RAISING ZEUS IN SECRET

In time-honoured fashion, let us begin with Zeus, and more specifically with the Hymn to Zeus of Callimachus,Footnote ¹ a poem that is complex, playful, densely intertextual and full of narrative tricks.Footnote ² The speaker begins by expressing uncertainty as to whether Zeus was born in Crete or Arcadia (1–7). Dismissing the Cretan tradition on the basis that ‘Cretans always lie’, he narrates how Rhea gave birth to Zeus in Arcadia (8–32). The narrative then somewhat unexpectedly combines the Arcadian and Cretan traditions: Rhea gives the infant Zeus to a nymph by the name of Neda, who then takes him to Crete to be reared in secret, as per the familiar Cretan tradition (33–54). Callimachus gives almost no explanation as to why Zeus’s birth must be kept secret:Footnote ³ readers must recall for themselves Kronos’ habit of swallowing his new-born children from accounts such as that of Hesiod’s Theogony.Footnote ⁴ From Zeus’s infancy we move quickly to his acquisition of kingship over the gods (55–67), and to his distribution among the gods of responsibility for various mortal professions (68–73). Zeus himself chooses kings, and a close connection is established between Zeus and ‘our king’, whoever that might be (73–90).Footnote ⁵ The poem closes with a request to Zeus for excellence and wealth (91–5).

The story of a god’s birth is not an unsuitable topic for a hymn: compare the birth-narratives in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (3) and to Hermes (4). But here in contrast to those narratives we do not find any account of precocious displays of speech or power by the infant god; not only is Zeus almost entirely passive in these lines,Footnote ⁶ he is not even present for a third of the narrative of his birth, his absence coinciding with a lengthy digression about the many rivers of Arcadia which at that time were not flowing overground (18–27).

Much like the Arcadian waters, Zeus seems to lie just beneath the surface of the narrative, and we catch glimpses of him through the evocation of forms of his name (Διός, Ζῆν, Ζηνός, etc.) in the repetition of the syllables δι- and ζη-;Footnote ⁷ and we find further play with the name of Zeus shortly after this section, as the nymph Neda takes him away to be hidden in Crete (32–45):

The close of this passage is marked by some ‘topographical sleight-of-hand’,Footnote ⁹ which depends for its effect on the fact that there are two places called Thenae—one in Arcadia, and one in Crete.Footnote ¹⁰ When we read that Neda ‘left Thenae for Cnossus’ we assume that the speaker is referring to the Arcadian Thenae, and that this is the moment of Neda’s departure. We discover in the following line, however, that she is already in Crete, in the Thenae near Cnossus. Clearly Neda was an excellent choice for this secretive mission, and deserving of her reward from Rhea, because she managed to cross over from Arcadia to Crete without us noticing. But the narrative trickery is not quite finished—since at the precise moment that Neda is hiding Zeus in Crete, Callimachus is hiding ZEUS in the margin of his text (40–3), in a reverse acrostic that starts/ends in the line in which we discover that we are in Crete and at the moment that Zeus himself is invoked in an apostrophe.

Many might find the idea of a reverse acrostic to be a priori implausible; but several factors make this particular reverse acrostic especially meaningful. First, since ZEUS appears as an acrostic (reversed or otherwise) only twice in all of extant Greek poetry,Footnote ¹¹ it is striking that one of those occurrences should be inside a hymn to Zeus;Footnote ¹² even more so that it should appear at this particular location in the hymn, when Zeus is being hidden.Footnote ¹³ The talk of secrecy and hiding (34)—as noted above, otherwise conspicuous by its absence—signposts to the reader that there is something to look for,Footnote ¹⁴ just as it does in the Phaenomena of Aratus shortly before the famous ΛΕΠΤH acrostic.Footnote ¹⁵ That Zeus is in hiding might also explain why the acrostic has been reversed: it makes him harder to find, which is entirely the point.

This last point can be developed. In hiding Zeus in the margins of his text, Callimachus performs a similar role to Neda, who hides Zeus in Crete. For this service Neda was rewarded by Rhea (37). This becomes significant when we consider the end of the poem, where the speaker twice asks that Zeus grant him ‘excellence and wealth’.Footnote ¹⁶ Given the connection established between Zeus and kings (and ‘our king’ in particular), the end of the poem is often read as a request for patronage from the ‘king’ in question.Footnote ¹⁷ In this context, Rhea’s treatment of Neda provides something of a mythological exemplum for Zeus and for his counterpart on earth: Callimachus, like Neda, has hidden Zeus, so Callimachus, like Neda, deserves a reward.

