Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus
CHRISTOPHER ATHANASIOUS FARAONE
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Faraone, Christopher A., author.
Title: Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus / Christopher Athanasious Faraone.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020043988 | ISBN 9780197552971 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197552988 (updf) | ISBN 9780197553008 (oso) | ISBN 9780197552995 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Hexameter. | Greek poetry—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PA3095 .F37 2021 | DDC 881/.0109—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043988
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197552971.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
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for Bruce Lincoln and Jamie Redfield, dear friends and fellow travelers
Preface and Acknowledgments
This study arises from my ongoing interest in the hexametrical poetry of the archaic and Hellenistic periods, as well as in ancient Greek religion and magic, and from my firm belief that much profit arises when all three are studied together. Of the four short genres of hexametrical poetry that I most closely interrogate, I began to work on incantations at least twentyfive years ago, when I published a series of loosely connected articles,1 in which I unwittingly laid the foundation for Chapter 5 of this volume, work that I returned to with renewed vigor when Dirk Obbink and I published our book on the Getty Hexameters in 2013.2 Chapter 3 on hymns also evolved slowly over a number of years, first in a graduate seminar on ancient Greek hymns that I teach regularly at the University of Chicago and then in articles on the paean and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo 3 The four internal chapters themselves initially took shape as lectures. The main argument for Chapter 3 (Hymn) was presented at the University of Lausanne (September 2010); the University of Missouri at Columbia (March 2011); at a meeting of the “Orality and Literacy” group at University of Michigan (June 2012); and at Cambridge University (May 2014). In the last two venues I owe special thanks to Ruth Scodel and Richard Hunter for their vigorous and friendly skepticism, which helped me simplify and hone my arguments.
Especially helpful, too, were the comments of my former colleague Boris Maslov at a conference entitled “Historical Poetics: Past, Present and Future” held at the University of Chicago in May 2011 and those that I received in February 2016, when Richard Martin kindly invited me to give a workshop at Stanford University on a draft of Chapter 6 (Lament). The central arguments in Chapter 4 (Oracle) were presented in 2018 at the Australian National University in Canberra and in 2019 at the University of Southern California, and I am grateful for the comments of Elizabeth Minchin at the
1 Faraone (1992a, 1995, 1996, 2001a–c, 2004a–b, 2006b–c, 2011b, and 2013b–c).
2 Faraone and Obbink (2013).
3 Faraone (2011a, 2015, and 2018a)
former venue and Greg Thalmann at the latter. Special thanks go, finally, to Cléo Carastro for arranging a series of lectures in Paris in December 2017, at which I presented Chapters 4–6 in sequence for the first time and in the process profited from the comments of Cléo herself, Renaud Gagné, and John Scheid, the last of whom made me aware of some crucial evidence about early Sibylline oracles.
The manuscript itself has also profited from the comments of many. I thank Seth Schein for his comments on and critique of an early version of Chapter 3, especially his advice on how to change the sequence of the argument, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Margalit Finkelberg, Boris Maslov, Radcliffe Edmonds, and Marco Fantuzzi, who read through and commented on different parts of the manuscript, and special thanks to Janet Downie, who gave me crucially important advice about the shape and content of the Introduction and Chapter 2. And I will always be grateful to Julia Kindt and the staff at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia, University of Sydney for making the month of February 2018 an exceptionally productive one, ending, as it did, with the first fully annotated typescript of the book. I am also grateful to Hannah Dubinski and Anna Darden, who did a stellar job assembling the indices and to Karen Donohue for her careful copy-editing. Early versions of some of the arguments in this volume were published in Greece & Rome (part of Section 3.4), the Journal of Hellenic Studies (Sections 5.1– 2 and 5.5), Antichthon (Section 5.2 and Appendix C), Classical Quarterly (Section 5.4), the American Journal of Philolog y (Section 2.2) and Transactions of the American Philological Association (Appendix E); in each case, I have profited much from the comments of various editors and anonymous referees, as I have from the anonymous readers of this volume. I should also add that the production of this book was delayed for at least a year by circumstances beyond the author’s control.
I am, as always, deeply thankful for institutional help. My initial research was supported by generous grants from the Loeb Classical Foundation Grant (2009) and NEH Fellowship for University Professors (2013–14). And at the University of Chicago I am grateful to two successive deans, Martha Roth and Anne Robertson, and to two chairs of the Classics Department—Alain Bresson and Cliff Ando—for their continued support for serious research at the University of Chicago in the form of research leave and funding, and, as always, to Catherine Mardikes, our wizard bibliographer in the Regenstein Library. The book is dedicated fondly to Jamie Redfield and Bruce Lincoln
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
in deep gratitude for all of the fun we have had over the last thirty years of team-teaching and especially for all of the things I have learned from them in the seminar room and in our energetic conversations around various diningroom tables.
Athens, April 2019
Abbreviations
CEG P.A. Hanson, Carmina Epigraphica Graeca (Berlin 1982–89)
DT A. Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae (Paris 1904)
DTA R. Wünsch, Defixionum Tabellae Atticae, IG 3.3 (Berlin 1897)
FGrH F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Berlin/ Leiden 1923–58)
GMA R. Kotansky, Greek Magical Amulets. Vol. 1: Papyrologica Coloniensia 22.1 (Opladen 1994)
Heim R. Heim, Incantamenta Magica Graeca-Latina, Jahrbücher für classische Philologie Suppl. 10 (Leipzig 1892)
IGH T. Preger, Inscriptiones Graecae metricae (Lipsiae 1891)
K-A R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae comici Graeci (Berlin 1983– )
LIMC Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Zurich 1981– )
L-P E. Lobel and D.L. Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta (Oxford 1955)
LSJ Liddell, Scott, and Jones et al. (eds.) A Greek-English Lexicon9 with revised Supplement (Oxford 1996)
PGM K. Preisendanz [and A. Henrichs], Papyri Graecae Magicae: Die Griechischen Zauberpapyri2 2 vols. (Stuttgart 1973–1974)
PMG D.L. Page, Poetae melici Graecae (Oxford 1962)
P&W Parke and Wormell (1956)
SEG Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum (Leiden 1923– )
SGD D. Jordan, “A Survey of Greek Defixiones Not Included in the Special Corpora” GRBS 26 (1985) 151–197
SM R. Daniel and F. Maltomini, Supplementum Magicum, 2 vols., Papyrologica Coloniensia 16.1 and 2 (Opladen 1990 and 1991)
SMA C. Bonner, Studies in Magical Amulets Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian, University of Michigan Studies, Humanistic Series 4 (Ann Arbor 1950)
Supp. Hell. H. Lloyd-Jones and P. Parsons, Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin 1983)
Introduction
In the late fifth century Aristophanes has his character Aeschylus express a strongly utilitarian view of early hexametrical poetry:1
For consider from the start how useful (ôphelimoi) the noble poets have been:
Orpheus, for one, taught us rituals and to refrain from homicide, Musaeus, cures for diseases and oracles, and Hesiod, works of tillage, seasons of harvest and plowing. And the divine Homer, whence did he obtain honor and glory, if not from this, that he taught us useful things (chrêsta): tactics, brave deeds, and the weapons of men?
