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The opening of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo

Mike Chappell

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Chappell Mike. The opening of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. In: Hymnes de la Grèce antique : approches littéraires et
historiques. Actes du colloque international de Lyon, 19-21 juin 2008. Lyon : Maison de l'Orient et de la Méditerranée
Jean Pouilloux, 2013. pp. 177-182. (Collection de la Maison de l'Orient méditerranéen ancien. Série littéraire et
philosophique, 50) ;

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 The Opening of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo

Mike Chappell
Associate Lecturer, Open University

In this paper I will focus on a single passage, as an example of commentary on a

hymn and the sort of issues that can arise. I have chosen the beginning of the Hymn
to Apollo as it is a problematic passage that has been interpreted in various ways,
and rises questions that are relevant both to the genre of Homeric hymns and to
Greek hymns in general.1 The opening scene (l. 1-13) has attracted many negative
comments. Its critics tend to focus on both its content and on linguistic or stylistic
diffi­culties. It seems odd that Apollo should appear brandishing his bow and frightening
the other gods in this way. The action seems out of place on Olympus, is unmotivated
(or at least no motivation is given) and has no serious consequences: Apollo allows
him­self to be disarmed by Leto, accepts a drink from Zeus and peace is restored. West
calls this scene “a peculiar business. What is Apollo thinking of, coming into the
com­pany of the gods with his bow at the ready, as if he were Odysseus and they the
suitors?”2 Kirk is still more critical, calling it “a post-Homeric exaggeration” that is
“well outside the limits of Homeric ethos.”3 Förstel thinks that this may be a displaced
motif from a theomachy4 (but what was the poet’s purpose in using it?). One reaction to
this sort of cri­ticism has been to attempt to tone down the scene, to make it less startling.
Baumeister asserted that Apollo is merely returning from the hunt and carries his bow
on his shoulder5 – this hardly matches the words of the text. Similarly, Miller argues that
Apollo has been using his bow outside Olympus, and has not yet put it away:6 “His bow
is at the ready because he has been wielding it in the world at large and has not yet,
at the moment of entering Zeus’ halls, adjusted his mood and bearing to his new
surroundings.” He compares HH 27 to Artemis, which has parallels with HH 3, 1-13

1. This paper is an adapted version of part of my forthcoming commentary on the hymn.

2. West 1975, p. 163.
3. Kirk 1981, p. 166 sq.
4. Förstel 1979, p. 166.
5. Baumeister (ed.) 1860, p. 118.
6. Miller 1986, p. 15.

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 178 m. chappell

(and also 186‑206). In this hymn Artemis is depicted hunting with her bow and
then going to Delphi, hanging up her bow and dancing with the Muses and Graces.
But there is no such contrast in HH 3: it is on Olympus that Apollo bends his bow, and
the gods are clearly said to spring up in fear. Why should they do this if they knew
that he posed no threat to them? Equally weak are the suggestions of Gemoll that
Apollo stretches his bow as a joke and of Allen, Halliday and Sikes that “as Apollo
approaches the seated gods he strings his bow to test it.”7
The passage becomes less problematic if we remember that this is a hymn in praise
of Apollo. The purpose of the opening is clearly to stress Apollo’s power; and how could
this be more clearly done than by showing that even the other gods are afraid of
him? Apollo is depicted from the start as a powerful and frightening god. This is also
how he is portrayed in Homer, especially in the Iliad, and in the rest of this hymn.
Jenny Clay’s view of the opening scene is that, after an opening that recalls earlier theo­
machies, it shows that Apollo is proved to be not a threat to the Olympian order, but a
loyal son of Zeus; and that this is a major theme of the whole poem.8 I prefer to say that
it emphasises Apollo’s power even among the other gods; and there is never any
question of a threat to Zeus. The fact that Leto and Zeus disarm and wel­come him
is natural in the prologue to a narrative of Apollo’s birth: his parents are praised too,
and we are reminded that he is a loyal son as well as a powerful archer god.
Kroll argued that the scene shows the influence of Near Eastern models.9 To show
a young god exercising such power over the others is a Near Eastern conception. Kroll
com­pares the unruly behaviour of Marduk in Babylonian myths, while West notes
simi­larities to a Sumerian hymn in praise of Ninurta. For the Greeks, power over men
and gods is the prerogative of Zeus alone. I am not sure Near Eastern influence is at
work here. Parallels in other hymns show that it is regular for the other gods to admire
or even fear a new god (see below); and the desire to stress Apollo’s power is natural in
a hymn to him. In any case, it is unlikely that Greek poets would imitate Near Eastern
stories in ways that were alien to their own ways of thinking about the gods: in fact
they adapted them in various ways.10 Penglase has attempted to find pervasive parallels
between the Homeric Hymns and Mesopotamian myths,11 but his ideas, particularly with
regard to the Delian part of the hymn to Apollo, are often implausible.