Finally, the hiding of Zeus might also be seen as a metaphor for another form of concealment for which Callimachus might feel he deserves ‘excellence and wealth’. As scholars have noted, the Hymn to Zeus constantly evokes the Theogony (a central concern of which is Zeus’s ascent to kingship) through a dense web of intertextual connections, and invites us to compare and contrast its narrative with that of Hesiod.Footnote ¹⁸ Yet the poem occludes almost all of the familial strife that we find in the Theogony, from Kronos’ devouring his children to Zeus’s defeat of the Titans and Typhoeus. The avoidance of any such narratives may have a poetic point, and perhaps also a political one: Callimachus draws attention to the power of poetry—or more specifically to his power as a poet—to present a particular version of ‘reality’, concealing elements of the divine succession myth in Hesiod (and elsewhere) that might evoke problematic elements of the Ptolemaic succession.Footnote ¹⁹

JASON AT THE RENOWNED ENDS OF THE ARGONAUTICA, PART ONE

For our second example we move from the Hymn to Zeus to the final lines of the Argonautica,Footnote ²⁰ which also have a hymnic feel:

While the Argonautica may be slow to start,Footnote ²² its ending is famously abrupt.Footnote ²³ The nine lines that form the envoi to the poem are densely packed with self-conscious narrative play.Footnote ²⁴ The opening lines of the envoi, like the opening lines of the poem (ἀρχόμενος σέο Φοῖβε παλαιγενέων κλέα φωτῶν | μνήσομαι, ‘beginning with you, Phoebus, I will recall the glories of people born long ago’, 1.1–2), evoke the opening and closing formulae of the Homeric Hymns, and together form a ‘hymnic frame’ to the poem.Footnote ²⁵ While Apollo appears to be the recipient of the hymn at the start of the poem, at the end it seems that the recipients are the Argonauts. Having started the poem as heroes in the epic sense, they have shown themselves worthy—or rather, the poem has shown them worthy—to be considered as heroes in the cult sense.Footnote ²⁶ This is one way in which the poem brings them immortality. As for another, the Homeric Hymns often present themselves at their close as a prelude to another song and an imminent future performance, via formulae such as αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ καὶ σεῖο καὶ ἄλλης μνήσομ’ ἀοιδῆς (‘but I will remember both you and another song’)Footnote ²⁷ or σεῦ δ’ ἐγὼ ἀρξάμενος μεταβήσομαι ἄλλον ἐς ὕμνον (‘having begun with you I will turn to another song’).Footnote ²⁸ At first glance, the absence of such an explicit formula—and indeed, the presence (possibly) of a direct negation of itFootnote ²⁹ —would seem to be one of many ways in which the Argonautica insists on its closure. But in one of many ways in which the poem undermines its closure,Footnote ³⁰ the Argonautica’s envoi does envisage a future performance, namely a continual reperformance of the Argonautica. This annual repetition of the poem will ensure that the names of the heroes—but also that of the poet—will live forever:Footnote ³¹ this seems to be underscored by how the sound, structure and meaning of lines 1773–5 point towards the familiar connection between immortality and song encoded by the presence of ἀεί in ἀείδειν.Footnote ³²

We will return to the specific subject of names shortly, but for the moment let us move on to the next lines of the envoi. The poet explains why he asks the Argonauts to be gracious: ‘because I have come to the famous ends of your toils’. His hijack of their verb of motion is striking but not surprising given ‘the deep and relentless parallelism between story and narrative’ that we find throughout the poem.Footnote ³³ On one level, this parallelism aligns the poet with the Argonauts, an alignment signposted by a programmatic connection between Apollonius and Jason, who both begin with their respective journeys with an address to Apollo:Footnote ³⁴ as Hunter comments, ‘the poet is … Jason, and the poem is the voyage’.Footnote ³⁵ On another level, however, it aligns Apollonius with his namesake Apollo: just as Apollonius promises to tell of the ‘lineage and names of the heroes, their journeys on the vast sea (δολιχῆς τε πόρους ἁλός), and all they did as they wandered’ (1.20–2), Apollo promised ‘to give signs and make known our journeys on the sea (σημανέειν δείξειν τε πόρους ἁλός)’ and also ‘to show the conclusion and ends of the journey (ἄνυσιν καὶ πείραθ᾿ ὁδοῖο | σημανέειν)’.Footnote ³⁶