This passage was central to Havelock’s famous argument that archaic poems in dactylic hexameters served as a kind of tribal encyclopedia that preserved all sorts of useful information, for example, when to plow a field or how to sacrifice a cow.2 Both Aristophanes and Havelock were, of course, primarily concerned with the content of these various poems, an approach that minimizes the differences between them in terms of poetic style, performative context, and implied audiences.
Although the passage suggests that these “useful” poets of old were all individuals, who specialized in one or perhaps two genres, most scholars
1 Frogs 1030–36. The sequence (Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, Homer) seems to have been the common way to list early poets, at least in the classical period—see, e.g., Hippias DK 86 b6 and Plato Apology 41a—and it is probably based on some vague perception of their relative chronology; see Konig (2010) 52–55.
2 Havelock (1963) 66 and (1982) 122–24. Given the focus elsewhere in the Frogs on the moral or political utility of poetry, Hunter (2014) 86–87 suggests that the “useful things” listed here are not, in fact, bits of factual information, but the moral attitudes that lie behind them. I agree that, given how the character Aeschylus elsewhere in the play focuses on the moral import of poetry, we might have expected him to stress this point, but it is hard to see a moralizing definition of “useful things” in the passage itself.
Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus. Christopher Athanasious Faraone, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197552971.003.0001
would nowadays agree that, like “Homer,” each of the names mentioned by the comic poet stands for a performance tradition, in which many individual poets participated over time.3 The name “Orpheus,” in short, like those of “Homer” or “Hesiod,” was a convenient persona under which later poets could compose—Pythagoras, for example, was alleged to have composed several different poems under Orpheus’ name.4 The poets who performed in these traditions, moreover, often excelled in several genres. Thus, in addition to the rituals and prohibitions that Aristophanes mentions, the Orphic repertoire also apparently included theogonies, hymns, and probably even heroic narratives.5 The name Musaeus, moreover, literally “belonging to the Muse,” likewise seems to have been a shared moniker for a series of hexametrical performers, who were perhaps most famous for their oracles, which were collected during the tyranny of Hipparchus and still known to Plato and Sophocles.6 Presumably they were bundled together in a single continuous collection, not unlike the latter half of the Hesiodic Works and Days 7 Similar collections of hexametrical oracles were also attributed to poets with more regional reputations: on the Greek mainland a series of male performers, who went by the name of “Bakis,”8 and a group of women, called “Sibyls,” who first appear on the Anatolian coast in the same area where the Homeric poems were composed.9 On Crete, Epimenides, like Musaeus, was remembered as a poet and “root-cutter” with special knowledge of purificatory
3 For the most recent summary, see Gainsford (2015) vi–x.
4 See, e.g., Henrichs (2003) 212–16 and Riedweg (2002b) 52–53.
5 West (1983) 1–38.
6 Herodotus 7.6, for example, says that in the time of Pisistratus, Onomacritus was caught redhanded inserting one of his own oracles into the collection of Musaeus’ poems; see Shapiro (1990) 335–36 and Dillery (2005) 167–68. More recently, scholars have wondered whether this report was biased by Pisisitratid propaganda, and Martinez (2011) has suggested that Onomacritus was in fact one of the first editors of the collection. Pausanias 1.22.7, writing much later, says that all of Musaeus’ oracles were composed by Onomacritus and that the only genuine work of Musaeus was a hymn to Demeter written for the Lycomidae. Slings (2000) 72–73, on the other hand, is probably closer to the truth in thinking that in the sixth century, Onomacritus was still part of a living oral tradition of poets composing and reperforming oracles and that the alleged interpellation of Onomacritus was simply a performance in which Onomacritus performed an oracle that he alleged to be that of Musaeus.
7 West (1983) 40.
8 Dillery (2005) 179–80 notes that Herodotus quotes the oracles of Bakis more frequently than those of others and seems to have thought that his oracles were more reliable than others, and Henrichs (2003) 216–22, who notes that these oracles are often recited in ritual contexts, such as animal sacrifice.
9 Bremmer (2010) 13–14 and Dillery (2005). And there must have been many others—Herodotus, for example, was a great believer in oracles and he insisted that the oracles of Bakis, Musaeus, and the otherwise unknown Lysistratos all correctly predicted the Greek victory at Salamis; see Shapiro (1990) 344.
and protective herbs,10 who in Solon’s time allegedly purified Athens of the Alcmeonid curse.11 His hexametrical poetry included a Theogony and a collection entitled Oracles. 12 Wide discrepancies over the dates of his birth and death suggest that “Epimenides,” too, was a name that could be adopted by various performers over a long stretch of time.13
Although poets performed numerous types of hexametrical poetry in the archaic period, scholars have, in fact, struggled to explain or define the connection between the dactylic hexameter and the notion of poetic genre, which in the ancient Greek world was dictated by meter, but also by the often ritual context in which a poem was performed.14 This struggle has often been exacerbated by the notorious ambiguity of the Greek word epos, which can refer to both the “dactylic hexameter” and its most famous genre, “epic poetry,” and also by the confusion in our sources over whether hexameters were sung with the melodic accompaniment of a stringed instrument, chanted with rhythmical accompaniment, or simply spoken aloud. In an effort to define an overarching genre of hexametrical poetry (epos) that embraces all the different kinds of content catalogued by Aristophanes, scholars have, in fact, generally settled upon a capacious notion of “epic” that can include hexametrical narratives about the kleos of mortals, like the Iliad or the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, as well as those primarily concerned with the gods, such as we find in the Homeric hymns and in the Hesiodic and Orphic theogonies.15 This taxonomy certainly suffices for most of the surviving hexametrical poetry of the archaic period, which in large part shares the familiar “epic” balance between narrative and dialogue. But it gives us less guidance, for example, about the genre of the Hesiodic Works and Days, which Aristophanes describes above as “works of tillage, seasons of harvest and plowing,” or the genres of the lost hexametrical poems that he describes
