This monograph, based on a 2020 UNC Chapel Hill thesis, offers a systematic study of the reception of the genre of the Homeric Hymns in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. It focuses primarily on the ‘macroscopic’ features of that intertextual relationship (p. 2) but, at the same time, it presents many opportunities for explorations of the various small-scale allusions to the Homeric Hymns that can be found across Apollonius’ poem.
An extensive introduction sets out the methodology. What is noteworthy within the broader introduction to the Homeric Hymns offered (helpful to non-specialists) is McP.’s discussion of the authorship of the Homeric Hymns and its relevance to Apollonius. McP.’s position is measured: given Apollonius’ sustained allusions to the Homeric Hymns, and notwithstanding his professional opinion, the Homeric Hymns were likely notionally ascribed to Homer and invested with the same authority as the epics.
McP. separates the various intertexts and allusions to the Homeric Hymns in the Argonautica into six categories. Not much hangs on this distinction (by McP.’s own admission there is some overlap between the categories), nor is it essential to the remainder of the book; nevertheless, it provides readers with evidence, almost at a glance, of the rich presence of the Homeric Hymns in the Argonautica and whets the appetite for what follows.
Chapter 1 looks at the beginning and ending of the Argonautica. McP. argues that Apollonius’ opening may be ambiguous (containing allusions to the Homeric epics as well as to the Homeric Hymns), but the undeniably hymnic salutation to the Argonauts at the close encourages readers to reflect on the nature of the poem in its entirety; in light of the envoi, one also revisits and reconsiders the beginning and discerns that the poem is intended as a hymn (in Homeric style) to the Argonauts collectively. That is because the ‘famous deeds of people born long ago’ (παλαιγενέων κλέα ϕωτῶν, 1.1), namely those of the Argonauts, are revealed as the poem’s true content and the object of the verb μνήσομαι (1.2), for which there is hymnic precedent in HH 3.1 and 7.1–2. McP. relies on rare hymnic usages to support a revised reading of the beginning both as hymnic and as addressing/honouring the Argonauts (rather than the god Apollo, who is mentioned in the poem’s opening line); but he also points out that Apollonius was more broadly interested in exceptional or unusual constructions in his treatment of the Homeric epics, avoiding excessively faithful borrowings and aiming instead for a recognisable yet fresh and striking Homeric texture (p. 144). Though McP. is certainly right that the rarity of the hymnic formulas Apollonius deploys in no way undermines the Argonautica’s prevalent Homeric-hymnic aspects, rereading the entire poem in light of the envoi as a hymn to the Argonauts runs perhaps the risk of assuming a structural unity and cohesion that the poem seems to me to resist – the distinctive and self-contained Book 3, different from Books 1, 2 and 4, is a case in point (the exceptionality of Book 3 is noted by McP. in reference to its lack of explicit references to hero cult in the following chapter, p. 164). Nevertheless, the chapter is valuable in fleshing out with critical attention an idea (that of the Argonautica as hymn) that has been tentatively put forward by scholarship (e.g. S. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature [1991], p. 287), but not previously explored in earnest.
Chapter 2 seeks to refine this idea: even if the poem is structured as a hymn, it is difficult to refute its epic affiliation. McP. reads in the poem the fusion of two branches of poetry attributed in antiquity to Homer (epics and hymns) and proposes that this duality mirrors the duality in Greek culture of the concept of the hero, as both a figure of myth/poetry and an object of cultic veneration. Unlike S. Hitch, with whose chapter on the same topic (‘Hero Cult in Apollonius Rhodius’, in: M.A. Harder, R.F. Regtuit and G.C. Wakker [edd.], Gods and Religion in Hellenistic Poetry [2012], pp. 131–62) there is some overlap, McP. argues that Apollonius was conscious of the difference between epic and cultic heroism (acknowledged repeatedly in the poem) and that this distinction corresponds to the Argonautica’s generic hybridity as an ‘epic hymn’ in that the Argonauts’ glorious deeds are commemorated in an epic manner but their own cultic status is acknowledged in a (Homeric-)hymnic way. McP. presents a series of case studies of Argonauts whose celebration combines epic motifs such as remembrance, song and kleos or aristeia, but also elements of cult worship. Moreover, he offers a survey of literary precedents for this generic experiment, which he traces all the way back to the Homeric Hymns, with the Homeric Hymn to Heracles proposed as a significant model.
Chapter 3 moves away from the question of genre to examine the Argonautica from a narratological perspective. In the Apollonian narrator’s various remarks, which hint at his ‘expertise in matters of cult and theology’ (pp. 237–8), and in his advertised piety (in similes or when he refrains from talking about religious rites) McP. discerns a hymnic voice that has its roots in the Homeric Hymns. He reads similarly (though perhaps more tenuously) the apologies the narrator offers to the gods (e.g. the apology to the Muses in 4.984–5) and even aetiology. McP. is cautious not to dispute that it is ‘the Callimachean facet of the AR narrator’s voice that we are hearing’ in aetiological passages (p. 256), but proposes that there is precedent for aetiology in earlier Greek poetry and especially the Homeric Hymns (a strong case is made for the Homeric Hymn to Demeter), which Apollonius exploits. The chapter’s broader conclusion is its most important contribution: narratological features of the Argonautica which have been considered un-Homeric are, in fact, Homeric if we open the scope of Homeric poetry to include the Homeric Hymns.
Chapter 4 extends the poem’s narratological examination into the representation of hymnody. McP.’s argument revolves around god-invocations; he observes that, when characters invoke gods, then: (a) the narrator tends to intervene in the narrative by apostrophising them in a Homeric-hymnic manner (in a process he calls ‘contagious hymnody’); and (b) the narrator deploys multiple honorific epithets in the narrative rather than in the characters’ speech (in a process he calls ‘hymnic narratization’), the accumulation of such epithets being a most recognisable marker of Greek hymns. Especially strong is the discussion of 3.858–62: Medea is described as addressing Hecate seven times; the narrator accumulates honorifics, which are fewer than seven; thus the narrator deliberately marks ‘the distorting effect that his mediation has on our access to the events of the narrative’ (p. 302), making readers aware of his hymnic voice. Both these processes reveal a clear tendency towards metalepsis, and they are most visibly at play, alongside other hymnic narratological techniques, in the episode of the Argonauts’ worship of Apollo at Thynias (2.669–719); the chapter culminates with an analysis of this episode. The book concludes with insightful remarks on the nature of the Argonauts’ heroisation and how it might have resonated with the Ptolemaic rulers and their ongoing deifications.
The book successfully establishes the significance to the Argonautica of the Homeric Hymns as a major intertextual model, as authoritative as the Homeric epics. Primarily specialists are likely to read this volume from beginning to end; but the useful glossary of hymnic terminology and the extensive index locorum will help non-specialists dip in and out as necessary. Even if one, inevitably, notices things to disagree with, McP. offers an impressively well-researched, thorough and rigorous study in which readers will find much to gain.
