” forms that remained invisible to most of the characters in the text. The flashing eyes of the gods, the specific colours associated to them, and the sweet smell that often accompanies their appearance, give a sensory vividness to the poetic presence of divinity that imparts an elevated cognitive intensity to the body of the deity. That being said, no reader of Greek poetry will forget that the gods can change form at will. The ideal, yet uncannily impersonal anthropomorphic appearance that is so often chosen to embody the presence of divinity in narrative frequently suggests the awesome, ineffable power which inhabits that morphē of a moment, and actually threatens mere mortals when it is revealed to them in its full power (e.g. HH 2.275- 280; HH 5.181-190). The fragmentary focalisation of poetry is the necessary channel for the contemplation of that reality beyond vision. It is, of course, wrong to believe that the physical images of the gods were dependant on the images of song, or vice versa. The representational dialogue between poetry, on the one hand, and sculpture and painting on the other, was a complex one at any one time, and it certainly went in both directions, with each medium speaking its own language. The difficulty of translating one into the other is well illustrated by an anecdote found in Ion of Chios’ Epidemiai (FGrH 392 F 6), where the tragedian , a contemporary of Ion, is found berating a pretentious teacher of grammar at a symposium for misunderstanding the different colour idioms of poetry and painting. When “the poet” (that is, ) depicts as “golden haired” (χροσοκόμαν), this does not mean that the painter should represent the god with blond hair, Sophocles says in the text, as the painting “would not be as good” if the artist actually made the god’s hair golden rather than black (the quote comes from Olympian 6.41). The codes of each art cannot be converted so easily into the other. Notwithstanding the interesting aesthetic issues raised by the anecdote, what stands out for us is the actual misinterpretation staged by the story, and the method of resolution to the disagreement: Sophocles vanquishes his foe by an overwhelming demonstration of culture and rhetoric. The poor pedantic grammarian clearly had no chance before the great playwright. But his “error” of literalism must have been a perfectly common reading of the poetic image, one that would have been reproduced countless times at other symposia, and it is probably fair to say that in the majority of these cases one of the most prominent poets of his age was not there to offer an authoritative solution. Who controls the poetic images of the gods? And, more importantly: who controls their interpretation? The flagrant contradictions that existed between the different kinds of divine representation were there for all to see and to decode. The visual culture of divinity that informed symposiasts in the time of Sophocles was characterised by great diversity and disagreements, constantly confronted to each other and creatively reinterpreted, where the many different images of the gods produced by interaction with poetry were never far from the mind. How could they be? A pillar of the education of everyone in the cities, male and female, citizen and slave, the performance of poetry remained a fundamental tool of socialisation throughout their lives, both as a shared object of reflection, and as a marker of discrimination, the touchstone that allowed one to make a distinction between those who belonged in the group and those who did not. This was especially true of participation in the local choral dances and songs that played such an important role in the ritual lives of the poleis and the upbringing of both girls and boys in the Greek world, but it was certainly not confined to choreia. That is the essential reason behind ’s attacks on Homer and tragedy. Conflicts of knowledge lie at the heart of Greek religion. Often tied to specific occasions at a certain moment, songs could be and frequently were adapted to new occasions, and given entirely different roles and performance contexts than the ones they had originally been intended for. A live web of different poetic cultures criss-crossed the Greek world, composed of a great many intertwined strands in a constant but circumscribed process of change. Few songs were entirely local, and the commonly used terms epichoric and Panhellenic, which remain very useful to think with, must be handled with caution if we want to avoid overly artificial distinctions. Song culture in the Greek world was never just a matter of social coherence and cultural cohesion, but it offered the individual a vast grid of potential alternatives, stances, and choices of reference for any situation. Poetry was one of the main mediators of divine reality, a comprehensive cognitive filter that provided the individuals with the building blocks of their imagination on the matter. What these blocks actually were for each individual, and what he or she did with them at various times, was ultimately a matter of chance, life history, and personal choice. The great diversity of poetic evocations of divinity in circulation, and their different understanding by different individuals, meant that the range of potential interactions between text and image was particularly broad, and far from uniform. What role the images deriving from the text played in the evaluation of the physical image in each individual case remained an open variable. But it would be difficult to deny that this role, in most occasions, was a determinant element of the imagination, as our sources assert so emphatically. Whenever someone visualised a Greek