10 Diogenes Laertius 1.112 calls him a “root-cutter” and a type of squill was named after him; Scarborough (1991) 147.
11 They may have been the same poem, a theogony presented as a series of prophetic announcements, about which Aristotle enigmatically remarked that Epimenides “did not prophesy about the future, but about the hidden past.” See West (1983) 45–47; for the oracles see Shapiro (1990) 339–40 and Dillery (2005) 181–83. For the Theogony, see Bernabé (2002).
12 Aristotle Rhet. 1418a24; for the oracular poem more generally, see West (1983) 47–53, who thinks it may have been composed pseudepigraphically in fifth-century Athens.
13 Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius place him in Athens in the time of Solon, but Plato says his visit took place just before the Persian Wars; see Shapiro (1990) 340.
14 For discussion, see, e.g., Harvey (1955) and the essays collected in Depew and Obbink (2000).
15 Thalmann (1984) xxi–xv, for example, makes an early attempt to separate “early hexametrical poetry” from “epic poetry,” but he limits his definition to the Homeric and Hesiodic corpora; the recent survey by Gainsford (2015) i and 1 helpfully adds the Orphic corpus, as well as oracles and “about 200 inscriptions.”
as the “rituals” of Orpheus or the “cures for diseases and oracles” of Musaeus, plural designations that seem to refer to collections of shorter recipes or prophecies.
In this study I shall not attempt to answer all of these long-standing questions, but rather I shall focus on the evidence for shorter, non-epic hexametrical genres as a way of gaining, albeit from the periphery, some new insights into the variety of their often ritual performance and their early history, and how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems, by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. I shall, therefore, aim primarily at the recovery of a number of lost or underappreciated hexametrical genres, which are usually left out of our modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period and beyond. Of central importance will be the surviving hexametrical poets, especially those of archaic and Hellenistic date, who embed or imitate traditional hexametrical genres of shorter duration to give a recognizable internal structure to a shorter poem or to an episode or speech within a longer one. I begin in Chapter 2 with a series of “soundings,” in which I examine three cases, where we have limited evidence for the existence of independent genres: (i) how Homeric poets embed the generic forms of epitaphs and avuncular advice; (ii) how a mimetic poem composed by Theocritus helps us to imagine the performance context of Sappho’s hexametrical epithalamia; and (iii) how the short poems embedded in the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer reflect the rich array of short hexametrical performances. I devote the main body of the volume, however, to describing the form and to some degree the history of four hexametrical genres, for which we do have substantial evidence that anchors them firmly in a ritual context and in the archaic period: the epichoric cult hymn performed in a sanctuary in connection with a sacrifice or procession (Chapter 3); the oracle chanted at a sanctuary of Apollo or by an itinerant Sibyl (Chapter 4); the incantation used to cure a disease or curse a rival (Chapter 5); and the solo laments sung in succession by women at the funeral of a family member or at the annual festival of Adonis (Chapter 6). And although each chapter is rhetorically framed around a Homeric episode or speech, for example, the Chryses episode in Iliad 1 or Circe’s instructions to Odysseus in Odyssey 10, each will also adduce evidence from a number of other sources, especially the hexametrical fragments of the archaic and classical periods, ritual inscriptions, and the mimetic
poems of Hellenistic period, all of which preserve important details about where, when, and how these shorter hexametrical genres were performed and by whom.
1.1
Embedded Genres in Homeric Narratives
But what do I mean when I say that an archaic hexametrical poet “embeds” a short genre in a longer narrative poem? In the case of the Homeric poems, I take my cue from the famous observation of Bakhtin, who suggested that in the early-modern period, novelists easily incorporated other, shorter genres, both the artistic (e.g., short stories, songs, dramatic texts) and the mundane (e.g., epistles or legal transcripts) and that they did so, in part, because they knew that their reader’s expectations of these shorter prose genres could be utilized, distorted, and even overturned, as the plot of their novels dictated.16 Bakhtin included both poetry and prose in his list of these “incorporated genres,” but for the novel they are, in fact, largely prosaic, which makes sense, of course, because it is presumably much easier for novelists to embed short prose genres, like an epistle or a newspaper obituary, into their own prose narratives. I shall argue that in similar fashion the Homeric poets absorbed a number of shorter genres into their poems and that they could do so most easily with those composed in dactylic hexameters. Such an approach is not entirely new, but it has not been fully utilized.17 Martin, for example, aptly sums up this Homeric habit of embedding other genres by pointing out that
16 See Bakhtin (1981) 263 for “inserted genres” and 320–21 for the “incorporated genre” and (1986) 62 for shorter genres that are “absorbed and digested” by the novel. See Frow (2006) for the impact of Bakhtin’s ideas more generally and, for their impact on Homeric studies, see Martin (1997), who suggests that Homeric similes were “generic imports” that were subordinated to the “ambitious super-genre of epic,” an idea that Tsagalis (2004) 24–25 applies to lament. Martin (2005) 172 rightly suggests, moreover, that these sub-genres were numerous: “the genius of Homeric composers is to vacuum up the sub-genres that naturally occur on their own in the oral poetic surroundings, and put them to new and pointed use.” He stresses a similar feature in Hesiodic poetry ([1992] 21–23): “The most important poetic strategy for constructing an open-ended advice composition as the Works and Days is the inclusion of a number of other genres,” and (p. 24), “the smaller song-genres which the Works and Days absorbed in order to fulfill its larger purpose as instructional (rather than ritual) verse.” For some illustrative examples of how “a text in one genre incorporates a text in another,” see Frow (2006) 40–48, who discusses the use of the riddle in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (pp. 40–41) or the embedded epistle of Fanny Price in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (pp. 46–48).
