Draft:Homeric Hymn to Apollo
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The Hymn to Apollo was attributed to Homer by Pindar and Thucydides[1] but its authenticity has been questioned.
Authorship
[edit]The Hymn to Apollo was attributed to Homer by Pindar and Thucydides, who wrote around the beginning and the end of the fifth century BCE respectively. This attribution may have reflected the high esteem in which the hymns were held, as well as their stylistic similarities with the Homeric poems. The dialect of the hymns, an artificial literary language (Kunstsprache) derived largely from the Aeolic and Ionic dialects of Greek, is similar to that used in the Iliad and Odyssey. Like the Iliad and Odyssey, the hymns are composed in the rhythmic form known as dactylic hexameter and make use of formulae: short, set phrases with particular metrical characteristics that could be repeated as a compositional aid.
The attribution to Homer was sometimes questioned in antiquity, such as by the rhetorician Athenaeus, who expressed his doubts about it around 200 CE. Other hypotheses in ancient times included the belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynathios of Chios, one of the Homeridae, a circle of poets claiming descent from Homer. Some ancient biographies of Homer denied his authorship of the Homeric Hymns, and the hymns' comparative absence, relative to the Iliad and Odyssey, from the work of scholars based in Hellenistic (323–30 BCE) Alexandria may suggest that they were no longer considered to be his work by this period. However, few direct statements denying Homer's authorship of the hymns survive from antiquity: in the second century CE, the Greek geographer Pausanias maintained their attribution to Homer.
References
[edit]- ^ Bing, Peter (2009). The scroll and the marble: studies in reading and reception in Hellenistic poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan press. ISBN 978-0-472-11632-4.