god, whether it be standing in front of a statue at a sanctuary, uttering a prayer at a sacrifice, faced with an epiphany, or lost in a state of dream, vivid images born out of contact with the great (and small) frescoes of poetry were necessarily activated. This was also true, much more significantly, of any reflection on the genealogy, attributes, or activity of a god. What the Greeks knew about the gods, they predominantly knew by the intermediary of song, and not just Homer and Hesiod. It is first and foremost through these songs that the narratives of myth took shape and were transmitted over the generations and the many lands of the Greek world, as many speeches and dialogues attest. , for instance, can still accept the authority of the grand old epics as a basis for plausible investigation, against the mere opinion (phēmē) of local tradition (9.41). Poetic language found its way into the language of ritual practice, such as the Bacchic gold leaves, or the cult epithet kraterophrōn applied to Herakles, which clearly derives from hexameter poetry, and found its way to sanctuaries from to (Leumann 1950: 327). Over and above the old wives’ tales mentioned by Plato (R. 350e; H. . 285e-286a; Grg.527a), or the casual talk at the symposium, it was the finally crafted songs of the poets that shaped the references informing the Greek religious imagination concerning the nature of their gods. But what theses songs said about the gods was far from uniform, of course. Some of the most basic facts about a god could vary from text to text: Aphrodite is the daughter of Ouranos in Hesiod's Theogony 154-206, but her parents are Zeus and in Iliad 5.370. These variants can be found concerning many aspects of the genealogy, attributes, and activity of most of the gods found in our sources. When the characters of Plato’s Symposium try to define the nature of the god , to take a notorious example, wildly different interpretations of the most basic traits of his power and character are proposed, many of them grounded in the words and generic language of competing poetic representations, starting with Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony, and ending with tragedy. A deep and playful experimentation with contemporary forms of Greek thought, the dialogue attests to the great flexibility of divine representations in the sympotic culture it portrayed, and the essential roles played by songs in justifying the competing claims to its knowledge. Poetry offered much ground for such spectacles of disagreement about the gods, both in its claims to embody tradition and in its appeals to the novelty of a break with the past. The many different portraits of the invisible presented by poetry in this religious system based on the “unknowability” of divinity were constantly contested. The variety of poetic voices that were vying for authority at the time is impressive and noteworthy. Some traditions had clear ideological agendas, others cultivated a more open polyphony, but all strove for distinction. In the contests of the symposium, the musical agōnes, or the dramatic competitions, verse was shaped through conflict with other verses, and the meaning of songs was grounded in a poetics of contrast. That is a situation already in place in our earliest records. Those often fundamental differences between the divine narratives that stem out of that dynamic process of agonistic poetics cannot easily be reduced to the variations of “parole” of the structuralist study of myth, or the divergences of space and time investigated by more historicist approaches – local traditions, religious movements, or cults. Far from passively reflecting the deep structures of myth, or the versions of native lore, poetic depictions of the gods were actively engaged in moulding the tales themselves, configuring them to the specific orientations of their text and authorial voice, and often engaged in competition with other contemporary texts and figures. They are not expressions of a fixed system, but positions within a system in constant movement. The song that claimed authority on divine matters could invoke the presence of the Muses, and assert a direct access to the inspired knowledge provided by the daughters of . Other songs could claim the authorship of poets with special links to the divine, such as , Musaeus, or . Most, however, did not do either. They all had, in any case, to negotiate a place in relation to tradition, a stance between the poles of appropriation and contestation. Following the path of tradition meant inscribing song over other songs, participating in a concert of voices that was both synchronically and diachronically larger than the individual performance of the here and now. Without moving away too far from the expectations of tradition, the song had to mark its specificity, and build the characteristics that made it stand out. Not limited to introductory hymns or proems such as Hesiod's Theogony 1-115 or Works and Days 1-10, or those emphatically self-reflexive passages of programmatic statements such as Iliad 2.484- 492, the construction of authority and the definition of a song’s situation in regard to tradition were more generally woven deep in the text as a whole, patterned with a myriad different strands. The internal logic of a poem is part of the armature of its authority. Only by taking the time to enter the text through close reading and engaging with the nuances of its language and imagery can these patterns be made discernible and properly assessed. I propose in what follows to look at one particularly rich example of that poetic negotiation of tradition, the claim to authority of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, an