The Representation of Delos in the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo, Pindaric Fragments and
Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos
L.E.A. Roling (0410020)
Supervisor: Prof. dr. I.J.F. de Jong
August 2012
MA Thesis (30 ECTS)
Research Master Literary Studies
Table of Contents
1. General introduction
3
1.1 Preliminaries
3
1.2 Approach
5
1.3 Delos: a Brief Overview
7
2. Delos in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: From Rocky Wasteland to Panhellenic
Religious Centre
2.1 Introduction
9
9
2.1.1 The Question of Unity
10
2.1.2 Performance Context and Date of Composition
13
2.2 The Representation of Delos in the Hymn to Apollo: a Close Reading
14
2.3 The Politics of Power: interpreting the Hymn to Apollo
22
3. Delos in Pindaric Fragments: From Daughter of Coeus to Four-Columned Shrine
3.1 Introduction
28
28
3.1.1 Difficulties: State of the Text and Genre
28
3.1.2 Summary of Paeans V, VIIb, XII and the Hymn to Zeus
30
3.2 The Representation of Delos in Pindar’s Paeans and the Hymn to Zeus:
a Close Reading
31
3.2.1 Paean VIIb
31
3.2.2 Paean XII
35
3.2.3 Pindar’s Hymn to Zeus (fr. 33c and fr. 33d)
38
3.2.4 Paean V
41
3.3 Interpreting the Pindaric Fragments in the light of Poetics and Politics
43
3.3.1 Pindar and Homer
44
3.3.2 The Politics of Power
47
4. Delos in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos: From Free-roaming Independence
to Voluntary Submission
50
4.1 Introduction
52
4.1.1 Callimachus’ Poetics
52
4.1.2 Politics: Callimachus and Ptolemy Philadelphus
53
4.2 The Representation of Delos in the Hymn to Delos: a Close Reading
54
4.3 Interpreting the Hymn to Delos in the light of Poetics and Politics
64
4.3.1 The Poetics of the Hymn to Delos
64
4.3.2 The Politics of the Hymn to Delos
66
5. Conclusion
69
6. Bibliography
72
Chapter 1
General Introduction
1.1 Preliminaries
Islands have always occupied a powerful place in the literary imagination. The island setting, be it
in texts from widely different periods such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe or Golding’s Lord of the Flies, has an enduring place in literature. The fascination for islands
can be attributed at least partly to its most basic spatial feature: it is a space completely encircled
by water, and therefore, as a self-contained (miniature) realm, lends itself especially to symbolic
interpretation. The islandscape may thus be considered to constitute the ideal locale for the
projection of larger societal issues, as happens for instance in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which a
group of young boys descends into savagery when left to its own devices on an isolated,
uninhabited island. In this novel, the reader is confronted, from the relative distance of the island
setting, with the anxieties and concerns of his or her own mainland society. Since islands
constitute an important part of the geographical outlay of Greece, it is, then, probable that one also
finds similar projections of societal concerns onto island spaces in Ancient Greek literature.
In the thesis at hand, the focus is on the literary representations of the Cycladic island
Delos, the birthplace of Apollo. 1 I have selected texts from three authors from different periods in
which Delos plays a prominent part: the first text under discussion, in the second chapter, will be
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, a specimen of archaic poetry. 2 The third chapter will be dedicated to
the representation of Delos in four poems by Pindar that have been transmitted in a fragmentary
state, on papyri or by being cited by other authors. In the fourth chapter, a Hellenistic poem,
Callimachus´ Hymn to Delos, will be looked at closely.
An important advantage of focusing on texts that deal with one island, i.e. Delos, is the
possibility for comparison. Reading the texts of Pindar in the light of the Homeric Hymn and
1
Rather than the final product of my time as a graduate student, this thesis forms the starting point of the PhD
research into islands in Ancient Greek literature that I will be conducting after I graduate. This thesis, then, constitutes
an initial case study, a finger exercise in the fruitfulness of two different approaches, namely metapoetics and politics.
2
Thucydides considered the Homeric Hymn to be one of Homer´s works (3.104). It seems, then, that the notion that
Homer was the author of the Homeric Hymn was still in currency in the fifth century BC.
3
Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos in the light of both his predecessors enables one to note, more or less
systematically, the differences in the way in which Delos is represented by these various authors.