So when we read at 1775–6 ἐπὶ κλυτὰ πείραθ’ ἱκάνω | ὑμετέρων καμάτων, we see that Apollonius qua poet-as-fellow-traveller completes his poem as the Argonauts complete their voyage, while at the same time Apollonius qua poet-as-Apollo is the one who has revealed their journey on the sea and is the one ‘responsible for bringing this hazardous journey to a safe conclusion’.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, there is particular significance in the description of the ‘ends of your toils’ as ‘famous’ or ‘glorious’ (κλυτὰ πείρατα). The Argonautica and the Argonauts almost had a different, far from glorious ending: just as they catch sight of the Peloponnese and just as they are almost home (4.1223–36), a storm blows them to the ‘ends of Libya’ (4.1227 Λιβύης … πείρασιν). Here it seems as if our heroes will perish (4.1305–7):

Nameless heroes and a task that lacked conclusion (ἀνηνύστῳ = without ἄνυσις) would have thwarted the plans of both Apollonius and Apollo, since the latter had promised ‘to show the conclusion’ (ἄνυσιν … | σημανέειν, 1.413–14) of the journey, while the former planned to celebrate ‘the race and names’ of the heroes (νῦν δ’ ἂν ἐγὼ γενεήν τε καὶ οὔνομα μυθησαίμην | ἡρώων, 1.20–1).Footnote ³⁸ Fortunately, the heroes are able to complete their task and the poet is able to complete his poem: the end is after all glorious, because of the heroic deeds of the Argonauts, but also because the recounting of those deeds and the naming of the heroes in the Argonautica has brought them and the poet glory.Footnote ³⁹

Now the connection between the fame of a poem and the fame of a poet is a commonplace, but it is the case that—like many poets—Apollonius does not actually name himself in the poem. κλυτὰ πείρατα may however point to some name-play at the ‘ends’ of the poem: it has been suggested that Apollonius hints at his name via his address to Phoebus in the first line of the poem (with Phoebus suggesting Apollo suggesting Apollonius),Footnote ⁴⁰ and he may hint at his name via a more subtle evocation of Apollo in the final line of the poem.Footnote ⁴¹ The same phrase, however, also points to play with a different name, at a different kind of ‘end’: in this case not the beginning and end of the poem, but the beginning and ends of its lines. Let us have another look at the text of the envoi:

Following the signpost to ‘famous ends’ and looking at the beginning and ends of the lines, we will find an acrostic and a telestic, both of which are fashioned in reverse, the unusual direction signposted by ἀνερχομένοισιν ἐτύχθη (‘created for those going up’).

In 1773–5 we find the reverse acrostic ΑΕΙ (‘always’). This sequence of letters is common in Greek verse, but it fits neatly with the subject matter of the sentence (the continual repetition of the Argonautica) and underscores (and as we shall see, develops) the play between ἀεί and ἀείδειν in these lines. Turning to the end of the line, spanning 1774–8, we find the reverse telestic ΙΗΣΩΝ (IÊSⓞN).Footnote ⁴² The sequence is rare in either direction, occurring only twice in all of Greek poetry as a normal telestic,Footnote ⁴³ and only here in reverse. Acrostics and telestics are necessarily features of a written text, and their presence here is pleasingly in tension with the language of oral performance: it seems particularly significant that telestic begins/ends with the final letter of ἀείδειν (‘to sing’).Footnote ⁴⁴ Jason may live for ever (ἀεί) through song that will be repeatedly sung (ἀείδειν), but the acrostic ΑΕΙ—here a feature of the written text, rather than an audible part of ἀείδειν—reminds us that his name (ΙΗΣΩΝ) will last for ever because it is inscribed as a telestic in the text of a poem that will be repeatedly read—κλυτὰ πείρατα indeed. Furthermore, the textuality of the telestic is further underscored by some stichometric symmetry: the telestic begins in the eighth line from the end of the poem, just as the Jason’s name first appears in the eighth line from the beginning of the poem.