important “literary hymn” from the 6th century. “How shall I hymn you, well-hymned (εὔυμνος) as you are in every respect?” With these words from line 19, the poet of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo marks the transition that will lead away from the divine realm of Olympus and the introduction of ’s son in the society of the gods into the human landscapes of cities and cult and the celebration of Zeus’ son in the world of men. The inscription of the divinity in the space and time of the hymnic narrative conjures a veritable map of the deity that is made an immediate interlocutor in the present of the performance, it locates him in myth and cult, and weaves a web of correspondences between that distant configuration and the hic et nunc. Line 19 opens the section of the hymn that is devoted to the presence of the god on the island of Delos. Apollo is “well-hymned”, in that “fields of song” are laid-down for him everywhere: the whole land glorifies him. That statement contains a complex poetic programme of great religious significance. The “fields of song” image of line 20 underlines the profound imbrication of land and poetry staged by the hymn. The passage goes out of its way to express the reach of these fields of song, which are found in all possible areas, both high and low, enumerated in lines 21-24. The imbrication of land and poetry that makes Apollo εὔυμνος is boundless, which is what makes the choice of the poem so difficult. The singer has to decide where and when his song is to be in this limitless field of possibilities. As all land brings joy to Apollo because of what he has done there and the songs that celebrate these events, the hymn can start from anywhere. From this general statement of spatial universality, the poem moves to the specifics of precise location. The transition is marked by another question, which points to one event, the birth of Apollo, and the place where it happened, the island of Delos. To further emphasise where the island is, and its relative position in regard to other places, the passage proceeds to relate all the locations where the birth of Apollo did not happen, spaces defined by a lack in comparison to Delos (lines 30-46). This is more than a priamel. The identification of that negative space, the enumeration of all the sites that refused to welcome Leto when she was about to give birth to the god, is organised as a circular spiral topography around the island. The whole Aegean is traced by this map of names. Only by virtue of the stories that did not happen in these locations is the story of Delos made possible. As has long been recognised, most of the sites named in the list have a significant cultic link to Apollo (see Kowalzig 2007: 72-80). But what stands out from the spatial web of the poem is the way these places, some of them, like Athens, Samos, or Miletus, significant regional powers in the 6th century, are positioned in a relation of dependence to the tiny island of Delos. The great gathering is located in the centre of the circle drawn by the peregrinations of Leto around the sea. The lands that once refused the arrival of the god at the edges of the Aegean now rejoice in his honour at its middle. Just as the songs that praise Apollo are embedded in all regions of the world, the sanctuaries of the god are innumerable, as well as the places that find favour with him. But no location is beloved by the god more than Delos, we are told, when the Ionians are assembled for the festivities (lines 146-148). At the heart of this event is a peerless wonder: the local chorus of the Delian Maidens described in lines 156-176. The Maidens “know how to imitate” the voices of all men, so that “anyone might think it was he himself speaking” (162-164). All song is concentrated in their song: they reproduce what comes from outside, and embody its likeness in all aspects of language and sound. In this, they function as a parallel to the centripetal force of the festival itself, its ability to gather the whole Aegean in one central location. Just as the island becomes host to the entire region, the chorus of the Delian Maidens contains the songs of all men. The song they start with is a hymn to Apollo, followed by a hymn to and Leto, before they “turn their thoughts to the men and women of old and sing a song that charms the people”: another hymn (158-159). Through this evocation of the Maidens’ choral mimēsis, what the passage is underlining is the breadth of their range: both gods and mortals, both male and female, their song encompasses the core of poetry. It is a hymn to Apollo that stands at the beginning of their miraculous performance, one that is located at the very heart of the nexus of Apolline song and place staged by the poem. The invitation to contrast the hymn presently performed in the hic et nunc of the audience with the hymn of the Delian Maidens portrayed in the text could not be clearer. The point is explicitly brought forward by the direct encounter of the persona of the text's author himself with the Delian chorus at lines 165-176. Switching to a dramatic mode, the poet addresses the chorus directly, as if present on site “here” (ἐνθάδε) in Delos, and asks them to commemorate his song for all time to come. When a man next comes from abroad to ask who is their favourite singer, they are to answer: “it is a blind man, and he lives in rocky Chios; all of his songs remain supreme afterwards” (lines 166-173). There can be little doubt that the blind poet is related to the first-person singular voice of the text, as embodied in performance, something that makes the shift of the first-person plural of the next line particularly