The two poems titled “Hymn to Apollo,” yoked together in the text, although generally separated out by editors, so as to celebrate separately the two manifestations of the god, are the hymns that have attracted most critical and scholarly attention and that seem to have had the profoundest effect on subsequent poetry. Hugh G. Evelyn-White suggests the Delian hymn comes from the eighth century BC; in the second hymn Delphi is all-important, Delos forgotten. It was probably composed around, and certainly not later than, 600 BC. The older part of the hymn is the one in which the blind singer identifies himself to the girls and paints a famous hypothetical portrait of Homer. The “Hymn to Pythian Apollo” juxtaposes the happy, beautiful lives of the immortals and the short, witless, helpless lives of mortals. Apollo is always “far-shooting” (ekatebol Apollon). It explains Hera’s hatred for Thetis (she nursed Hephaestos when Hera threw her defective offspring, the lame god, from heaven) and why in the Iliad Thetis is able to ask such big favours of Hephaestos (the shield for her son Achilles, for example). The poem provides the etymology of “Pythian”: the slaying of the dragoness, her physical decomposition hastened by Helios, the sun; it evokes the origin (Cretan, Cnossan) of Apollo’s priesthood.
The most complex and amusing hymn is “To Hermes.” Shelley translated it, but it is more up Byron’s street in its humour, burlesque and parodic implausibilities. It was written some time after Terpander invented the seven-string lyre, about 676 BC. A straightforward invocation, “Muse, sing of Hermes,” is followed by a tautological genealogy: son of Zeus and Maia, whom Maia bore, when she was joined in love with Zeus … Maia is nicely characterised as a privacy-loving goddess who lives in the recesses of her cave. She has abundant tresses. Her amazing offspring Hermes, born at dawn, by noon is already inventing and playing the lyre; in the evening he steals the cattle of far-shooting (again) Apollo. What were his chief attributes and achievements? He was “wily, a thief, a rustler, an inducer of dreams, a night owl, at the gates a thief, a child who would shortly display amazing deeds among the immortal gods.”
He is born with one instinct, it would seem: to steal Apollo’s livestock. But as he bustles, leaving his swaddling behind, from the maternal cave, he comes upon a tortoise. “Hermes first made the tortoise sing. The animal appeared to him at the gate of the courtyard; it was grazing on the lush grass in front of the cavern, moving ungainly along. When Hermes, Zeus’s luck-bringing child, saw it, he chuckled: ‘A sign of good luck for me so early! I won’t give it a miss. Ho there, fellow-comer to the feast, you of the lovely form, who make music at the dance! I am happy to meet you! Where did you get that lavishly patterned roof, that embossed shell—a tortoise, mountain dwelling? Come with me, I’ll take you in; you’ll assist me and I will honour you, but first you must bring me benefit. Home’s the best place to be: out of doors bad things can happen. Alive, you’re a spell against wicked magic; but dead, you’ll make the most delicious music.’” The infant’s sang froid is a kind of innocence. And, sure enough, he kills the tortoise brutally and transforms the shell into a lyre. A double “Homeric” simile underlines his action: “Just as a quick thought flits through a man’s heart when he is troubled in spirit by flocking worries, just as an eye glances up and dazzles, Hermes contrived the thought and the act in the same instant.” This is how music happens, too: the thought and deed, the command and the act of playing, occur virtually together.
Having made the lyre, momentously he plays it: “At the merest touch of his fingers it made a marvellous sound, and he played on, singing delicious phrases here and there, not a song but like the melodious blurtings of young men at a festival. Then he sang of Cronus’ son, father Zeus, and Maia with her pretty sandals, how they had talked together when making love, and he told the amazing story of his own conception.” His first song touches on delicate themes: love, but the love his parents made to make him. The father of the lyre and of music, a baby, is at the same time practical, guileful, deceitful, cheerful, “innocent,” close to the ground.
Soon he tires of singing. What he craves is meat. He steals fifty of Apollo’s cattle. He is crafty: he “reversed the hoofprints, the front appeared behind and the hind appeared in front, while, for his own part, he walked the other way.” Thus the cattle seem to have vanished into thin air, having arrived and not departed. He makes for himself sandals of brushwood and leaves to sweep away traces as he walks.