17 For a similar approach, see Tsagalis (2004) 24 on the laments in the Iliad: “as a monumental composition, the Iliad has absorbed different poetic genres from a long-standing oral tradition . . . [which] include praise poetry, blame poetry and, most pertinently for this study, funerary poetry” and (pp. 24–25) “laments as a subgenre of funerary poetry were subordinated to the ambitious super-genre of epic.” But he does not go on to argue, as I shall below in Chapter 6, that the embedded genre was originally composed in dactylic hexameters.
the Homeric epics “attained their bulk by the introduction of pre-existing or contemporary non-epic genres” and that it is “a mode of composition that gives both Homeric poems their convincing realistic tone.”18 In the past, however, scholars have generally described these embedded genres as linguistic phenomena that could be expressed in ordinary speech, as well as in a number of different literary genres, both poetic and prosaic, suggesting that “speech-act types” or “speech formats” lie, for example, behind the laments in the Iliad or the instructions of Circe in the Odyssey. 19 In this regard, Martin’s work has been exemplary, because he has shown, for example, the enormous role that commands play in the Iliad, where in most cases the poet has undoubtedly rendered a prose speech-type in dactylic hexameters.20 Martin has also suggested that there existed another, more complicated speech genre of instruction that we find in the Odyssey, in which a native informant (e.g., Nausicaa) tells a stranger (e.g., the shipwrecked Odysseus) how to get to some unfamiliar place (this is the “map”) and what customs to follow, once he arrives (this is the “script”).21 In the case of military commands, of course, it is unlikely that generals ever gave orders to their troops in dactylic hexameters, but as we shall see in Chapter 3, at least one sub-genre of the “map and script” type was regularly composed in dactylic hexameters: the instructional oracle. In the case of lament we can also rely on the substantial body of scholarship on lament as a speech genre, beginning with Alexiou and ending with Tsagalis, who have shown how knowledge of this very old and continuous Greek tradition can inform our reading of the Iliad, especially at the end of the poem, where the keening Trojan women present a critical female counterpoint to the heroic ideology of the poem.22 But here, too, I shall
18 Martin (1984) 31, speaking more broadly about all “primary” genres (i.e., both verse and prose) and specifically about character speech.
19 See, e.g., Derderian (2001) 10, for “Homeric speech genres” in the context of the laments in the Iliad or Martin (2007) and Sections 4.1–2 below for the “map-and-script” type of “speech type-scene” found in the “Orphic” gold tablets-and in the character speeches of the Odyssey. Bakker (1997) 1–17 and Murnaghan (1999) 203–4 also discuss Homer as a source for “speech genres” and “discourse strategies.” Minchin (2007) makes good use of Bakhtin as well, but prefers the term “speech format”; acknowledging (pp. 23–26) its affinity to other critical terms, such as “speech-act type,” “speech act,” or “speech type.”
20 Martin (1989).
21 For Circe’s advice, see Martin (2007) 4–5, who describes “speech type-scenes” as “flexible, but recurrent modes of handling a situation” that “occur in character-voice instead of narrator-voice” and are built on syntactical and pragmatic linguistic frameworks, rather than the content that usually defines other kinds of Homeric type-scenes. See also Minchin (2007) 23–70, who discusses rebukes and declined invitations.
22 See, e.g., Alexiou (2002), a second edition of her classic 1974 study, and Tsagalis (2004) 15 n. 66, who in a discussion of lament as a rather capacious speech type writes, “the Iliad has both ‘absorbed’ and adapted the sub-genre of the γόοι to his subject matter.” Elsewhere, he suggests (pp. 20–21) that “in certain cases, the Iliadic text hints at what might have preceded certain
suggest that although there might have been a general “speech-act” category of Greek lament capacious enough to embrace the lyric traditions reflected in the choruses of Attic tragedy, the female laments in the Iliad share a number of linguistic hallmarks that are tied to the structure of the dactylic hexameter and thus reflect an independent hexametrical sub-genre of lament that was performed both at family funerals and probably at the annual celebrations of the Adonia, at which women mourned the death of Aphrodite’s consort, Adonis.23
There are, moreover, at least two different ways in which the Homeric poets embed a short hexametrical genre. The easiest method is to simply import a freestanding hexametrical speech genre as part of the speech of a Homeric character, a relatively simple maneuver, since speeches occupy roughly half of the length of the Iliad and Odyssey. 24 And indeed, we shall see that two of our four case studies will begin with the speeches of individual characters— Circe’s instructions in the Odyssey and the solo laments in the Iliad. In each case, I shall argue that the poet has imported a freestanding hexametrical genre that is well known to his audience and that he can use to enhance a dramatic or narrative situation by fulfilling or upsetting the audience’s generic expectations in various ways. In Chapters 3 and 5, on the other hand, I argue that the poet has taken two other hexametrical genres—hymn and incantation—and used them, not in his character speeches, but rather in the narrative portions of his poem. In Chapter 3, I argue that the Iliad poet has modeled most of the Chryses episode in Book 1 on a local hexametrical hymn to Apollo Smintheus, in order to play with expectations about the various stock characters, who appear in a traditional type of epichoric or cult hymn in which human impiety is always punished by the gods. In this case the generic appropriation is quite easy, because the poet has, without changing the hexametrical meter, embedded both the narrative and dialogue portions of a short epichoric hymn into a much longer epic narrative. In Chapter 5, too, I shall show how the Odyssey poet models the description of Helen’s famous Egyptian drug on a generic boast drawn from short expressions [i.e., of lament] . . . that have survived through time and have been preserved by the epic tradition.” I agree, but I would push this argument even farther by narrowing the sub-genre to laments performed in hexameters. Martin (1984) 31 also notes that lament must have been a long and old tradition outside of epic. For more recent approaches to ancient Greek lament, see the essays collected in Suter (2008).
23 See Section 6.3 below.
24 Martin (1989) 46.
hexametrical incantations of the type that appear in some recently published fifth-century BCE inscriptions from Magna Graecia.
