Vergados The "Homeric Hymn to Hermes"

Introduction, Text and Commentary
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-3-11-025970-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Greek, Ancient (to 1453), 732 Seiten

Reihe: ISSN

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.

Zielgruppe

Academics, Institutes, Libraries

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vergados, Athanassios

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturkritik: Hermeneutik und Interpretation
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Griechische & Byzantinische Literatur

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgments;7
2;Abbreviations;9
3;Introduction;15
4;1. Summary of the poem;16
5;2. Music, poetry, and language;18
5.1;2.1 Hermes’ two songs;18
5.2;2.2 Hermes’ songs as mise en abyme;23
5.3;2.3 Semata, poetry, and prophecy;29
5.4;2.4 Hermes’ deceptive language;36
6;3. Humour in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes;40
7;4. Relation to archaic literature;54
7.1;4.1 Language;54
7.1.1;4.1.1 Vocabulary:;54
7.1.2;4.1.2 Formulaic Phrases:;62
7.2;4.2 Metre and prosody;71
7.3;4.3 Thematic correspondences between h.Herm. and other archaic hexameter poems:;79
7.4;Appendix: oral or literate composition?;87
8;5. Relation to other literature;90
8.1;5.1 References to the story of h.Herm. in other authors;90
8.2;5.2 Allusions to h.Herm;124
9;6. Structure and arrangement;139
10;7. Date and place of composition;144
10.1;7.1 Date of composition;145
10.2;7.2 Place of composition;162
11;8. The transmission of the text;168
12;.µ... e.. ..µ.~.;175
13;Commentary;227
14;Bibliography;601
15;Illustrations;661
16;Indices;671

Über Autor(innen)

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