The other major difficulty with this scene is the changes of tense that occur in
it.12 In 2-4 the verbs are present; in 5 we have an imperfect, in 6-10 aorists, and then

7. Gemoll 1886, p. 121; Allen, Halliday, Sikes (eds) 1936, ad loc.

8. Clay 1989, p. 38.
9. Kroll 1956, supported by Walcot 1966, p. 48 sq.; Càssola (ed.) 1975, p. 84; Penglase 1994,
p. 98 sq.; West 1997, p. 355.
10. On this process see Kirk (ed.) 1990, p. 7-14.
11. Penglase 1994.
12. See in this volume Hunzinger, p. 54-55.

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 the opening of the homeric hymn to apollo 179

in 12-13 presents again. Various explanations have been put forward for this, often
assuming incompetence on the part of the poet. Bound up with this is a debate about
whether the scene is a narrative of Apollo’s first appearance on Olympus after his
birth, or a typical description of his activity. Both these types of scene occur in the
Homeric Hymns. For first appearances, cf. HH 4, 322 sq.; HH 6, 14-18; HH 19, 42-47;
HH 28, 4 sq.; Th. 68 sq.; these have some parallels with our scene: the new god is
admired or feared by the others at HH 6, 16 sq.; HH 19, 45 sq.; HH 28, 6 sq.; and Zeus
rejoices in his children, as Leto does here, at HH 4, 389 sq.; HH 28, 16 (and cf. 205 sq.).
If this is Apollo’s first appearance, that might explain his behaviour in brandishing his
bow on Olympus; he would not yet know how to behave, and his mother has to take
the weapons off him (Wilamowitz states that Leto “lehrt den Sohn, was sich auf dem
Olymp schickt”13). The fear of the other gods would also be natural if they had never
seen Apollo before; and Zeus’ welcoming gesture would be appropriate in this context.
However, scenes of a first appearance on Olympus naturally follow, rather than precede,
a birth narrative; and the present tenses are hard to explain if this is a unique occasion (the
his­toric present is not used in early epic14). If, on the other hand, this is a typical scene,
then the content seems odd. As West puts it: “It is represented not just as something
he did once but as something he does regularly; and the gods jump every time, as if
they had never seen the charade before.”15 It is difficult to compose a typical scene
with narrative development; contrast the second scene on Olympus (l. 186-206), which
is more like a tableau of Apollo leading the gods in dance and singing.
Some see this combination of typical and specific elements as the cause of the changes
in tense. Hermann suggested that the poet started a typical scene, but got carried away
by the narrative element and dropped into the past tense. Wilamowitz argued that the
poet slipped into past tense narrative because he was a narrative poet by profession.
Similarly, Unte believes that the poet starts with a typical picture of Apollo, but “falls
into” a past narrative and then “falls back” into the present.16 The return to the present
is a problem for all these theories which present the poet moving almost inad­ver­
tently from present to past, from typical description to narrative action.
A similar approach was proposed by Janko.17 He divides the Homeric Hymns into
two main types: those in which the central section is descriptive or typical, which he
calls attributive; and those in which it is past narrative, which he calls mythic. He
comments on the start of HH 3: “The poet clumsily chose an attributive scene incapable
of narration in the present tense without absurdity. He began with the present tenses
in 2-4, but then realised that the scene depicted could not happen once the gods were
familiar with Apollo’s appearance. Thus he switched to the past tenses of 5-10, turning

13. Wilamowitz 1916, p. 442.

14. Cf. Chantraine 1963, p. 191.
15. West 1975, p. 163.
16. Hermann 1806, ad v. 4; Wilamowitz 1916, p. 442, n. 2; Unte 1968, p. 22.
17. Janko 1981, p. 17.