1.2 Mimesis of Genres in Hellenistic Poetry
In various ways, then, the Homeric poems will provide us with important insights into the earliest stages of these shorter genres performed in ritual settings and in dactylic hexameters. And it is for this reason that I have organized each of the four central chapters around a well-known Homeric episode or scene. But because modern definitions of genre depend so heavily on knowing the details about the place and timing of a performance as well as the identity of its performer(s) and audience,25 we shall find that our second greatest source of information about these shorter genres—and hence the chronological endpoint of this study—is indeed the hexametrical poetry of the Hellenistic period, primarily the so-called “mimetic” poems of Callimachus and Theocritus, which seem to imitate accurately different ritual performances, such as cult hymns, laments, or incantations, while at the same time sketching a dramatic frame that provides important and otherwise lost details about their performance.26 Both poets could, of course, have easily learned about these shorter hexametrical genres, either from their own life experiences or from books available in the same library at Alexandria, where they found their texts of the Homeric poems and the burgeoning commentaries on them.27 There is a tendency, however, to assume that Callimachus closely modeled his hymns on the longer Homeric Hymns28 or cleverly recast the content and devices of non-hexametrical poetry into the more pedestrian form of a hexametrical hymn, in the latter case either because choral and lyric meters had fallen out of fashion29 or because
25 See, e.g., the essays collected in Depew and Obbink (2000).
26 The term “mimetic” describes a poem that is an imitation (“mimesis”) of a performance, while at the same time being a narration (“diegesis”) of it; see Harder (1992) 384–95.
27 For hymns, see the comments of Faulkner and Hodkinson (2015) 14, about another Alexandrian poet: “Philicus’ focus on the old cults of Greece and less prominent cult sites situates him well within the interests of contemporary Alexandrian poets.” For hexametrical incantations, see the so-called “Philinna Papyrus” (first century BCE), a fragment of an anthology of them; they are discussed in detail by Faraone (2001b) and below in Appendix D.
28 Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 353–61.
29 See, e.g., Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 30, although they also suggest (pp. 32–33) that there were other, more mundane hexametrical models, for example, some of the shorter Homeric Hymns that seem designed for communal performance and end with specific requests, like “save the city,” or short hymns preserved in sanctuary inscriptions and elsewhere that were actually performed for the god in the context of a festival.
of the Alexandrian’s fondness for the “contamination of genres.”30 In some cases, this is true, but the situation is decidedly different with the hymns dedicated to Apollo, Athena, and Demeter, the so-called “mimetic” hymns that evoke a ritual performance, which the narrator seems to be centrally involved in or even directing.31
I suggest, in fact, that in his mimetic hymns Callimachus used both the content and the form of regional or local hymns that were performed at sanctuaries. He composed the Hymn to Athena, for example, in elegiac couplets and in a Doric dialect, and throughout he shows detailed knowledge of the cult of Athena at Argos, the place where the hymn is set.32 Some explain this combination as a classic example of generic contamination, by which the poet purposely renders an originally choral hymn in elegiac couplets, a favorite Alexandrian meter, although it is equally easy to suppose that Callimachus knew of and was indeed imitating an epichoric Argive genre of elegiac hymns that is lost to us, but easily available to him in the library at Alexandria.33 He wrote his hexametrical Hymn to Demeter in the same Doric dialect, and his readers would have surely recognized that the hymn was set during a traditional procession performed by women carrying a ritual basket to a Demeter sanctuary somewhere in the Doric world.34 Indeed, scholars often use this poem as reliable evidence for the religious processions and activities performed in mystery cults devoted to Demeter.35 It is a curious fact, then, that religious historians highly value the content of Callimachus’ mimetic hymns as accurate sources for otherwise lost information about local ritual performances,36 while literary historians suggest that these same mimetic hymns are, in fact, inaccurate sources of information about the
30 Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 33.
31 Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 31–33.
32 Bulloch (1985). Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 31 note the “obsessively archaeological precision with which he refers to the actual performance.”
33 Faraone (2008) 136–37. For other parallels, Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 32 note fragments of two fourth-century elegiac hymns of Crates and another from the Argolid by Aristocles. See also the two elegiac hymns by Isidorus discussed in detail by Faraone (2012b).
34 Although it is true that the Doric dialect in Hymns 5 and 6 seems to be a “cosmetic adaptation” of a poem that could have easily been composed in “epic” hexameters, it is also true that the dialect fits the Argive setting of Hymn 5; see Hopkinson (1984) 44–45, who nonetheless explains it in both hymns as the result of “the Hellenistic fondness of dialectical experiments” (p. 44). Even though there are no clear references to the setting of Hymn 6, most of the locales suggested by modern scholars— e.g., Cyrene, Cos, Cnidus, for which see Hopkinson (1984) 35–39—use the Doric dialect. Scholars have suggested that the evidence for “Attic dialectical coloring” in Philicus’ fragmentary Hymn to Demeter likewise suggests that he chose an Attic model for his hymn; see Hunter (1996b) 31. This poem, however, used what appears to be an invented form of choliambic hexameter.
35 Henrichs (1993).
36 Henrichs (1993).
narrative, metrical, or linguistic form of Greek hymns, choosing instead to stress the poet’s penchant for distorting rather than reflecting traditional generic forms. But, at least in the case of his mimetic hymns, should we not start with the assumption that Callimachus provides an accurate rendition not only of the rituals in the sanctuary, but also of the meter and dialect of the hymns that were performed there?