puzzling. Is this a reference to a group of singers? Does it point to the plurality of rhapsodic performances that are to follow (Nagy 1996: 214-225)? Various scenarios have been proposed, and none has been generally accepted. What is certain is that the statement concerns the persona of the poet, and continues the description of the exchange that is to be made between him and the chorus. While the collective chorus sings the praise of the individual poet whose song has come to it, the collective performers of the epic poetry embodied by the poet will sing the praise of the individual chorus, and the individual island, in the countless lands and cities where they will carry their song. Following the centripetal movement of songs and lands towards Delos, the centrifugal diffusion of the hymn throughout the region furthers the depth of praise offered to the god. The chorus that contains all other songs has identified this one hymn as the superior song. As it unfolds in performance here and now, the answer to the question of how the poem is to hymn the well-hymned god involves every member of the audience in a landscape of other songs and performances that trace the contours of a vast area of significance. Appropriating the authority of the fixed chorus of the maidens, the mobile hymn of the blind poet of Chios establishes itself as the one voice that stands out in the whole of the Aegean. The narrative circle is complete, and the poem consequently gives signs of closure. But the 1st-person voice of the narrator continues its intervention and announces that “and myself, I shall not cease from hymning the far-shooter Apollo of the silver bow, whom lovely-haired Leto bore” (lines 177-178). Building on a variant of the traditional formulas that usually end hymns and point forward to another performance, these two lines reverse expectations and lead us back to a new beginning, the start of the hymn's second half, the so-called “Hymn to Pythian Apollo”. The parallel between the two constructions is clearly emphasised. The question of line 19 is restated word for word at line 207: “How shall I hymn you, well-hymned (εὔυμνος) as you are in every respect?” The new answer leads to the evocation of a different map of significant space. As in the first half of the hymn, the lines that answer the question open the vista of alternative songs and stories that the poem could follow. The section, similarly, is traced around the evocation of a distinctive space. The parallel is striking: an initial scene on the summit of Olympus (lines 186-206) is followed by a series of itineraries that map out an area of relevant geography. In search of the seat of his great oracle, Apollo descends from the great northern mountain to travel south, passing through a variety of places on the way (lines 216-244). As in the case of Delos, the site of is chosen as the result of a rejection from another land (lines 245-299). Apollo's subsequent search for the ministers of his new oracular shrine will take him back to Crete, the site of the original starting-point for the great circular trajectory of the “Hymn to Delos” (lines 409-439). But instead of drawing a circle around the east of Greece, his trajectory in guiding the Cretan men to Delphi goes in the opposite direction, and adds the whole western part of the Greek landmass to the map of Apolline space drawn by the poet, taking on all of the Peloponnese in the process. The three itineraries of the hymn touch, but do not overlap. They correspond to the three regions of humankind identified by the poem: “those who live in the fertile Peloponnese”, “those who live in the Mainland”, and “those who live in the seagirt islands” (lines 247-252). Giving shape to a space that goes from Olympus in the north to Crete in the south, from the Ionian Sea to the coast of Minor, they encompass the whole of “non-colonial” Greece, at any rate. The endpoint of the last two, Delphi, is placed right at the nominal centre of this Apolline geography. Just as Delos is displayed as the middle point of the Aegean in the first part of the hymn, Delphi comes out as the centre of Greece. The poetic landscape created by the deployment of geographical lists in the poem, and the elegant combination of the parallel, complementary spaces from the two halves of the hymn, formalises the traditional proposition that Delphi is the navel of the world. The choice of Delos and Delphi allows the hymn to incorporate all the spaces and, by extension, all the other songs of the well-hymned god. The poem’s evocation of time follows a parallel course. Essential to the idea that the songs are grounded in space is the idea that these spaces commemorate an event. The focus of each half of the hymn on a particular location is a celebration of an event that took place there in the distant past, and of the rituals that still commemorate it even now. The articulation of these two events together opens a vertiginous perspective on the time of the gods. The birth of the god at Delos is an especially appropriate temporal anchor for the poem, and its link with the foundation of Delphi is a perfect pendant to it. To understand how the two moments are complementary, and how their combination can be said to evoke a complete image of the god in the world, it is important to consider how each event is linked to a different episode taking place on Olympus in the text. The first moment, the birth of Apollo on Delos, is associated with the arrival of Apollo on the divine mountain, and his first acceptance into the society of the gods (lines 1-13). The threat of divine conflict is an important thread of this episode. It is Hera’s hostility to Leto that creates the