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the passage into something closer to the common description of a deity’s first arrival on
Olympus.” Again, the return to the present is awkward for this idea. It seems preferable
to try to find some explanation that does not involve positing incompetence on the part
of the poet. Another difficulty with this theory, and those just mentioned that represent
the poet stumbling into an awkward shift of tense, is that it seems to posit a picture of
com­po­sition that rules out much premeditation or possibility of revision. Janko applies
the same explanation to other problems in this scene. Having lost his way, the poet
used awkward phrases “in the ensuing confusion;” his “creative flow was badly disrupted
because of his initial blunder.”18 Janko has also explained difficulties in Homer in this
way, and states that “poets composing orally cannot go back and alter what they have
composed.”19
Clay, who has a very useful discussion of the whole scene, takes a rather different line.
For her “the opening scene of the Hymn to Apollo portrays both the first epiphany
of the new god on the threshold of Olympus and his eternally repeated entrance into
his father’s house.” This is possible because “the time of the gods differs from ours.
This is clear from the paradox that the gods, although they are born and thus have
come into being, henceforth exist forever. […] Hence an event in the past – say, the birth
of a god, his first reception on Olympus, or his first epiphany among men – is not to
be distinguished from his characteristic repeated actions. Each conveys the god’s
essential nature in all its fullness.”20 I think there is something in this, but Clay perhaps
goes too far in ignoring the syntax of the passage. Moreover, the gods of early
Greek epic are not outside time. They have their own history; and on the whole the
Homeric Hymns do distinguish their unique past actions from their typical activities.
It is true that once the gods are born and have developed their characteristic functions
and powers, there are no major changes in their lives; but it is precisely this period of
growth and development that the Hymns are mainly concerned with.
Clay rightly points out, in support of her view, that there are parallels for past tenses
in typical descriptions of divine activity. The best parallel is the start of the Theogony
(which also provides a parallel for a hymn opening with a description of the gods’ typical
acti­vity before the account of their birth). This describes the habitual activity of the
Muses, and again we see a change from present tenses to aorists, and an imperfect
in line 10. HH 19 to Pan provides another example, again combining aorists, presents
and an imperfect (3-10; 12-14; 29). The aorists can possibly be explained as timeless
aorists21; however, this leaves the problem that the actions they describe in this scene
are rather too spe­cific to be timeless. Faulkner prefers the term “omnitemporal” for
aorists that occur in attri­butive scenes of the hymns.22 He argues (similarly to Clay’s

18. Janko 1982, p. 100 sq.

19. Janko 1998, p. 7; for counterarguments, cf. Nagy 1999.
20. Clay 1989, p. 28-29.
21. Cf. West (ed.) 1966, on Th. 7.
22. Faulkner 2005.

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explanation) that tenses can be blurred in such passages because the past actions of the
gods can display their permanent characteristics, and have effects in the present. In the
case of our scene it is a mis­take to say the scene is too specific to be typical: although one
occasion, it reveals “the perma­nence of Apollo’s awe-inspiring divine nature.” This seems
the best expla­nation of the change from presents to aorists, but the imperfect μίμνε (l. 5)
is more pro­blematic. An expla­nation of this has been proposed by West who compares
the Vedic injunctive in Sanskrit, which he describes as “a usage whereby a primary
stem modified only by the so-called secondary personal endings was neutral in respect
of tense and mood and could be used, when the context gave sufficient indication of
function, with reference to past, present, or future, real or imagined.”23 In Vedic hymns
it often alternates with the present in descriptions of gods’ typical activities. This
could explain the unaug­mented imperfect in line 5. Greek “timeless” aorists may
also derive from uses of an injunctive (there are also Vedic aorist-stem injunctives); in
this case they ought to be augmented, but are mostly not. West suggests that perhaps
the aorist-stem injunctive came to be regarded as an aorist indicative, and was accordingly
augmented. Various parallels have been pointed out between early Greek hexameter
poetry and the Vedic hymns, and a common parentage is often assumed for them, so it
would not be surprising if the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod preserve a stylistic feature
also found in Vedic hymns.
Bakker connects the tenses in the scene with the idea of “remembering” the god
with which the hymn begins.24 He points out that memory in archaic Greece was not
just about recalling past events, but making them present, and poetry did this in an
espe­cially vivid way. The poet visualises the events as if they are present to him, and
this collapsing of present and past helps explain the shift in tenses in the scene. This
is reasonable enough, but his theories about the passage as an example of “temporal
deixis” are more speculative. He believes that the syllabic augment is a deictic marker
rather than one of tense in the conventional sense, used for describing “immediately
obser­vable realities,” and compares the language of Homeric similes, which also
com­bine present tenses and augmented aorists (usually explained as “gnomic”).25