Taking note of these differences leads to a next step, that is, the interpretation of them. In this
thesis, I have chosen to read these differences in the light of two strands of theory: on the one
hand, I will connect the representation of Delos in these texts to the historical background,
concentrating on contemporary political circumstances. For this purpose, I will draw on ideas
current in colonial studies, most importantly the work of Edward Said. On the other hand, I will
read the representations of the island in the light of metapoetics, focussing on the way in which
earlier accounts are evaluated (explicitly or implicitly) and the use of terminology that is
considered to be metapoetically pregnant elsewhere in a poet’s corpus. I will only read the Pindaric
fragments and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos in this metapoetic vein, since the Homeric Hymn does
not refer to any predecessors – possibly because it was composed in an age in which poetry was
still a predominantly oral affair and this was the first poem in which a version was fixed – and
contains no clear textual pointers that suggest that certain passages should be understood as
metapoetical reflections. 3
The chapters of this thesis will all be structured as follows: first, I will briefly introduce the
literary text or texts under discussion in the chapter, focussing on relevant issues that have become
recurring topics of scholarly attention or that may otherwise be regarded as problematic. The
second part of the chapter will contain a close reading of the representation of Delos. The results of
this close reading will then be taken on board in the third section in which I interpret the results of
my close reading in the light of politics and metapoetics.
In this introductory chapter, I will first elaborate further on my approach (section 1.2) and I
will then turn to a brief overview of the island Delos and its history (section 1.3). This overview will
become relevant when I relate the results of my close readings to the historical contexts in which
the texts were composed.
3
Of course, there is a sphragis to be found in the Homeric Hymn in which the narrator points to himself at work as a
poet on the island Delos (165ff.). However, this seems to be a call for kleos rather than a reflection on what poetry
should convey and how it should go about doing so.
4
1.2
Approach
As noted above, my approach will consist of a close reading followed by an interpretation of its
results. For my close reading, I will draw on the tools that narratology has to offer, especially as
developed by De Jong in her Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative (2004, 2007 and 2012). Central
questions in a narratological investigation of space – the topic of SAGN 3 – are as follows: 4 what
methods of presentation are used (is it the narrator or one of the story’s characters who describes
the island space); is space looked at statically, as merely a setting, or is it an integral part of the
story; and what symbolical associations does a particular piece of space (in this case, an island),
carry in a particular literary text? The merit of establishing these narratological parameters lies
mainly in that they allow for a concretisation and systematic formulation of what one may
intuitively discern in a text. Such a systematic approach then also facilitates comparison between
texts.
After my close reading, I will turn to an interpretation of the elements of the
representation of Delos that have been brought to light. As mentioned before, my interpretation
will consist of a colonial and political reading on the one hand and a metapoetical one on the
other. My colonial-political reading will be heavily influenced by some of Edward Said’s principles
as expounded in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism.
In Culture and Imperialism, Said stresses that although scholars often suppose that there
exists a disjunction between cultural and political spheres, cultural artefacts are never “neutral” or
“independent”:
In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be central, yet rarely is
it put in its full political context, a context that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on
the one hand an isolated cultural sphere, believed to be freely and unconditionally
available to weightless theoretical speculation and investigation, and on the other, a
debased political sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur.
(56-7)
This quote illustrates Said’s central point throughout his large body of work, namely that cultural
products accomplish political ends. Art for art’s sake, then, is something that does not exist. Rather,
4
Cf. also Hoffmann (1978) and Dennerlein (2009) for these concerns. Since De Jong has developed a practical
introduction for the scholars who have written chapters for SAGN to use as a guideline, I mainly draw on her
introductions.
5
all cultural products – from high art to products of popular culture – do something in a sociopolitical context, however implicitly. And although Said focused mostly on the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries in his work, the same principle may be said mutatis mutandis to hold true for
the cultural products of other periods of history.
Although Said’s writings had a tremendous impact on the study of the literary works of
modern foreign languages, classicists have not embraced Said’s notions with such great
enthusiasm. Nevertheless, some of the ideas propounded by Said were already “in the air”, even in
the field of classics, e.g. in 1951, when Nilsson stressed the political value of myth: “Myths served to
justify the possession of a country or a district, they served to assert claims on some territory which
a city wanted to win, and to impress the righteousness of these claims upon public opinion” (49).
The important difference between Said and Nilsson, however, is that Said stresses that cultural
artefacts may also establish and strengthen certain discourses of dominance without being openly
propagandistic. Thus, works of art may also have a political and imperialistic function
unobtrusively, without even the narrator and the narratees necessarily being conscious of it.
Taking my cue from Said’s notion that texts are never entirely “neutral”, I will connect what
stands out in my close reading of the texts to the historical background against which these poems
were composed. I expect that these political and historical contexts will shed a new light on each
representation of Delos and that the representation will, to some extent, perform and reinforce
political concerns that were actual at the time of composition.