crisis of Apollo’s dramatic birth, and his arrival on Olympus has ominous overtones of potential struggle. A powerful young god carrying a stringed bow, he provokes fear among the gods when he first appears to them. Apart from Zeus, they all rise in his presence, trembling. Will the young god contest the power of his father, reignite the War in Heaven with the claim of a new generation? His warm welcome by Zeus immediately appeases the tension. Disarmed of his bow by his mother, offered the nectar of divine society by his father, Apollo has entered the community of the gods without strife. The hymn begins with the outcome of its initial narrative, the mutual recognition of father and son, and the overcoming of Hera’s hostility, a divinity that, as it happens, was in fact prominently honoured on the island of Delos. The second part of the hymn, which also starts on Olympus, follows a parallel structure to the first part. Now established as a powerful god throughout the world, with major sanctuaries in and Lycia, in Miletus, Delos, and Delphi (lines 179-185), Apollo is no longer the young god making his way to the land of his father, but a great voice at the heart of Olympus. The festivities of the gods described in the poem are reminiscent of the festivities of men taking place on Delos, with a clear underscored between the chorus of the Muses and the Delian Maidens. The Muses, like the Maidens, sing of gods and men, and their song is also a hymn (line 190). All the gods who are named as participating in those festivities belong to the same generation; that is, they are all children of Zeus, a fact foregrounded by Aphrodite being identified as Zeus’ daughter (line 195), a statement that clears any possible confusion with other traditional genealogies. United in a great circle dance, holding each other by the wrists, the generation of Zeus’ children rejoice in harmony – indeed, Harmony herself is part of the choral celebrations (for Harmony as a daughter of Zeus, see Gantz 1993: 215). Apollo is at the centre, leading the dance with his kithara under the joyful gaze of Zeus and Leto (201-206). His generation is united in its celebration of Olympus, with Apollo at its head. An answer to the unstringed bow of the first half of the poem, the stringed kithara seals the union of generations, the renunciation of strife, and the power of song to embody the rhythms of cosmic concord (cf. Monbrun 2007). After going up to Olympus, Apollo now moves away from it as one of its agents. It is outside of Olympus that the stringed bow reappears as a defining attribute of the god. The central event of the hymn’s second half, the foundation of Delphi, is built on a moment of violence, the slaying of a by the god. This Delphi is the place where the dragon rots. A long ring-composition at the core of this section relates how Hera, furious at the birth of Athena, resolved to stay away from the company of the gods and produce a child of her own: Typhon (300-374). A particularly vivid scene describes how she hit the ground with the flat of her hand and demanded the child from the primordial powers of earlier generations (334- 339). The primordial forces she addresses are the previous rulers of heaven, among whom are the defeated enemies of Zeus now locked in . Demanding as she does that her child be more powerful than Zeus, just as Zeus was more powerful than Kronos, is nothing less than to tear the cosmos asunder. Hera’s rage reopens the War in Heaven (Strauss Clay 2006: 67-71). The awesome Typhon, traditionally portrayed as the greatest threat and the last challenge to the order of Zeus, is made the son of Hera in this version and this version alone. Prominently linked to Gè in her prayer for the child, the divinity usually identified as Typhon’s mother, it is Hera who becomes the mother of all danger in the poem. This is a distinctive version of the myth that writes itself upon tradition and belongs to the distinctive narrative logic of the text. The birth of Typhon is the reverse mirror of the birth of Apollo, Typhon the cosmic challenge that Apollo emphatically is not. Hera’s opposition to the birth of Apollo in the first half of the hymn is answered by her own pregnancy in the second half in opposition to the birth of Athena. That continued antagonism is marked by a contrast to the refusal of lands to welcome Apollo in both halves of the hymn: the earth herself accepts the birth of Typhon. It is on the future site of Delphi that he is welcomed by the dragon to be reared, not on Olympus, as Apollo, and from there that he will launch his assault on Olympus. Apollo’s foundation of Delphi is inscribed on the site of the alternative world threatened by the arrival of Typhon. The poem is entirely silent about the battle of Zeus and Typhon. It only mentions Apollo’s slaying of the dragon on the future site of the temple, the point of departure and conclusion of the poem’s long ring-composition on the birth of the great adversary of divine order. Just as , that other son of Zeus, will be famous for exterminating the offspring of Typhon at the four corners of the world, Apollo slays the creature that reared the monster at the very centre of the universe. This highly selective reference to one of the determinant events of archaic Greek cosmogony allows the poem to activate a relevant background of meaning against which to highlight the specificities of its own themes. The slaying of the dragon confirms the final triumph of the young god over the enmity of Hera – an intermediary that allows for the avoidance of a direct confrontation between the gods of the Olympian pantheon. By killing the beast and laying down the foundations of his temple, Apollo