There is a witness: an old man within a vineyard sees him. The infant god promises him a fine vintage if he keeps his counsel. After the theft of Apollo’s cattle and the slaughter of two, and a first meat feast, Hermes sleeps away from home, then returns unperceived, passing like an autumn breeze through a keyhole, re-wraps himself in swaddling, and is a simple baby, clutching his seven-string lyre. His mother knows as mothers always do, and they have the kind of heated exchange that usually occurs between teenagers and parents. Hermes intends to become the prince of robbers.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Apollo is troubled when he discovers that his herd has been raided by rustlers. The old vineyard-keeper discloses the truth and Apollo hurries to Maia’s cave where he beards Hermes in his den, tries to intimidate the baby, then drags him off to trial by the highest judge, Zeus himself. The judge cannot contain his laughter when the baby god, holding in one hand his lyre and in the other his trailing swaddling clothes, pleads his case. He orders Hermes to take Apollo to the byre near the river Alphaeus. Apollo marvels at the baby’s strength and cannot bind him. Hermes plays the lyre and Apollo loves the music and the instrument. Since the poem is a hymn, it issues in harmony. They become friends. Hermes gives Apollo the lyre and invents the pipes for himself so that they can play duets. Apollo grants his half-brother every skill except soothsaying. He can learn divination if he wishes, but not prediction and visionary prophecy. Zeus makes Hermes lord over birds of omen, lions, boars, dogs, flocks—country things. He also becomes the elected messenger between Olympus and Hades.
The first “Hymn to Aphrodite” is like the hymn that the blind poet Demodocus sings in Odyssey VIII, 266ff., though superior in subtlety and development. Three hearts are impervious to Aphrodite: those of Athena, Artemis and Hestia.3 Aphrodite has affected every other god and the whole human world: none is left untouched. Zeus tricks her into love with a mortal, namely Anchises, so she will know what it is all about. Anchises was tending cattle—another cowboy—on Mount Ida. He is godlike in demeanour. Their courtship unfolds ceremonially and is beautifully rendered. After their initial love, she promises him dignity and offspring, a son who will reign and “children’s children after him, springing up continually.” He will not be immortal but his line will last for ever, which is second best. The name of Aeneas is uttered, possibly a later interpolation. The baby they have will be raised by nymphs, who are neither mortal nor immortal: at their birth great trees are born and when they are to perish the trees perish.4 When the boy is five the goddess will bring him back to Anchises and instruct him. He is not to mention that he slept with her or Zeus will kill him. She vanishes like a rocket (or a bird soaring) into the windy sky. It is an amazing poem, full of illuminating congruities.
The second “Hymn to Dionysus” is hard to date: some critics attribute it to the fourth or third century BC, others to the seventh or sixth. The kinds of poise and polish which the language enjoys, and the efficiency rather than ease of movement in narrative, seem to argue for a later date. We encounter again a god in his youth, formally unstable, innocent, disarming in himself and in the metamorphoses he undergoes and provokes. Pirates spot the ostentatiously caped god standing on a promontory. They capture him to sell on as a slave and try to tie him up. As when Apollo tries to bind the infant Hermes, here too the bonds fall away, and the youth sits grinning at his captors. The helmsman urges the pirate master to put the god ashore but the master refuses to part with so fine a catch, this glowing youth in his purple robe. Wind takes the sails and suddenly the ship is awash with sweet wine; grape vines twine up and then dangle from cross-beams and rigging;
ivy coils up the mast, flowers bloom, berries, “and all the thole pins5 were covered with garlands.” The sailors, terrified, try to land the lad; but he becomes a furious lion and creates amidships a grumbly shaggy bear “which stood up ravening.” Lion in prow, bear amidships, the pirates crowd into the stern. The lion jumps on the pirate master and seizes him, and the pirate crew jumps overboard into the bright sea and is transformed—into a school of dolphins! Dionysus does not kill the master: he identifies himself as divine and bids him be cheerful. Here ends a beguiling lesson.
