Archaic Poetics of Identity

The longest of Callimachus’ six hymns, the Hymn to Delos stands out as unusual, in large part because of its addressee. Instead of a god or goddess, Delos as both island and nymph receives the honor of the poet’s song, and throughout the poem Callimachus exploits the slippage between place and personification in clever and often comic ways (Giuseppetti).

Pindar’s Aeginetan odes constitute a striking subset of his epinicia, both for their sheer quantity (approximately a quarter of the corpus) and for their consistent focus on a single set of heroes, the Aiakidai. At the same time, as Stenger (2014) has recently stressed, Pindar’s insistence on linking the Aiakidai with Aegina stands in stark contrast to the minimal time actually spent on the island by the heroes.

In this paper, I highlight an unnoticed aspect of Homeric impersonation in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. I argue that the author of the poem establishes his Homeric pedigree through specific allusions to an established canon of Homeric epic, particularly the Odyssey. Rather than just offering evidence for the early development of Homer’s biography, the hymn also attests to the early reception of his poems.

The sea storm fragments of Alcaeus were perceived already from antiquity as carriers of metaphorical meaning (Heracl. Alleg. Hom. 5), and modern scholarship has followed suit, although with occasional dissent, e.g., Slater (1976: 161-70).