vanquishes once and for all the forces that have opposed him since his birth. No longer pushed away in exile, he imposes his presence on the land of his choice, and punishes the land that opposes him. His victory confirms the cosmic power of Zeus. Just as the birth of Apollo happens despite the attempts of Hera to limit the reproductive powers of her husband, the death of the dragon consecrates the failure of her own reproductive power and her challenge to his rule. With the killing of the , Apollo becomes an integral part of his father’s final and complete dominion over the universe. Male rule is definitively imposed over female opposition. The powers of earlier generations, Gè and Ouranos, as well as the , are defeated once and for all. The foundation of Delphi on this site seals the constitution of Olympian order. Literally built over the corpse of the creature that reared the last challenge to it, it consecrates the alliance of later generations against the older forces of primordial times. Just as it is literally at the centre of space, Delphi is thus also figuratively at the centre of time. It is certainly not a coincidence that this is the place that will become the seat of the oracular voice that knows “what has been, what is, and what shall be”; a channel for the knowledge of Zeus himself. Reducing the internal logic of a poem to a combination of discrepancies imperfectly brought together by chance hardly does justice to the intricate parallels that make the different parts of the text echo each other, and that were experienced as a whole by the audiences of the text that we actually have. The combination of the Delian and Delphic halves of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is more than an assemblage of disparate elements, but a carefully crafted tableau built on parallels and responsions. Grounded in these two complementary poles, the presence of the god is projected over the entire Greek domain, and inscribed in the fabric of time that made the universe what it is. The aim is to encompass the full range of the god’s presence. The song makes a claim over all other songs of Apollo, elevating the hymn over any one event, any one place, or any one performance. Designed for perennity throughout the cities of Greece, the poem gives an authoritative shape to the power of the god. Its own recurrent performance over the centuries is a powerful answer to the repeated question of lines 19 and 207. The hymn conjures an image of the god that claims the authority of tradition as a whole. The rhetoric of Panhellenism it deploys from beginning to end projects an all-encompassing vision that surpasses the perspective of any one place of cult or any one song, and ties them all together in one general picture of common significance. The discourse of authority displayed by the hymn could nominally sustain itself in any performance or occasion. But at no time was there any outside force to defend it efficiently, no priesthood or recognised arbiters of orthodoxy to remind the audience of its truth and tell them what it meant (Parker 2011: 40-63). That is a predicament it shares with most other poetic texts. What is the meaning of Zeus Aigiochos? Is it Zeus “the Aegis-Bearer”, or “Goat-Rider” Zeus (see West 1978: 366-368)? What is the meaning of Eriounios? Is it “Benefactor”, or “Fast- Runner” (see Leumann 1950: 123)? Is Hermes Diaktoros “the Dispenser” or “the Guide”? Is there one correct answer to such questions? The old formulaic epithets, obscured and misunderstood with the passage of time, became invitations for reinterpretation and exegesis, with little stability in place. The endeavours of rhapsodes to explain the real sense, the hyponoia, of the poems they performed were regularly derided, for instance (see Richardson 2006). The interpretive cultures of the symposium were notoriously variegated (see e.g. Plato, Prot. 347e). And attempts, like that of the Derveni Commentator’s exegesis of an Orphic “hymn”, to impose meaning on a text – and, in this case, propose a reading of broad ritual and theological significance – had marginal impact at best. The authority of the poem could be denied as easily as what we find in Herodotus, for instance, or dismissed entirely, as the works of so many “Presocratics” attest. It could be transformed by allegorical exegesis, something that already appears in our sources in the 6th century, and that is well attested in the classical period (Struck 2004). It was, in any case, always mediated by the individual agency of every member of the audience, who undoubtedly understood it in different terms from most of their peers, with no recognised voices able to steer a clear and common direction. Sophocles could not direct the interpretation of every member of his audience, as he did that poor grammarian in the symposium described by Ion of Chios. When the Muses tell Hesiod that “we know how to say many false things similar to genuine ones, but we know, when we wish, how to proclaim true things” (Theogony 27-28), one implication is that the two opposites are almost undistinguishable to the human audience, and each one can lead to the other. In other words: the interpretation of the song is as important as the song itself in uncovering the truth it holds, a teaching repeated in countless verse traditions of later periods, from the riddles of the symposium and popular oracular poetry to the most refined melic poems of Pindar, who spoke “for those who can hear” (see e.g. Ol. 2.85). Nowhere was this more true than in the massive spectacles of shattered knowledge and fragmented perspectives offered by tragedy to Athenian audiences throughout the classical period, with their