The poetry of Theocritus is almost entirely hexametrical,37 and here, too, his mimetic poems have much to tell us about traditional genres performed in this meter, some even from areas outside of Alexandria, for example, on his native Sicily or on Cos and the surrounding islands, where he seems to have spent much of his time and where he would have encountered the hexametrical works of local fourth-century hexameter poets like Erinna.38 Indeed, Theocritus displays, albeit poem by poem, the same Bakhtinian voraciousness that the Homeric poets do, although his choices tend to be more homespun. Dover pointed out many years ago, for example, that the frequent “symmetrical repetition” in Theocritus’ mimetic poems is “a characteristic of folksongs, games, wedding-songs, lullabies, spells and other sub-literate categories of poetry”39 and indeed, as we shall see, the incantation embedded in the first third of Idyll 2 or the epithalamium in Idyll 18 do, indeed, seem to reflect living hexametrical genres. Here, again, commentators have traditionally assumed that Theocritus is merely “translating” the content from some prosaic or lyric genre into hexameters—for example, the prose mimes of Sophron, popular songs, or love serenades—and have concluded that the “Theocritean corpus is, in fact, a veritable Noah’s ark of mimetic lyric forms which have been adapted to, and hence saved by, their transference to recitative metre.”40 This conclusion is undoubtedly true for many of his other poems, but, as we shall see, the mimetic Idylls, at least, often reflect Theocritus’ deep appreciation of traditional hexametrical genres, especially those that easily fit into Dover’s “sub-literate categories of poetry.”41
37 Halperin (1983) 206–9.
38 Hunter (1996b) 14–17.
39 Dover (1971) lxii.
40 Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 33. See earlier Gow (1952) 2.16, discussing the irregular refrains of Idylls 1 and 2, as well as the couplets or triplets in Idylls 3 and 10 as devices “for suggesting in epic verse the structure of sung verse.”
41 For the “Homeric” hymn, see Idyll 15.100–44 (the embedded “Adonis Song,” for which see below Section 6.3) and 22.1–26 with Hunter (1996b) 124 and 128, who notes that the meter in both is in conformity with Theocritus’ other “ ‘epicising’ poems”; for the epithalamium see Idyll 18 and the discussion below in Section 2.2; for a lament with refrains, see Idyll 1. 64–142 (the embedded “song of Thyrsis”), with Porro (1988) and Reed (1997) 22; and for allusions to the genre of begging songs, see Id. 16.5–12, with Hunter (1996b) 92–94; for an embedded lullaby, see Id. 24.7–9 and the discussion below.
In many cases, however, choosing between a famous lyric model and a pedestrian one can be quite difficult. In a passage near the start of Theocritus’ Idyll 24, for example, Alcmene places her hands on the heads of her twins and recites three verses (7–9):
Sleep, my babies, a sweet sleep from which one wakes, sleep, my souls, twin brothers, well-protected children. Rest happy, and happy may you reach the dawn.
Here the sonorous repetitions, the rhythmical and syntactical parallels between the first two lines and the internal rhymes all suggest that Theocritus imitates part of a traditional lullaby, one of Dover’s “sub-literate categories.”42 Commentators, however, traditionally point to a brief fragment of a lullaby that Simonides has Danaë sing to Perseus (Threnos 13.18–19):
κακόν (“Sleep, baby, and let the sea sleep and let our immeasurable misfortune sleep”). They suggest, in short, that Theocritus is imitating Simonides, because the latter is an earlier and famous poet, who would have been well known to Theocritus. It is interesting to note, however, that in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, when the chorus are encouraging the eponymous hero to sleep after he has been wracked with pain, they resort to a lullaby in a heavily dactylic meter, which begins, Ὕπν᾿ ὀδύνας
εὐαίων, εὐαίων, ὦναξ (“Sleep, ignorant of anguish, ignorant of pains, may you come to us with gentle breath, bringing felicity, felicity, O lord!”).43 Here, too, we find the same sonorous repetitions of rhyming words and sounds (especially the prefix εὐ-), although the chorus are addressing the god Sleep, rather than the person they are trying to lull to sleep.
The traditional approach, then, is often one based strictly on relative chronology: Sophocles is imitating Simonides and Theocritus is imitating Simonides or Sophocles or both. But one can, in fact, also suggest that all three poets are recalling traditional hexametrical lullabies that perhaps each
42 Waern (1960) begins her brief study of Greek lullabies with Theocritus’ verses, but makes a formal distinction (p. 2) between “popular poetry” and “literary poetry,” suggesting that “no lullaby was transposed word for word from the oral tradition to the elevated poetry” and that “it was bound to undergo linguistic, stylistic and metrical changes to fit its new setting.” She is undoubtedly correct with regard to those lullabies in Greek tragedy or lyric in which the poetic diction and meters are difficult, but why insist that Theocritus had to change the meter of a traditional lullaby to put it in his poem?
43 Sophocles Philoctetes 827–29.
heard as a child, lullabies performed by their own mothers or wet nurses, as they rocked them to sleep. In a number of cultures, moreover, lullabies share much in common with incantations sung over babies to protect them while they slept, an idea that is clearly reflected in Alcmene’s concern that her “well-protected” children “sleep safely” and “happy reach the dawn.”44 Regarding Alcmene’s lullaby, of course, there is not enough data to make a judgment, but it nicely highlights the differences in the two approaches: (i) if we imagine Theocritus composing his verses in an ivory tower influenced only by the masterpieces of Greek poetry, it is easier to assume a persistent process of imitation or allusion uninfluenced by sub-literate compositions; or (ii) if we adopt the method used in this volume, it is easier to imagine— especially in his mimetic poems—a much broader range of influences, which in addition to the “greatest hits” of older lyric and choral poetry also included traditional hexametrical performances that the poets might experience in their homes and sanctuaries. It is, in short, precisely because these mimetic poems aim at reproducing the experience of an ongoing performance in a ritual context—sometimes by deploying local dialects and referring deictically to ritual sites and performers—that we expect to find the least amount of literary influence, the greatest amount of local color, and the most information about these non-epic genres of hexametrical poetry.
1.3 Archaic and Classical Fragments
A third, and perhaps unexpected, source of information about hexametrical genres are those moments when the lyric and iambic poets of the archaic and classical periods take up this unaccustomed meter in ways that suggest they are guided by some generic constraint. Seven hexametrical fragments survive, for example, in the corpus of the seventh-century Spartan poet Alcman, some of which are thought to come from the short introductions (prooimia) he performed just before a chorus of unwed girls began to sing a “maiden
44 Rosenmeyer (1991) 23–25 and Karanika (2014) 160–61. For parallel crossovers between lullaby and incantation, see Barb (1950) for medieval Europe; Frankfurter (2009) 239–40 for late-antique Egypt; and Farber (1990) for ancient Assyria, the last with numerous parallels from modern ethnography. We shall see below in Sections 5.3–4 and Appendices C and D, in fact, that dactylic hexameters were indeed the default medium for incantations in the Greek world, a practice that gives added heft to the suggestion that the verses of all three of the poets quoted above also reflect in their meter and repetitions a traditional hexametrical lullaby.
song” (partheneion) that he himself had also composed.45 Fragment 26 is the longest and most famous of these introductions:46
No longer, honey-toned, strong-voiced girls, can my limbs carry me. If only, if only I were a cerylus bird, who flies along with the halcyons over the flower of the wave with resolute heart, strong, sea-blue bird.