There are many reasons why the poet might have chosen Jason’s name to preserve in telestic form: he is the central character, and as leader of the Argonauts could be representative of them as a group; he is a figure programmatically connected with the poet; he is also a character whose suffering clearly does not conclude with the end of the poem. One might well ask however why the telestic (and the acrostic) are reversed. There does not seem to be any particular significance in the reversal. One could perhaps argue that this might in some way reflect the way in which Jason’s kleos will suffer in the events following the poem; but perhaps this is just a literary game (possibly inspired by the reverse acrostic in the Hymn to Zeus), one that Apollonius does not want to make too easy: a well-hidden surprise for the reader, the discovery of which after repeated readings being one way in which the poem becomes sweeter to read, if not to sing, from year to year.

JASON AT THE RENOWNED ENDS OF THE ARGONAUTICA, PART TWO

Many Greek and Latin words can be found at the edges of classical poetry. Whether any ancient authors were deliberately writing them as acrostics and telestics into their poetry is one question; whether any readers were noticing them is another.Footnote ⁴⁵ As evidence that they were, scholars have put forward various examples of acrostic intertextuality—passages where they argue that an author either reproduces or in some way responds to an acrostic or telestic in an earlier text.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although these examples cannot tell us whether the original acrostics or telestics were deliberate, they at least suggest the existence of a reading practice according to which some readers were on the lookout for acrostics and telestics. With this in mind, let us return to Jason: whether or not we believe it to be intentional, it is a matter of fact that we find the five-letter final-letter sequence ΙΗΣΩΝ running in reverse near the end of the Argonautica. If we can find evidence to suggest that it was noticed by an ancient reader, it would suggest that at least some ancient readers were in the habit not only of looking for acrostics and telestics, but looking for them in reverse.

An obvious place to look would be in an another Argonautica. While the Argonautica of Varro Atacinus has not survived, fortunately we have the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus; and while unfortunately we do not have the ending of that poem (the most obvious place to look), we do have its beginning (the next most obvious place to look, 1.1–11):

The opening of Valerius’ Argonautica Footnote ⁴⁸ contains a number of echoes not only of the opening of Apollonius’ Argonautica,Footnote ⁴⁹ but also its end. Although reference to the Argonauts as ‘sons of the gods’ is not uncommon,Footnote ⁵⁰ its presence in Valerius’ opening line gains resonance from the presence of the same phrase (μακάρων γένος) in Apollonius’ closing address to the Argonauts at 4.1773. Furthermore, the specification of the Argonauts’ goal as ‘the shores of Scythian Phasis’ (Scythici … Phasidis oras) is a detail not found in the opening of Apollonius—rather it reworks the final line of Apollonius and the ultimate goal of the Argonauts’ journey, namely the return of the heroes to the ‘shores of Pagasae’ (ἀκτὰς Παγασηίδας).

Something else that the Valerius’ proem takes from Apollonius’ envoi is the presence of Jason in a reverse telestic. In some precise symmetry, just as we found Jason (ΙΗΣΩΝ) in a reverse telestic that began four lines from the end of the Greek Argonautica, so too we find Jason (in his Latin form IASO) in a reverse telestic that ends four lines from the beginning of the Latin Argonautica. That Valerius uses the Latin form Iaso Footnote ⁵¹ in the telestic as opposed to the Greek form Iason (which he uses in the actual text)Footnote ⁵² acts as pleasing comment on the way that Valerius—in one form of the reperformance of the Argonautica as envisaged by Apollonius in his envoi—has produced a Latin version of the story inspired by his Greek model.Footnote ⁵³

Just as with Apollonius’ telestic, that of Valerius is strongly signposted. First we have the Sibyl, whose presence here as elsewhere invites us to study the text carefully, thanks to the association of her utterances with acrostics.Footnote ⁵⁴ Significant too is the phrase oras | ausa sequi (‘daring to follow the shores’), with ‘shores’ pointing to the edge of the text, much as πείρατα did for Apollonius.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is possible too that aperti (whose final letter provides the first letter of IASO) might point to the opening of the telestic, while consedit Olympo (whose final letter provides the final letter of IASO) might point to the end.Footnote ⁵⁶

IASO appears quite frequently in the Latin poetry both as a telestic (36 times) and as a reverse telestic (31 times).Footnote ⁵⁷ But while there is a higher probability that such a letter sequence might appear by chance than in the cases of ΖΕΥΣ or ΙΗΣΩΝ, the probability that the name of the same character should appear by chance in the same unusual form, in poems on the same subject, in similarly significant locations, seems small indeed.