My second strand of interpretation, that of metapoetics, will depart from the notion that
the Pindaric fragments and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, stand in a tradition. That is, they deal with
a story that has been told before, namely in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. 5 These poets can thus be
expected to position themselves with regard to what came before, and hint at their own poetic
principles in their texts. I expect, then, that the Delic insular space will also function as a space in
which poetic identities are, so to speak, established. Before I start with my first chapter on the
representation of Delos in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, I will first briefly provide relevant
background information on the island Delos.
5
Of course, a lot of texts have been lost over the course of time, and one cannot be certain that the Homeric Hymn was
the first, let alone the only, text to deal with the Delos. Nevertheless, I believe that as a poem that features such a clear
Homeric sphragis in 165-72, the hymn carried a certain amount of authority, even in antiquity.
6
1.3
Delos: a Brief Overview
Delos is a small island at the centre of the Cyclades, some 6 km long and 1.2 km wide. 6 It covers an
area of 3.5 square km. It is separated from neighbouring Rheneia by a channel that is 1 km wide.
The interior of the island is quite rocky, with Mount Cynthus reaching 113 meters. The island was
abandoned in the Early Imperial period and, apart from the odd hermit, has remained uninhabited
ever since.
In the archaic period, however, it was a bustling cult centre. In the Odyssey, one already
finds reference to a cult place at Delos when Odysseus compares Nausicaa to a palm tree on the
island: 7 “Δήλῳ δή ποτε τοῖον Ἀπόλλωνος παρὰ βωμῷ / φοίνικος νέον ἔρνος ἀνερχόμενον ἐνόησα·” (“I saw
such once, at Delos, beside the altar of Apollo, a young sapling of a palm tree shooting up.” 6.16263). The neighbouring Cycladic islands Naxos and Paros were the island’s most conspicuous
patrons in the early archaic period. 8 In the later sixth century first Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens,
asserted his authority, followed by Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos. Pisistratus had the island
purified for the first time by emptying the graves within view of the sanctuary of Apollo around 540
BC. 9 In 523/522 BC, Polycrates dedicated the neighbouring island Rheneia to Delian Apollo, adding
it as an extension to the territory of Delos. 10
In the classical period, after having come through the Persian Wars unscathed, Delos
became the meeting-place and the treasury of the Delian League. In 454 BC, the treasury was
moved to Athens, supposedly in order to protect it from the Persians. Delos remained an
important place, however, and in 426 BC, the Athenians carried out a second purification of the
island. This time, they cleared all the graves on Delos and forbade anyone to die or give birth on
the island. Pregnant women and ill people were thus removed to Rheneia to give birth or to die
and be buried respectively. In 422 BC, the Athenians expelled the entire population of Delos on a
6
Brill’s New Pauly s.v. Delos.
7
The text is taken from Allen’s OCT (1917) and the translation is Lattimore’s (1951).
8
OCD s.v. Delos. (based on archeological findings).
9
Herodotus (1.61ff.) and Thucydides (3.104).
10
Parke (1946: 106).
7
charge of impurity, but they were recalled a year later. 11 The Athenians were thus completely in
control over the island.
From 314 BC onwards, Delos became what Laidlaw calls “Free Delos”, that is an
independent state. 12 Moreover, this independent Delos formed the political and religious centre of
the Nesiotic League, an alliance of islands in the Aegean of which Delos constituted the political
and religious centre. In practice, however, the Nesiotic League was controlled by larger empires:
from 315 BC onwards it was controlled by Antigonus Monophtalmus and his son Demetrius
Poliorcetes, kings of Macedonia. In 286 BC, after the defeat of Demetrius by Seleucus, Ptolemy II
Philadelphus, king of Egypt and patron of Callimachus et al. took control of the Nesiotic League. 13
This lasted until 262/1 BC, when Philadelphus lost the Battle of Cos from Antigonus II Gonatas.
There is no evidence that the Nesiotic League continued to exist after this battle.
Afterwards, Delos remained independent in name, but it was dominated in practice by the
various powers of the Aegean until the Romans officially gave it to the Athenians – who had
remained consistently loyal to Rome during the Third Macedonian War – in 166/165 BC. 14 The
island’s prominence declined slowly but steadily. In 88 BC, the island was sacked by Mithridates
VI’s naval forces. After some restoration work, the island was again sacked in 69 BC, this time by
pirates who were allied to Mithridates. The island never restored from this second devastation, and
was eventually abandoned. 15
11
Jebb (1880: 21).
12
Laidlaw (1932: 94).
13
Brill’s New Pauly s.v. Delos.
14
Laidlaw (169).
15
Brill’s New Pauly s.v. Delos.