Thucydides, however, uses the same term, prooimion, to describe a short section of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a definition that has long suggested to scholars that the Homeric hymns were themselves used as introductions to a performance—rhapsodic or otherwise—of epic narrative.47 More recently, however, some have argued that hexametrical prooimia were instead introductions that praised the local god(s) prior to choral performances in their sanctuaries,48 and that Thucydides is referring not to the entire hymn itself, but rather to a similar introductory performance to maiden performances in honor of Apollo’s sister Artemis.49 Such an approach, in fact, makes better sense of the most puzzling part of the passage that Thucydides quotes (HHApollo 165–68):
Come now, let Apollo be gracious and Artemis likewise, and farewell, all you maidens, and me in after times remember, whenever, some dweller upon the earth, a long-suffering stranger, shall visit this isle. . .
Here, the direct address to the maidens, the quasi-autobiographic details, and first-person reference to the singer are out of place in a Homeric hymn, but they are all found in the Alcmanic hexameters quoted above.50 The poet
45 Terpsander was also thought to have composed prooimia of this sort; see Bowra (1961) 23–24 and Gerber (1970) 98–99.
46 Text and translation by Campbell (1993).
47 Maslov (2012).
48 See Maslov (2009) 6–7 and (2012) reviving the argument of Koller (1956).
49 Kousoulini (2013).
50 Kousoulini (2013) 439–40. Nagy (1990) 375–77 and (1992a) 119–20, on the other hand, suggests that the maidens are local Delian Muses, who inspire the blind singer from Chios (= Homer), much as the local Heliconian Muses inspire Hesiod.
of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo seems, in short, to have embedded, in the manner described above, the short genre of the Alcmanic prooimion into the Delian section of his hymn. We can surmise, moreover, that this ritual genre performed in a sanctuary was traditionally a hexametrical one, because elsewhere in his extant corpus Alcman uses only lyric or choral meters and it is likely that generic considerations forced him to abandon his traditional media and compose his prooimia in dactylic hexameters. Sappho also used hexameters in a limited manner that suggests some similar kind of generic constraint: her hexametrical fragments come only from her wedding poems, and below in Section 2.3 we shall ask why Sappho would use this meter in such a limited number of fragments, a meter that she never uses elsewhere and that is otherwise completely foreign to Lesbian poetry. The answer, I shall suggest, is that she, too, seems to have been constrained by tradition to compose her epithalamia in dactylic hexameters.
The iambic tradition also made use of hexameters, albeit for the purpose of parody. The sixth-century BCE poet Hipponax, for example, composed a short poem in dactylic hexameters that calls for the expulsion of an enemy or rival—a parody, it seems, of the kind of ritual poem that the Greeks sometimes chanted, as they chased human or animal scapegoats from their homes or cities.51 Because he deploys dactylic hexameters only once in his extant repertoire, he signals that this genre, too, was also traditionally performed in hexameters.52 And indeed, one genre of hexametrical incantations, the socalled “flee formulae,” is attested as early as the Hellenistic period and seems to be related to these scapegoat chants, because they, too, directly address dangers and evils in dactylic hexameters and urge them to depart.53 As it turns out, some of our best evidence for short hexametrical genres comes from the parodies composed a century later than Hipponax by writers of Attic comedy, who, like Hipponax, signal their parodic intent by switching to hexameters, a meter that is otherwise foreign to comic drama. Comic oracles spring to mind most easily, of course,54 but there is one example of a parodic incantation,55 and some hexametrical lines of a purification chant from a lost comic play of Diphilus may likewise be part of a parody of a traditional ritual
51 Hipponax Frag. 128 (West) with a full discussion by Faraone (2004a).
52 Not, as others have argued or assumed, because he is writing a mock epic; see Faraone (2004a) 210–11 past bibliography and discussion.
53 See Faraone (2018b) 208–15 and Appendix D below.
54 See Sections 4.1–2 below.
55 See Section 5.3 below.
genre.56 This use of dactylic hexameters during a purification rite dovetails well, of course, with their use in pharmakos rites, because both cases presumably involve similar gestures of expulsion. And from one of the earliest comic writers, the Sicilian Epicharmus, we have single hexametrical verse that might have been the beginning of a unison chant of the Sirens: (Frag. 121 K-A):57 λαοὶ τοξοχίτωνες ἀκούετε Σειρηνάων (“Men clad in bow and arrows, hear the Sirens!”). Scholars have sometimes suggested that we should imagine that the Sirens’ performance at Odyssey 12.184–91 was a choral one,58 but if so why would Epicharmus have them chant on stage in dactylic hexameters? It is a curious fact, however, that, unlike comedy, the extant tragedies preserve only a handful of passages in stichic hexameters, for example, when Hera in a lost play of Aeschylus takes on the guise of a begging priestess and performs a hymn to some local Argive nymphs or when Neoptolemos in Sophocles’ Philoctetes produces four hexameters, in which he recalls and then revises the famous oracle that informed the Greeks that Troy could not fall without the bow of Heracles.59
Finally, inscriptions of the archaic and classical periods are another rich source for short hexametrical genres of a ritual nature. By the end of the seventh century, we begin to see various kinds of public genres composed in dactylic hexameters, such as dedicatory inscriptions or epitaphs, the latter of which are discussed in detail just below in Section 2.1. More important to this study, however, are the more private poems, the oldest of which is the “Nestor’s Cup Inscription,” a hexametrical couplet that in the late eighth century BCE was
56 Diphilus Frag 126; Parker (1983) 207, however, sees the use of the hexameter as comic hyperbole: i.e., treating the quotidian as an epic event, a traditional approach, as was discussed earlier, that tends to see the Homeric or Hesiodic corpora as the sole referent for all later hexametrical texts.
