Carman Romano (Bryn Mawr College)
Humor as Praise: Hermes and Apollo in Homeric Hymn 4
In this paper, I explore how the poet of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes delights its titular divinity not simply by narrating Hermes’ precocious actions, but by emphasizing Apollo’s reactions to them. Perhaps because Hermes is a tricky god with a keen sense of humor, as scholars such as Vergados (2011) and Bungard (2011) have recently noted, the poet of the Hymn opts to use Apollo as a foil, repeatedly rendering Hermes’ self-righteous elder brother the object of the baby-god’s every joke. Specifically, I show how Hermes is meant to delight not only in the story of how he invented the lyre and rustled Apollo’s cattle, but especially in Apollo’s amazed reactions to these deeds. I use the scene of epiphany from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as a comparandum, and argue that the poet of the Hymn to Hermes models Apollo’s staggered reactions to his little brother’s feats after the reactions typical of human beings upon unexpectedly encountering a divinity. To substantiate my claim that Apollo's surprising reactions ought to be read as humorous, I rely on Eco's (1972, 1985) theory of iteration and inversion. According to Eco, story-tellers engage iterative topoi in their narratives that "console" their audience members by their sheer familiarity. Occasionally, a story-teller will invert a topos or deploy it in an unexpected way, garnering a laugh from her audience. I apply this theory to the Hymn to Hermes and argue that Apollo’s absolutely shocked reaction to Hermes’ backward and strange footprints and the sound of the lyre mirror mortal reactions to the divine, and so "invert" the audience’s expectations of the topos of epiphany as it is typically deployed in the Homeric Hymns. Apollo's behavior, since Apollo is often depicted as a potentially frightening and powerful deity in his own right. Not only, then, does the narrator of the Hymn to Hermes aim to please his piece’s divine object by recounting how he revises his timai among the Olympians, as Clay (1989) has convincingly shown, but also through humor leveraged against Hermes’ brother and (eventual) friend.