The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Related Texts: Text, Translation and Commentary

343 Pages·2012·2.05 MB·English

by  Stuart Douglas Olson

S.Douglas Olson
The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Related Texts
TEXTE UND KOMMENTARE
Eine altertumswissenschaftliche Reihe
Herausgegeben von
Siegmar Döpp, Adolf Köhnken, Ruth Scodel
Band 39
De Gruyter
The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite
and Related Texts
Text, Translation and Commentary
by
S. Douglas Olson
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-026072-4
e-ISBN 978-3-11-026074-8
ISSN 0563-3087
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For Rachel (h. 5.185–6)

Preface
In late spring 2008, I began work on a commentary on the Homeric Hymn
to Aphrodite. The poem is early and complete, and has a lovely and com-
pelling storyline, and at that time no substantial modern English-language
edition of the text existed. I accordingly began to think and write my way
through it line by line, consulting the available commentaries, such as they
were, and familiarizing myself with the secondary bibliography. The
hAphr. (as I refer to it throughout here) is a beautiful example of small-
scale early Greek epic poetry, and I felt—and continue to feel—much like
Anchises in its presence: like an ordinary cowherd preparing for another
tedious day on the farm, into whose life suddenly drops a creature of ex-
traordinary beauty.
Early that summer, I discovered that Oxford University Press was
about to publish a commentary on the hAphr. by Andrew Faulkner. After
much consideration, I decided to continue with my own project. One fun-
damental element in the ideology of the modern ‘standard commentary’ is
that it is comprehensive and universal: it ‘covers everything, for everyone.’
But among the most common reactions to working with even the most up-
to-date editions of ancient texts is, in practice, a mixture of bafflement and
frustration, when one discovers that the commentator has ignored the word
or issue in which one is interested, or has dealt with it in an unhelpful
manner, or has failed to take some crucial piece of evidence into account.
Editors exercise enormous power over their authors, by deciding what to
print (and thus what to omit); even if they do so with regard for the highest
professional standards, offering a complete and easily reversible critical
apparatus at the bottom of the page, most readers will pay attention only to
the Greek or Latin as printed. Commentators, meanwhile, determine not
just the answers to the questions a text poses, but the questions that are
asked of it, and the better and more convincingly they so, the more effec-
tively and permanently they shape how the text is understood. The exist-
ence of two contemporary commentaries on a single Homeric Hymn, I
decided, produced independent of one another and in the absence of a long
tradition of interpretation to set a critical agenda in advance, might make
that issue visible in a productive way. In the event, Faulkner and I read the
hAphr. very differently, both on a line-by-line level (including in the Greek
we print, and the style and content of the apparatuses we provide) and in
viii Preface
our sense of the poem’s larger affiliations, context, and effects.1 My hope
is that readers will take this as a provocation rather than a problem, and as
encouragement to read the original Greek and what the two of us have to
say about it closely, critically, and creatively. In support of this approach, I
set Faulkner’s edition aside during my first, formative pass through the
text, and I have made a systematic effort not to argue directly with him
when we disagree, both because this would misrepresent the independent
nature of the projects, and because the reader will, I assume, have both
texts at hand and be able to construct the imaginary dialogue between us
for herself. 2
My text is based on complete collations of the manuscripts and the edi-
tio princeps (for all of which, see Introduction 6). I provide three separate
apparatuses. The first is a catalogue of specific intertexts: passages from
Homer, Hesiod, and other Hymns that the hAphr. or one of the nine other,
related, shorter Hymns presented in this edition quote, echo, or refer to
somehow, as well as passages from later authors who for their part quote,
echo, or refer to one of the Hymns. The second apparatus catalogues for-
mulaic language (somewhat broadly defined), documenting instances in
which the Hymns use established epic diction without obviously referring
to a specific epic exemplar. Implicit in the distinction between the items