The “Hymn to Pan” is also striking. Pan is Hermes’ son, though who the mother was, given Pan’s goat’s hooves and horns, is initially a moot point. The poem sets out to provide an explanation. Pan is a spirit of nature who also hunts. In the evening he plays the pipes, invented by his father in an earlier hymn. The noise he makes is sweeter even than that of a sweet-noted bird. The nymphs sing along with him, and the story he tells is often of the amorous adventures of his father. Hermes’ first song was about the amorous adventures of his parents, too: this would appear to be the beginning of self-knowledge for a god. Hermes became the shepherd-servant of a man because he wanted to wed his daughter Dryops. They had a baby who was cheerful and strong but had goat’s feet, horns and a full beard. The wet-nurse was so alarmed she ran away. The father, hugely proud, took the bearded baby wrapped in hare skins to Olympus and showed him to the gods. The gods were delighted, especially Bacchic Dionysus. The name Pan is a shortened form of pantes, says the hymn, “because he delighted all their hearts.”
There are other memorable hymns, or passages in them. The second “Hymn to Artemis” evokes the huntress who, tiring of the chase, goes to the house of her brother Apollo and choreographs the dances of the Muses and Graces. The nymphs or priestesses in his house chant of Leto and her wonderful offspring. The “Hymn to Helios” invokes the Muse Calliope to help the singer celebrate glowing Helios. Again we get a genealogy: Helios is the son of Hyperion and Euryphaëssa, brother of rosy-armed (and rosy-fingered) Eos and of “rich-tressed Selene,” the moon. The hymn is clearly a prelude, in this case seeming to promise an epic poem: “I will celebrate the race of mortal men half-divine whose deeds the Muses have showed to mankind.” These are the heroes: Hesiod says they occupy the space between the human and the divine, transcendent but not immortal. Appropriately, the “Hymn to Selene,” the moon, follows “Helios,” beginning “And next,” as if it was a sequel to the previous poem. The hymn-writer calls Selene “long-winged,” which some translators take to mean “far-flying.” It might be taken to indicate the wings of the crescent.
The hymns are an uneven anthology of preludes and narratives. They are so various and in places so charming that they do Homer no discredit, even though he is unlikely to have composed them. It is equally unlikely that the epigrams attributed to him are his. They are to be found in the Life of Homer attributed to Herodotus and repeated in the Contest and elsewhere.6 Some are aphoristic commonplaces, but a few stand out. The fourteenth epigram is about the potter’s art, blessing the virtuous potter and cursing the false promiser. It grows, as so much that is attributed to Homer does, out of an allegorising tradition. The fifteenth epigram, about the prosperous man, is also memorable, though also apocryphal.
Then there is Margites: “Once to Colophon an old man, a graced singer, the Muses’ servant and far-shooting Apollo’s, came. He bore in his dear hands a sweet-sounding lyre.”7 Margites is a simpleton, insofar as we can infer him from the few remaining fragments, who “would not sleep with his wife” for fear that “she might report ill of him to his mother.” It is only with great difficulty that his young wife can persuade him to “discharge his marital duties.”8 We cannot reach a verdict on the poem, given the poverty of fragments, but its form is curious. The basic measure, as in all the Homeric attributions, is hexameter, with apparently random iambic lines interspersed. It dates possibly from the sixth century.
Even more completely vanished than Margites is Cercopes (“monkey-man”). Cercopes told of two cunning brothers, Acmon and Passalus. Their mother, Memnon’s daughter, warns them to keep clear of Blackbottom (Heracles). They disobey and Zeus, angered, turns them to stone. The connection with Memnon and Ethiopia and the imagery smack of a kind of atavism bordering on racial fear and hostility.
Of all the apocryphal Homeric poems none is more fun, or more illuminating, than Batrachomyomachia (“The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice”), “the song which I have just composed on tablets upon my knee.” It is a decidedly literary composition, working, as all parodies do, from and on existing texts. Early critics regarded it as a Homeric apprentice-piece, a kind of tiny maquette for the Iliad. This overlooks the elements, continuous throughout the poem, of intertextual comedy, the spoofing of conventional epic diction, simile, action, with specific passages in the Iliad quite deliberately burlesqued. It is a relatively early production, accepted as Homeric even in pre-Hellenic times. The tenth-century lexicon, the Suda, declares that the real author, also responsible for Margites, was Pigres, a Carian, brother of Artemisia, “wife of Mausolus.” He is a man who distinguished himself at the Battle of Salamis. The Suda confuses two Artemisias, but the date, around 480 BC, might be right.