8
Chapter 2
Delos in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: From Rocky Wasteland to Panhellenic
Religious Centre
2.1
Introduction
The first fully-fledged literary representation of the island Delos occurs in the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo. As I have mentioned in the introductory chapter to this thesis, all chapters that deal with
literary representations of Delos will be structured similarly: first, I will briefly introduce the
literary text under discussion in that chapter, focussing on relevant issues that have become
recurring topics of scholarly attention or that may otherwise be regarded as problematic. The brief
discussion of such problems will become relevant over the course of the chapter. The second part
of the chapter will contain a close reading of the representation of Delos in the literary text under
discussion. The results of this close reading will then be taken on board in my own interpretation
of the representation of Delos in the text. This structure is also adhered to in this chapter, and I will
therefore start with an introduction to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.
The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells the story of the birth of Apollo on Delos and the god’s
subsequent foundation of an oracle and temple at Delphi. Scholars have traditionally divided this
hymn into two different sections, one in which Delos plays an important part (ll. 1-178), the other in
which Delphi takes a prominent place (ll. 179-544). Since the Delian section of the Hymn will be
the focal point of this chapter, it is useful to provide a brief schematic summary of this section of
the hymn for future reference, based on Richardson (10):
- ll. 1-18 The opening movement of the hymn: Apollo enters the palace of Zeus and
impresses the congregated Olympians. Leto takes his bow and Apollo sits down among the
Olympians. The narrator salutes Leto as the mother of Apollo and Artemis (14-18).
- ll. 19-29
The narrator addresses Apollo, stresses the widespread worship of the god
in the form of a priamel (20-9) and chooses the theme of his song: the birth of the god on
Delos.
9
- ll. 30-50
The narrator tells of Leto’s journey around the Aegean in search of a place
to give birth to her son. The places (islands, cities, landmarks) that are reluctant to receive
Leto and Apollo are listed in the form of a catalogue (30-46).
- ll. 51-88
Leto arrives on Delos and a dialogue between the two ensues. Leto tells the
island that the birth of Apollo will turn barren Delos into a rich island (51-60). Delos states
her readiness to receive Apollo and subsequent riches, but demands an oath from Leto that
Apollo – who is apparently predicted to be a somewhat haughty god – will not disrespect
his birthplace (61-83). Leto gives her promise (84-88).
- ll.89-126
The birth of Apollo takes place after Iris brings Eileithyia, who needs to
provide assistance but has been kept in the dark by a jealous Hera (97-114). The goddesses
present at the birth cry out as the god is born (119) and wash and swathe the newborn deity.
Themis nurses him (124-5) and Leto rejoices (125-6).
- ll. 127-39
The god grows miraculously and Delos blossoms. The god then pronounces
the lyre and bow as his attributes and announces his oracular function (131-2).
- ll. 140-6
A priamel of the range of Apollo’s power ensues, followed by the statement
that Delos remained his favourite place (146).
- ll. 147-178
A description of the Delian festival (146-55) and the chorus of the Deliades
(156-64) follows. The narrator then takes his leave and asks of the Deliades to acknowledge
him – the blind man from Chios – in the future as the greatest singer and announces that
he shall spread their fame and will never stop singing of Apollo.
2.1.1 The Question of Unity
Since the end of the Delian section of the Hymn includes a leave-taking from the Delian girls
(“χαίρετε δ’ ὑμεῖς πᾶσαι” in l. 166) and a promise to continue singing of Apollo (“οὐ λήξω … ὑμνέων” in
ll. 177-8), the question of the poem’s unity or disunity remains a recurring topic for discussion
among scholars. The elements of leave-taking and a promise to continue singing of the god
generally tend to signal, in other hymns, that the hymn has come to an end: in the Hymn to
Aphrodite, for example, the poet ends his song with the lines “Χαῖρε θεὰ Κύπροιο ἐüκτιμένης
μεδέουσα· / σεῦ δ’ ἐγὼ ἀρξάμενος μεταβήσομαι ἄλλον ἐς ὕμνον” (“I salute you, goddess, queen of well-
10
cultivated Cyprus. After beginning from you, I will pass over to another song” 292-3). 16 Here one too
finds an instance of the verb χαιρώ (as a means of taking leave) and the promise on the part of the
poet that he will sing of Aphrodite in the future. Whereas the Hymn to Aphrodite ends after these
closing elements, the poet of the Hymn to Apollo seems to take his promise of continuing to sing of
Apollo quite literally and launches the Pythian section of the hymn. Scholars can generally be
divided into unitarians, who believe that the Delian and Pythian sections of the hymn were
conceived by one poet and meant to form a single whole, and separatists, who believe that the two
sections were composed separately.