included in the first apparatus and the second is a substantial claim about
the textualization of some epic poetry by the time the hAphr. was com-
posed, a matter I discuss briefly below and then take up in more detail in
Introduction 5. To my mind, the difference between the two categories is
generally clear; but individual readers may well feel that certain passages
included in the first apparatus belong in the second, and vice versa. The
third apparatus is a traditional apparatus criticus; points where my reports
of manuscript readings differ from those presented in Càssola (1975) or
Faulkner (2008) should be understood as intended as specific corrections
or supplements of their texts (although see Introduction 6.C on the limits of
the variants I record).
Much of my commentary is of a traditional philological character: I
consider what ought to be printed in the text, how variants arose, what
words mean and how they are to be construed and understood, and who
and what the individuals and objects referred to by the poet and his charac-
_____________
1 See the more detailed comments below, and the next two sections of the Introduc-
tion.
2 Matters are in fact even more complicated than this, since Faulkner and I were
both granted advance access to N. J. Richardson’s new Cambridge Green and Yel-
low commentary on the poem (2010), which is however on a considerably smaller
scale. I regret that Maire G. Chapsa’s 2008 dissertation (University of Patras) on
the Hymn came to my attention too late to be taken into account in this edition.
Preface ix
ters are. The primary limitation I have imposed upon myself in this connec-
tion, is that I have often declined to discuss matters that would seem to me
to be better taken up in a commentary on Homer or Hesiod; my reasons for
this are outlined briefly below. Two broad strategies of reading nonetheless
sharply distinguish my interpretation of the texts treated in this edition
from Faulkner’s treatment of the hAphr. First, I argue throughout that the
hAphr. in particular is composed in the shadow of the Iliad and the Odys-
sey, in more or less the form in which we have those poems today, and
probably in the shadow of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days as
well. Put another way, the Hymns do not merely participate in and bear
witness to epic diction. Nor are they best understood as the product of a
degraded and clumsy ‘sub-epic’ phase of that diction (to use Hoekstra’s
unfortunately now well-established formulation). Instead, the Hymns treat-
ed in this edition, and especially the hAphr., consciously rework both gen-
eral and specific epic exemplars. Their language and expressions are not to
be explained, at least in the first instance, as merely ‘typical epic diction,’
in some cases badly handled. Instead, I proceed on the assumption that the
Hymns represent calculated and creative responses to fixed older texts, and
that their full sense only emerges when they are interpreted in that light.3
The credibility of this approach can only be assessed by the results it
yields, and thus by the contents of my commentary. Second, I pose
throughout a series of fundamentally narratological questions, including by
asking repeatedly not just ‘Who speaks?’ but ‘Who sees?’ or, better put,
‘Who perceives?’ and thus, to use a more technical term, ‘Who focalizes?’
This approach—or bundle of related approaches—works to expose some of
the poems’ basic but designedly invisible mechanics: how (to use Ge-
nette’s terms) has histoire (the events or alleged events the Hymns repre-
sent in their own idiosyncratic ways; Bal’s ‘fabula’) been transformed into
narration (the poems we have; Bal’s ‘text’)?
Attentive readers will note in addition that I am dubious about the ex-
istence in the archaic period of kings in the Troad claiming descent from
Aeneas (the ‘Aeneidae’), whereas Faulkner maintains that the hAphr. was
composed specifically to honor such individuals (Introduction 1); that I do
not believe that that poem was widely known or influential during the Hel-
lenistic period or later, whereas Faulkner maintains that it was (Introduc-
tion 3); that I reject, on specifically stated grounds, Janko’s ‘glottochrono-
metric’ attempt to precisely date the language of the hAphr., and indeed of
all surviving early epic texts, a matter on which Faulkner takes no firm
_____________
3 For clear large-scale examples of this tendency, e.g. hAphr. 58–67 (combining and
reworking Il. 14.166–86, esp. 169–72, on the one hand, and Od. 8.362–6, on the
other), 202–17 (combining and expanding on Il. 5.265–7; 20.234–5); h. 6.3–18
(filling in the gaps in Hes. Th. 188–206, esp. 191–202).