discordant voices, powerless choral songs, and open-ended irony. These plays recurrently staged the main figures of the heroic past faced with a world coming apart at the seams, the mutability of human fortune and the enigma of divine inscrutability – powerful foci of reflection on the fundamental religious issues of the polis. As play after play explored and reconfigured the delicate edifices of tradition on divine justice and ritual action, on the cultic landscapes of the past and their many ramifications in the present, each spectator was confronted to choices of interpretation and involvement that were entirely personal (see Budelmann 2000 for the plays of Sophocles). The religious role of tragedy is a vexed question of scholarship that cannot be properly addressed here. Most scholars, at this point, would agree that drama should not simply be equated with ritual. , at any rate, certainly does not hide behind every mask, and it would be absurd to reduce tragedy to the religious dimensions of the plays, as some have done at times. These religious dimensions, for many members of the audience, had very little significance indeed. But they clearly did matter to most, and the constant questioning of the foundations of religious knowledge by tragedy was hardly just an aesthetic concern. Tragedy’s “discourse of religious exploration”, to cite Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, opened a space that invited a real and constantly renewed engagement from every single viewer with the meaning of piety and cosmic order, ritual practice, and religious belief (Sourvinou-Inwood 2003). The protagonists of the plays were, in the great majority of cases, the central figures in the religious universe of the audience, and many tragedies ended with the foundation of a cult, the creation of a direct link between the dramatic muthos that had just unfolded and the ritual life of the present. Considering that most of these aetiological stories were set outside of Attica, tragedy actually provided its Athenian audiences with a detailed map of cult in the wider Greek world, and even beyond – reinvented for the occasion, of course. The rituals that were described and performed in every play, in any case, from sacrifice to supplication, from hymnic singing to libation and choreographed schēmata, were in direct dialogue with the everyday religious experiences of the audience. In some cases, it can be demonstrated that tragedy did not only reflect cultic practice and imagination, but profoundly modified it (see e.g. Henrichs 1978). The fact that this discourse, and indeed performance, of religious exploration can be read as a fundamental element of stability and order, a powerful reaffirmation of the religious system of the polis, or as a transgressive questioning of religious norms designed to leave the spectators with more queries than answers, is a testament to the inexhaustible richness of these texts, and the intractable hermeneutic challenges they have and will always continue to pose. The great popular events of the dramatic festival were by all accounts the most spectacular types of poetic performance of their day, but they should not be allowed to overshadow the many other types of poetry that existed at the same time, and we should always remember that nowhere did they play a comparable role to the one they had in Athens at a specific time. Pindar, for instance, presents a whole different world of negotiations with many of the same theological traditions engaged by . The poetic literacy and religious competence needed to navigate the many voices of truth offered by authoritative song in the archaic and classical period varied a great deal from person to person, let alone group to group, city to city, region to region. Yes, Greek religion had no Church and no Scripture, as we are often reminded. But we should cease to present the flexibility of its system of authority, based on competition and rivalry, as an absence. The many unmediated choices of the individual before the grandiose claims of poetry to reveal images of divine truth created a mosaic of possibilities of immense cultural potency. This cut- and-thrust of immediate reception and culture in movement has left little trace, and it cannot be measured or quantified, like foundation deposits, the size of altars, or the prices of sacrificial animals on inscriptions, any more than it can be modelled, like social interactions. But it is no less important than sanctuaries or sacrifice or festivals to make sense of Greek religion. The many discrepancies of poetry, just as the even greater divergences and disagreements of its ancient (and modern) understandings, are not indications that these texts mattered little for the religious life of their audiences, but a fundamental characteristic of that lively and constantly shifting religious system, and the choices confronted by each individual. Greek religion cannot be limited to cult, whatever we mean by cult. Without the vast web of poetic worlds painted in our texts, and the challenges to scholarly interpretation they entail, our knowledge of the possibilities of Greek religious experience would be thoroughly diminished, and much more stale. The platitudes of positivistic certainty dismiss “literature” from the study of archaic and classical religion at our loss. The many poetic texts that have come down to us contain a rich but circumscribed pool of meaning, which must be analysed for itself, not merely used to find reflections of something else, if we want to make any sense of the Greek religious imagination. The hermeneutic analysis of poetry is an essential part of any real understanding of early Greek religion.