Whatever explanation of the tense changes we adopt, I would argue that it is a

typical scene. This is what we would expect at the start of a hymn. If it is typical, the
past tenses can be explained, or at least paralleled; if it is past narrative, the present
tenses cannot. The passage begins and ends in the present tense, and there are cases of
gene­ra­lising τε in lines 2, 3 and 12. The objection that the content is not suitable for
a typical scene is, I think, too pedantic. It is a typical description in that it conveys
what Apollo is like, and his relationship to the other gods. To that extent I would agree
with Clay and Faulkner that the distinction between past and present breaks down

23. West 1989, p. 135-138.

24. Bakker 2002.
25. For more detail, cf. Bakker 1999.

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here, and that a god’s unique action can convey his nature. It is undeniable that the
scene contains elements suitable for an account of a first arrival on Olympus, but it still
displays the god’s essential nature.
Scenes of arrival on Olympus are, as I have said, a feature of the Homeric Hymns.
In addition to the accounts of a god’s first arrival already quoted, we can compare HH 2,
483 sq.; HH 4, 503 sq.; HH 5, 291. HH 15 moves from Heracles’ exploits on the earth to
his current situation on Olympus, and the fragmentary HH l also ends on Olympus.
Such scenes normally come at the end rather than the beginnning of a hymn. In the case
of a first arrival, it is natural that it should follow the birth narration; and it is some­
times just a case of the god returning home after whatever action has been narrated, as
at the end of the Hymn to Aphrodite. The Hymns have a tendency to return to the
present at the end, and to describe the god’s current situation, which is normally on
Olympus. This is important thematically, since the status of a god among the other
Olympians and his acceptance by them are major themes of the Homeric Hymns. So
it is unusual for a hymn to open with a scene on Olympus, whether it is typical or not.
The Theogony opens with a description of the Muses’ typical activity, but this is on
Helicon; however, the poem’s “second beginning” (36 sq.), after the account of their
meeting with Hesiod, describes their typical activity on Olympus before the narration of
their birth and first arrival on Olympus. To open a hymn with such a scene, especially
one as vivid as lines 1-13 of the Hymn to Apollo, is a striking and effective conception.
The image of Apollo the powerful archer is stamped on our minds from the beginning. If
we did not have such a scene, the god would not actually appear in the Delian hymn
until near its end. It is all the more striking if it is meant as an account of Apollo’s first
appea­rance on Olympus, because of the disruption of the logical order of events.

In spite of its awkwardness at some points, the passage does succeed in conveying an
impression of Apollo’s greatness. It is a vivid vignette of Olympian life, with the gods
springing up in fear of Apollo and the restoration of peace once his bow is hung
up. Some recent work on Greek hymns has stressed their cletic aspects, their role
in making the god powerfully present, and divine epiphanies in the hymns can be
seen as a way of calling on the god to manifest him or herself, even if not in physical
form.26 Apollo in particular can be seen as a god who is called on to come to his
shrines from afar. So in this light too it is a powerful and effective idea to open the
hymn with a description of the god arriving and demonstrating his might.

26. E.g. Garcia 2002; Furley, Bremer 2001; Vamvouri Ruffy 2004.

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