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  • The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Introduction, Text and Commentary by Athanassios Vergados
  • Cecilia Nobili
Athanassios Vergados. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: Introduction, Text and Commentary. Texte und Kommentare, 41. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. Pp. xiii, 717. $182.00. ISBN 978–3–11–025969–8.

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This long and much-awaited commentary to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is an excellent product of the revival of studies on the Homeric Hymns that has appeared in the last decade.1 After Faulkner’s publication of his commentary on the Hymn to Aphrodite (followed by another by Olson), the Hymn to Hermes was the only one among the four major Hymns still lacking a detailed analysis.2 Vergados has undertaken this task with incomparable competence and produced a work that is due to become fundamental for students of archaic epic poetry.

The book begins with an introduction focusing on two important themes of the poem, reflection on music and poetry, and humor, which is followed by a section on the linguistic parallels between the Hymn and other works (Homer, Hesiod, and the other Homeric Hymns); it ends with a useful assessment of the relations between the Hymn and other versions of the same stories by coeval and later authors. This is then followed by a section on the problem of the date and place of composition and one on the transmission of the text. Afterwards comes the text with the apparatus and, finally, the detailed commentary on single passages.

The introduction (4–14) anticipates a fundamental theme: through the humorous narration of Hermes’ invention of the lyre and its music, the Hymn represents one of the first reflections on the importance of the origins and functions of poetry in Greek literature. Hermes’ first song is itself a hymn to Hermes, which narrates the affair between Maia and Zeus and his own birth, thus overlapping, though with some meaningful variations, with the beginning of the Hymn itself. Hermes’ second song is a theogony that recounts how the gods obtained their timai, thus mirroring Hermes’ own attempt at reaching legitimacy. With this sort of self-portrait the poet demonstrates, as Vergados (10) states, that he is well “aware of, and reflects on, the conventions of his traditional art.” Nonetheless, the author’s interpretation of both passages as examples of mise en abyme should not be stressed too much: Hermes’ songs are accompanied by the lyre, which at the time of the composition of the Hymn (second half of the sixth century, as Vergados 145 also states) cannot reflect the performance of rhapsodic proems. It is better suited to citharodic compositions, which shared many elements with Hermes’ song and have been considered by some to be the antecedents of the Homeric Hymns.3

The chapter on the date and place of composition (130–53) faces a much-disputed problem. Vergados examines the most significant proposals criticizing the historicist interpretations and the attempts to use single passages as time and place markers (for example the seven-stringed lyre or the allusion to [End Page 416] the Delphic sanctuary). Nevertheless, the elements he adduces go in the same direction and simply confirm the date of the Hymn in the second half of the sixth century accepted by most scholars. No attempts are made to define the place of composition, although Vergados (148) shows that an early Athenian reception is confirmed by the Atticisms and by the knowledge of the poem on the part of fifth-century vase painters and of Sophocles.

The strongest element in the volume, however, is the great number of linguistic parallels with other forms of epic that the poet adduces and discusses: such an attention to vocabulary illuminates the peculiarities of the Hymn in relation to other poems and its debts to the tradition. Vergados points to the many neologisms (such as αἱμυλομήτην and πυληδόκον, important in defining the attributes of this new god). The use of formulaic phrases is equally meaningful, so that ∆ιὸς ἄλκιμος υἱός, used to define Hermes at line 101, is typical of Heracles, another precocious child and cattle raider; δολίης δ᾿οὐ λήθετο τέχνης (line 76) seems to be drawn from Hesiod (Th. 547, 660), where it is applied to Prometheus, a trickster figure who...

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