FOR FURTHER READING

Calame 2009 [2006] is a particularly important methodological overview of recent scholarship on poetry and religion, while Calame 2009 [2000] offers a current introduction to the poetics of myth, with good bibliography. The synthesis of Parker 2011: 20-31 and Versnel 2011: 151-237 offer stimulating general discussions of poetry and early Greek religion, with a full set of references. Much of the scholarship of earlier decades on the question has been shaped by the very different approaches of Vernant (see 1988 and 1990) and Burkert (see 2001 and 2007). For the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, see Calame 2013, with extensive bibliography. For religion and tragedy, Seaford 1994, Henrichs 1994/1995, and Parker 2009 offer interesting paths through the scholarship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Budelmann, F. 2000. The Language of Sophocles. Cambridge.

Burkert, W. 2001. Kleine Schriften I: Homerica (ed. Ch. Riedweg). Göttingen.

Burkert, W. 2007. Kleine Schriften VII: Tragica et Historica (ed. W. Rösler). Göttingen.

Calame, C. 2009 [2000]. : Poetics, Pragmatics, and Fiction. Cambridge.

Calame, C. 2009 [2006]. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece. Harvard.

Calame, C. 2013, "The Homeric Hymns as Poetic Offerings", in A. Faulkner (ed.), The Homeric Hymns. Oxford, pp. 334-357.

Gantz, T. 1993. Early Greek myth, 2 vol. Baltimore.

Henrichs, A. 1978. "Greek Maenadism from Olympias to Messalina", HSCP 82: 121- 160.

Henrichs, A. 1994/1995. "‘Why Should I Dance?’: Choral Self-Referentiality in Greek Tragedy", Arion 3: 56-111.

Kowalzig, B. 2007. Singing for the Gods. Oxford.

Monbrun, P. 2007. Les voix d'Apollon: l'arc, la et les oracles. Rennes.

Nagy, G., Poetry as Performance. Cambridge.

Parker, R. C. T. 2009. "Aeschylus’ Gods: Drama, Cult, Theology", in J. Jouanna and F. Montanari (eds.), Eschyle à l’aube du théâtre occidental. Vandoeuvres, pp. 127-154.

Parker, R. C. T. 2011. On Greek Religion. Ithaca.

Richardson, N. J. 2010. Three Homeric Hymns. Cambridge.

Seaford, R. 1994. Reciprocity and Ritual. Oxford.

Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 2003. Tragedy and Athenian religion, Lanham (Md.).

Strauss Clay, J. 2006. The politics of Olympus (2nd ed.). Princeton.

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West, M. L. 1978. Hesiod: Works and Days. Oxford.