The poem consists of 303 hexameters in a rather chaotic state, including what may be Byzantine interpolations. Coming as it originally must from the period of allegorical readings of epic, the names are indicators, and finding English equivalents for them is a cheerful challenge for the translator.
Cheekpuffer, or Puff-jaw, the frog king takes Crumbsnatcher the mouse (who has just escaped a hungry ferret) across a lake, after first asking his name and provenance, promising him lavish gifts if he answers correctly, and receiving a suitably ceremonious reply. The mouse speaks of the differences in their natures, especially in what they eat, describing the human foods he most enjoys. He says he is brave, he runs on men’s beds and nibbles them, and is afraid only of the hawk, the ferret and the trap. The frog remarks that the mouse concentrates rather a lot on belly-matters.
The mouse boards the frog and they begin their cruise of the lake. Soon the mouse gets frightened, steadying himself with his tail. Just before a water snake appears and scares the frog into a fatal dive, the mouse declares, “Not thus did the bull carry on his back the dear burden, when he bore Europa over the waves to Crete, as this Frog bears me over the waves to his dwelling, making his yellow back rise out of the bright water.”
A mouse on shore witnesses the floundering death of the king. The race of mice plans its revenge. They arm ingeniously, armour made of bean pods and reeds and ferret skin, with bronze needles for spears and helmets of peanut shells. When the mice issue the challenge of battle, the frog king denies guilt. Lying thus, he puts himself and his kind in the wrong. The frogs use pointed rushes for spears and snail shells for helmets. The confrontation begins. Zeus, who has a finger in everything, summons a conclave of the gods. They look down on armies, opposed as if the centaurs confronted the giants. Zeus asks the gods to take sides. Athena will not back the mice: they have made a mess of her garlands and robes and reduced her to going to the money-lender, an outrage for an immortal. She also dislikes the frogs, who once kept her awake all night. She urges the gods not to commit but to watch with amusement. They concur. There are direct echoes of Iliad battles, notably of the stone wounding the shoulder, as happens to Hector.9 The battle rages, the mice are winning, the frog cause almost lost when Zeus sends a thunderbolt. The mice will not desist so the gods send crabs to side with the frogs. The mice turn tail and the sun sets on the one-day war.
Alexander Pope’s friend Thomas Parnell based his memorable attack on pedantic scholars on this poem.10 Samuel Taylor Coleridge found the poem delightful and slight. Against the notion that it was Homer’s apprentice-piece, he said: “to suppose a work of mere burlesque to be the primary effort of poetry in a simple age, seems to reverse that order in the development of national taste, which the history of every other people in Eu
rope, and of many in Asia, has almost ascertained to be a law of the human mind; it is in a state of society much more refined and permanent than that described in the Iliad, that any popularity would attend such a ridicule of war and the gods as is contained in this poem.” The genre itself suggests—even if the parodic elements did not—a later composition.
The convenience of finding early, middle and late poems by Homer eludes us, not only because texts have perished but because the grin and the cat refuse to stay together in the tree. It is unlikely, too, that we will learn much more than we already know about Homer’s antecedents, the eastern sources for some of the elements in his poems, the tradition out of which they emerge. In poetry the miraculous coming-together of factors into a major poem cannot be explained by evolution. Indeed, the history of epic poetry is a denial of theories of cultural evolution. The great poets, the peaks, are suddenly there, without much benefit of foothills: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton. They have antecedents and contexts but the lines that lead up to them are not straight, the selection they make not always natural. The great epics lead to or produce not greater epics but a kind of diminishment. In the aftermath of Milton growth was hard; it was not given to Italians to replicate or to contest the pre-eminent achievement of Dante. Leopardi, his worthiest successor, is worthy in his knowledge of Dante’s place. After Homer, the Greek epic poets become formal, literary, more “written,” less direct. For a while the Greek lyric poets maintain the connection with the breathing world which is so palpable in Homer. The Homeric poems, in their concentration and power, exhausted the epic tradition. Ionia remained in thrall to romantic epic subject-matter. In Boeotia something new stirred: Hesiod exercised “freedom from classical form,” and expressed “his grave, and yet child-like, outlook upon his world.” And the lyric poets in their different modes, all of them steeped in Homer and not vying with him, were crawling out from under his towering shadow. As usual, the heir to great epic poetry is the lyric poet.
The First Poets Page 12