57 The translation is that of Rusten (2011) 72.
58 Richardson (2011b) 20–21 notes that their boasts to universal knowledge (ἴδμεν γάρ τοι πάνθ . . . ἴδμεν
recall the famous claims of the Muses in the Theogony about true and false song and he suggests that “both songs appear to be choral, and both stress the divine knowledge of the singers”; see also Bowie (2011) 49–65; Peponi (2012) 76–80; and Murnaghan (2018) 171.
59 Hymn: Aeschylus Semele Frag. 220a, with Sommerstein (2008) 230–31. The papyrological evidence suggests that this hymn was at least thirty dactylic hexameters long and begins ν
(“Infallible nymphs, glorious goddesses, for whom I collect alms, life-giving daughters of the Argive river Inachus, who attend upon all mortal act[ivities])” in the translation of Sommerstein. Oracle: Sophocles Philoctetes 839–42 with Pretagostini (1982) 164–65; Halperin (1983) 211; and Schein (2013) ad loc. There are some even more puzzling hexameters near the end of the Trachiniae: three five-verse sections of recited hexameters, the first and last spoken by Heracles (1010–14 and 1031–40) and the middle one split between Hyllus and the Old Man; see Easterling (1982) ad loc. and Pretagostini (1982) 165–66, who sees an allusion in an epic mode to Heracles’ labors. The syntax of all three sections is mangled and possibly corrupt, so one cannot venture a guess as to what genre, if any, Sophocles is gesturing toward.
scratched onto a cup from Ischia and appears to be an erotic curse or a parody of it.60 There are, moreover, two kinds of longer ritual texts in hexameters that were inscribed into small metal sheets. The first are the so-called “Orphic”61 gold leaves or gold tablets, which appear to be a kind of passport for the dead and which have been suggested as a model for the advice that Circe gives Odysseus before his visit to Tiresias.62 Textual variations in these verses show us that they were being orally composed long before they appear in the lateclassical and early-Hellenistic graves of West Greece, Thessaly, and Crete.63 Of equal importance are a series of lead amulets, also from West Greece and Crete, which preserve protective hexametrical charms. The most important are the so-called “Getty Hexameters,” which date to the late fifth century bce and probably come from Selinus.64 They run to nearly fifty lines of dactylic hexameters and seem designed to protect a house or a town from a variety of evils.65 A close examination of the parallel texts from Western Locri, Himera, and Phalasarna reveals that these verses, too, were probably the product of an earlier period of oral composition and performance.66 Such incantatory hexameters might, in fact, have been a regional Sicilian specialty in the classical period, because, as we shall see in Section 5.2 and Appendix C, Empedocles boasts of his own mastery of hexametrical incantations for healing the sick, as well as for controlling the weather and summoning the dead for necromancy.
1.4 Dactylic Hexameters
This study, finally, raises the question why hexameters were used so widely from the archaic period onward, in so many regions and for so many different genres. One claim, explicit or implicit—and one that I shall
60 Discussed in detail in Section 5.3.
61 Modern scholars are eager to assign to Orpheus the authorship of these gold tablets, but these texts are, in fact, never mentioned by any ancient author and their designation as “Orphic” stems entirely from the plausible idea that, since Orpheus was a legendary hexametrical poet and since he successfully visited the underworld and returned, any early hexametrical text that gives advice on the topography of or etiquette in Hades must surely be his For some snapshots of this important debate, see the introductions to Graf and Johnston (2007) and Bernabé and San Cristóbal (2008) and the essays collected in Edmonds (2011b).
62 See Section 4.3 below.
63 Janko (1984 and 2016).
64 See, e.g., the essays collected in Faraone and Obbink (2013) and Antonetti (2018).
65 Faraone (2013c).
66 Janko (2013).
question throughout this study—is a scholarly assumption that we might call “Homeric hegemony,” which runs something like this: because in our extant sources Homeric poetry appears first, shorter poems composed in dactylic hexameters and attested in later sources must necessarily be imitating epic poetry. But this approach confuses, of course, the date of a genre’s appearance as a written text in the historical record with the date of its invention as an oral performance. The genre of the narrative or rhapsodic hymn must have been known, of course, to the composers of epic narratives, because they themselves presumably used the genre when they also composed such hymns as introductions for their longer epics.67 Epichoric or cult hymns, on the other hand, seem to be a different genre, because they focus more tightly on human and divine interactions and on etiological explanations for the origins of a particular ritual, festival, or temple. But here, too, commentators assume Homeric priority, when they suggest, for example, that Callimachus models his two mimetic hymns on the sections of the Homeric hymns to Apollo and Demeter that describe rituals and give etiologies for them.68 In Chapter 3, however, we shall see that this argument can be flipped on its head and that it is, in fact, more likely that the composers of these Homeric hymns knew and embedded local cult hymns from Delos, Crisa, or Eleusis into their own Panhellenic narratives.
The same is true for oracles. As we shall see in Chapter 4, Herodotus and Aristophanes give us a clear understanding of the generic features of hexametrical oracles performed in the classical period, and these oracles share a number of formal characteristics with the speeches of some characters in the Odyssey, for example, Tiresias, who is indeed called a prophet in the poem and whose words are labeled as prophetic. But when Parke and Wormell, while discussing Delphic oracles, claim that “[t]he form, usage, and vocabulary of the responses derive accordingly from epic, as was natural in view of their hexametrical verse form,” they, too, seem to be confusing the chronological precedence of epic poems with the origins of the oracle as an orally composed and remembered genre.69 But, since the composers
67 See, e.g., Thalmann (1984) 120–21 and Faulkner (2011) 16–19. The embedded song that Demodocus sings in the Odyssey, about how Hephaestus binds the naked and adulterous Aphrodite and Ares in his bed, seems to reflect this tradition; see, e.g., Burkert (1960); Thalmann (1984) 118, however, thinks it reflects a lyric rather than hexametrical performance.
68 Fantuzzi and Hunter (2004) 365–67.
69 Parke and Wormell (1956) 2.xxiii. Flower (2008) 220 also assumes some kind of Homeric influence or training when he says that “the Pythia’s dactylic hexameters are . . . not beyond the compositional ability in ex tempore composition of a Greek, who had a sustained exposure to Homer” or (p. 221) “any Pythia exposed to epic hexameters could have composed oracles.” But see more recently