Separatists generally consider three possibilities: firstly, the two hymns may have been
composed separately and joined together by a third person, although this is unlikely, for there are a
number of parallels among the Delian and Pythian hymns that suggest that this is no mere
patchwork of entirely different hymns: both hymns open with a scene on Mount Olympus in which
Apollo makes an entrance and affects the other gods (1-13 and 186-206). Both have a section in
which the poet contemplates a fit topic for song introduced by the line “πῶς τάρ σ' ὑμνήσω, πάντως
εὔμνον ἐόντα” (“How shall I hymn you, fit subject as you are in every respect?” 19 and 207).
Furthermore, Leto travels far and wide in search of a place to give birth, while Apollo travels in
search of a site for his oracle. Both Leto and Apollo converse with a local entity (Delos and
Telphousa respectively) about ending their search there (Leto convinces Delos to accept Apollo,
while Telphousa convinces Apollo to continue his search elsewhere). Both Delos and Telphousa
are offered a temple and a sacred grove in lines that show remarkable verbal parallels (cf. Chappell
69-70). Due to this abundance of parallels between the Delian and Pythian sections of the hymn,
separatists have generally considered it unlikely that the Delian and Pythian sections of the Hymn
to Apollo were entirely separate hymns joined by a third person. Rather, separatists are inclined to
think that one of the two sections was specifically composed to be added to the other section: thus,
Wilamowitz, in his Die Ilias und Homer, argues that the Pythian section was added to the Delian at
a later date. This theory may certainly be qualified as attractive, for it accounts for the similarities
between the two sections as well as for the fact that the Pythian section does not have a proper
hymnal beginning in which the god who will be the subject of song is announced. West, however,
disagrees and argues that the Delian section of the hymn was composed at a later date by
16
The text and translation of the Homeric Hymns is taken from West’s 2003 Loeb edition.
11
Cynaethus, a poet from Chios (the place the narrator of the Delian section calls his home).
Furthermore, West argues, this Cynaethus changed the original Pythian hymn (e.g. by means of the
deletion of the opening lines in which the subject of song is announced and by the addition of
certain episodes, e.g. the slaying of Typhaon in the Pythian section) in order to construe a single
poem. 17 Linguistic analysis conducted on both sections has proved inconclusive in terms of
establishing which section of the hymn is older: rather, Janko (99-132) has shown that the language
of the Delian section seems to be more Ionian than that of the Pythian section, especially with
regard to the large amount of occurrences of nu-mobile before consonants. Therefore, linguistic
research seems to support the notion that the hymn was not composed as a unity by one and the
same poet, but other than that, it cannot give any decisive answers as to which section is older.
Unitarians such as Miller and Clay stress that the parallels between the Delian and Pythian
sections of the Hymn cannot have been accidental and argue that certain arguments on the side of
the separatists are not as self-evident as they may seem. Miller succeeds in showing that the
closing passage of the Delian section, although it seems to be prima facie a typical hymnic ending,
does not conform completely to what one would expect: unlike gods in other hymns, Apollo is not
directly addressed in this closing passage. Rather, the poet only explicitly takes his leave from the
Delian maidens in l. 166, not from Apollo. Therefore, Miller argues, “χαίρετε” merely signals the end
of the Delian theme, not of the hymn as a whole. The poet of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo intends
to continue to sing of Apollo’s exploits and does so in the Pythian section of the hymn.
Another objection to the unity of the hymn, namely that two widely different cult sites
(Delos and Delphi) are celebrated rather than one cult site (at which the hymn would have been
performed), is countered by Clay, who argues that the shrines at Delos and Delphi had a
Panhellenic rather than a local significance (9-11). She states that “we should not foist off a
nineteenth-century parochialism on the Greeks” (48) and argues that in the eyes of the Greeks,
Apollo was not either Delian or Pythian, but both at the same time, and that it was this Delian and
Pythian totality that the poet of the Hymn to Apollo was trying to depict.
All in all, both unitarians and separatists have valid arguments in favour of their positions.
Nevertheless, neither Unitarians nor separatists argue that the division of the poem into a Delian
and a Pythian section is not evident: whether one poet combined these two episodes in one poem
17
Cf. West (1975).
12
on purpose or whether a poet attached his own section to a pre-existing Delian or Pythian hymn,
the fact remains that the poem as we have it today consists of two different episodes from the life
and exploits of Apollo. It is therefore that I deem it legitimate to focus on the Delian section of the
hymn alone in my analysis.
2.1.2
Performance Context and Date of Composition
Apart from the issue whether the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was originally conceived of as a unity or
not, scholars are also divided on the question how the Hymn was performed. Most scholars assume
that the Homeric Hymns in general were meant to be performed at the local cult place with which
each hymn could be associated: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for instance, is generally considered
to have been composed for performance at Eleusis. Likewise, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo could be
connected with either the Delian festival that is depicted in the Delian section of the hymn or
associated with Delphi, the cult place that is established in the hymn’s Pythian section. Other
scholars, such as Parker (2) and Garcia (9), have argued that the Homeric Hymns were not
necessarily bound to a single festival context. Clay, advocating a Panhellenic reading of the hymns,
also dismisses the hymn’s purely local cult associations and even suggests that the Hymns might
have been performed at symposia (7).
Aside from the question how the Hymn to Apollo was performed, scholars have also
considered the issue whether a date of the (combined) hymn’s (first) performance could be
established. Generally, scholars agree that the Hymn must have been composed somewhere
between 650 and 500 B.C. Burkert and West have arrived at a very specific date based on a
scholium to the first line of Pindar’s second Nemean: 18
ἐπιφανεῖς δὲ ἐγένοντο οἱ περὶ Κύναιθον, οὕς φασι πολλὰ τῶν ἐπῶν ποιήσαντας ἐμβαλεῖν εἰς τὴν
Ὁμήρου ποίησιν. ἦν δὲ ὁ Κύναιθος τὸ γένος Χῖος, ὃς καὶ τῶν ἐπιγραφομένων Ὁμήρου ποιημάτων
τὸν εἰς Ἀπόλλωνα γεγραφὼς ὕμνον ἀνατέθεικεν αὐτῷ.
Prominent became Cynaethus and his like, who are said to have interpolated many verses
in the poetry of Homer. Cynaethus was Chian by origin, and he wrote, among the works
attributed to Homer, the Hymn to Apollo and fathered it on Homer. (FGrH 568 F 5)
18
The translation given here is by Chappell (2011: 71-2).
13
Based on this scholium and the information in Thucydides 3.104.2 that the Samian tyrant
Polycrates celebrated a festival on Delos when dedicating the island Rheneia to Delian Apollo
(which has been dated to 523/522 B.C.), West and Burkert suggest that Cynaethus must have
composed the Hymn to Apollo for this specific Delian festival. West furthermore argues that, in
order to please his Samian patron, Cynaethus inserted the passage in which Hera prevents
Eileithyia from assisting in the birth of Apollo into his own Delian section and added the Typhaon
episode to the pre-existing Pythian section. 19 Although the performance context and date that
West and Burkert suggest is of an almost startling specificity, this scenario is certainly not
improbable, as I hope to show later on in this chapter.
2.2 The Representation of Delos in the Hymn to Apollo: a Close Reading
As announced in the introduction to this thesis, my close readings draw on narratological theory.
Therefore, the text is approached with the following questions in mind: in which terms is Delos
described? Who is the describing (and focalising) agent and how is the Delic space related to other
spaces in the text?
After the narrator has opened his hymn with Apollo’s entrance on mount Olympus, he
addresses Leto, and the island Delos is first mentioned:
χαῖρε μάκαιρ’ ὦ Λητοῖ, ἐπεὶ τέκες ἀγλαὰ τέκνα
Ἀπόλλωνά τ’ ἄνακτα καὶ Ἄρτεμιν ἰοχέαιραν,
τὴν μὲν ἐν Ὀρτυγίῃ, τὸν δὲ κραναῇ ἐνὶ Δήλῳ,
κεκλιμένη πρὸς μακρὸν ὄρος καὶ Κύνθιον ὄχθον,
ἀγχοτάτω φοίνικος, ὑπ’ Ἰνωποῖο ῥεέθροις.
I salute you, O blessed Leto, for you bore splendid children, the lord Apollo and Artemis
profuse of arrows: her you bore in Ortygia, him in rocky Delos, leaning against the long
eminence of Cynthus, hard by the palm-tree, below the streams of Inopos. (14-18)
In line 16, the narrator briefly mentions that Artemis was born on Ortygia (“Quail-island”). This
island is mentioned twice in the Odyssey (5.123 and 15.406), but its location remains unclear there
as well as in the Hymn to Apollo. There are four geographical possibilities that Allen, Halliday and
Sikes and Richardson mention: (a) Ortygia is an old name for Delos’ neighbouring island Rheneia
19
Polycrates had taken power over Samos during a festival of Hera and therefore held the goddess in high regard
during his reign (e.g. by constructing a large temple dedicated to her).
14
(as identified by Strabo 486), (b) it refers to Delos itself (e.g. in Call. H. 2.59), (c) it refers to the
island next to Syracuse (e.g. Pindar P. 2.6-7) or (d) it refers to a place at Ephesus (Strabo 639). None
of these options are wholly satisfactory: (b) can be discarded immediately, since the entire
narrative concerning Leto’s search for a willing island to accept her son as well as her eventual
arrival at Delos would become pointless if Leto had just given birth to Artemis on that exact same
island. Option (a) can also be discarded, since in line 44 the island Rheneia is mentioned without
being related to Artemis or Ortygia in any way. Also, Leto’s search across the Aegean for a place to
give birth to Apollo seems rather pointless if the only thing the goddess should have done was
cross a minimal sea distance in order to reach the (eventually) willing island Delos. Options (c) and
(d) seem more probable, but in my view it seems more likely that the hymnic poet mentions
Ortygia as Artemis’ birthplace because it has an exotic, unfamiliar quality to it, like it has in the
Odyssey (15.404). This has the effect that the narratees can conceive of Ortygia as “elsewhere”, i.e.
lying outside of the sphere of the familiar Greek world of the Aegean (which is the spatial world of
the hymn).
Whereas Artemis is born “elsewhere” in unfamiliar Ortygia, Leto has given birth to Apollo
on “κραναῇ … Δήλῳ” (“rocky Delos” 14). Delos is here given the epithet κραναός, a relatively rare
word that only occurs twice in the Iliad, four times in the Odyssey and once in the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter. In the Iliad and Odyssey, the word is an epithet of Ithaca in five out of six instances. 20
Minna Jensen, in an article on the epithet points out by means of Il. 3.201 that κραναός has a
connotation of poverty in Homer (1982: 6), for when Priam asks Helen who the ram-like Achaean is
that he spots, Helen answers as follows: 21
οὗτος δ’ αὖ Λαερτιάδης πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς,
ὃς τράφη ἐν δήμῳ Ἰθάκης κραναῆς περ ἐούσης
εἰδὼς παντοίους τε δόλους καὶ μήδεα πυκνά.
This [again] is Laertes' son, resourceful Odysseus, who grew up in the country, rough
though it be, of Ithaka, to know every manner of shiftiness and crafty counsels. (3.200-2)
20
Κραναός can be found in Il. 3.201 and 3.445, where it is said that Paris and Helen spent their first night after leaving
Sparta νήσῳ … ἐν κραναῇ (“on a rocky island” or “on the island Kranaos”, since it is unclear whether the word serves as
an adjective or as the proper name of an island in this line). In the Odyssey, κραναός occurs at 1.247, 15.510, 16.124 and
21.346.
21
The text is taken from Allen’s OCT, the translation of the Iliad and Odyssey from Lattimore’s translation.
15
Here Helen points out that the island Ithaca has fostered an exquisite hero in spite of it being very
(περ) κραναός. There is thus, in this passage, a clear contrast between the rocky meagreness of
Ithaca’s soil and the great leader it has brought forth. The same goes for the other instances of
κραναός in the Odyssey: in all instances, the word occurs in verses that describe the lords of Ithaca
(though in a general sense). There is thus a contrast between the power of the leaders of Ithaca and
the island’s barrenness. This sentiment is also expressed in other terms in Od. 9.27: Ithaca is
described there as an island that is τρηχεῖ’, ἀλλ’ ἀγαθὴ κουροτρόφος (“a rugged island, but a good
nurse of young men”). In the Hymn to Demeter, κραναός occurs at a pivotal moment, when Hermes
tells Hades that he has come to get Persephone because Demeter “μέγα μήδεται ἔργον, / φθεῖσαι φῦλ’
ἀμενηνὰ χαμαιγενέων ἀνθρώπων / σπέρμ’ ὑπὸ γῆς κρύπτουσα” (“is purposing a grave thing, to destroy
the feeble stock of earthborn humankind by keeping the seed hidden under the soil” 351-3). It is at
the point that Demeter has decided to make the soil sterile that Hermes remarks that she is
“Ἐλευσῖνος κραναὸν πτολιέθρον ἔχουσα” (“occupying Eleusis’ rugged citadel” 356). Although Eleusis
may be, in reality, a rocky place, the earth has been made barren, and therefore κραναός seems a
perfect epithet for the rocky place where Demeter, the cause of this infertility, resides, especially
since this place will become a place associated with fertility in the future.
As has become clear from this brief excursus into the epithet, κραναός generally has a
connotation of barrenness, but more specifically of barren places that have potential: as barren
Ithaca has fostered powerful men and rocky Eleusis eventually becomes the cult centre of the
goddess of fertility, so barren, rocky Delos will prove to be a rich cult centre after the birth of the
powerful god Apollo. In a sense, then, a narrator who calls a place κραναός, is stressing that the
place may be sterile, but that there is potential nevertheless.
Returning to the passage of the Hymn to Apollo in which the narrator first introduces Delos
(14-18), one may wonder whether it is the narrator who focalises this first image of Delos or
whether the narrator embeds Leto’s focalisation of the island. The latter seems to be the case, since
the spatial features of the island are described in the second person through Leto’s interaction with
them (she gives birth to Apollo on rocky Delos, leaning against mount Cynthus, near the palm-tree
and near the river Inopos). I will expand on this issue of the focaliser below in my discussion of line
25ff. At any rate, the most important landmarks of Delos are in this way introduced to the external
narratees (the audience listening to the reciting poet) of the Hymn to Apollo.
16
In line 19-24, the narrator wonders what aspect of mighty Apollo he should hymn (“πῶς τάρ
σ’ ὑμνήσω”, “How shall I hymn you?” 19). He then expands on Apollo’s geographical field of
influence, which spans the entirety of the Aegean world: from the mainland (ἤπειρον 21: according
to LSJ II, this term generally indicates the mainland in the Western Aegean) to the islands (νήσους
21). Furthermore, the narrator tells his internal narratee Apollo as well as his external narratees
that geographical features such as mountains, rivers and harbours all fall under Apollo’s control. In
short: the entire Greek world is thus under Apollo’s rule.
In line 25, the narrator decides that he shall tell the story of Apollo’s birth on Delos. In line
26, the term κραναός recurs when the narrator tells, in second-person narration, that Leto brought
him forth, leaning (κλινθεῖσα) against Mount Cynthus “κραναῇ ἐνὶ νήσῳ” (“on the rocky island” 26).
Again, one may wonder who focalises the island Delos here and who qualifies it as κραναή. There
are, in principle, three possibilities: (a) the narrator focalises here, or (b) Apollo is the focaliser
(since he is addressed in this second-person narration) or (c) the narrator embeds Leto’s
focalisation of the island, since she is (as in the earlier instance of κραναός in line 16) engaged in
interaction with the island. The latter option seems the most plausible, partly due to its similarity
to the occurrence in line 16. Even though one cannot find verbs that explicitly signal focalisation
(such as “Leto saw” etc.), the narrator nevertheless in both cases (16 and 26) positions himself next
to Leto, as it were, and looks at the island through Leto’s interaction with it: rather than
positioning himself at a great distance from Delos (which one would call a panoramic standpoint),
the narrator joins Leto from a scenic standpoint. At any rate, Leto finds κραναή Delos in a state of
great poverty and isolation: it is being beaten from both sides by a κῦμα κελαινὸν, which, like its
only other occurrence in Homer (Il. 9.6) seems to evoke a negative, harrowing atmosphere. 22 This
κῦμα κελαινὸν is aroused by especially brutal (λιγυπνοίοις “keening” 28) winds. As will become clear,
Delos at the time of the narrator looks and feels quite differently.
In line 29-46, we do find something that resembles a panoramic standpoint on the part of
the narrator, as he lists the islands and mainlands of the Aegean from the South (Crete), Westward
22
In Il. 9.6, the κῦμα κελαινὸν appears in a simile that expresses the deep fear that the Greeks feel: “ὡς δ’ ἄνεμοι δύο
πόντον ὀρίνετον ἰχθυόεντα / βορέης καὶ Ζέφυρος, τώ τε Θρῄκηθεν ἄητον / ἐλθόντ’ ἐξαπίνης· ἄμυδις δέ τε κῦμα κελαινὸν /
κορθύεται, πολλὸν δὲ παρὲξ ἅλα φῦκος ἔχευεν· / ὣς ἐδαΐζετο θυμὸς ἐνὶ στήθεσσιν Ἀχαιῶν” (“As two winds rise to shake the
sea where the fish swarm, Boreas and Zephyros, north wind and west, that blow from Thraceward, suddenly
descending, and the darkened water is gathered to crests, and far across the salt water scatters the seaweed; so the
heart in the breast of each Achaian was troubled” 9.4-8).
17
towards Athens, up North, towards the East and finally Westwards again, ending at the Cyclades
and Delos. In line 45, however, the narratees find out that they have not been confronted with a
random list of islands in the Aegean, but that the narrator has taken Leto’s wanderings in search of
a birthplace for her son as a leading principle in his list. As Miller points out, the catalogue fulfils a
double function: the places that first refuse to become Apollo’s birthplace will later prominently
become part of his sphere of influence (1986: 33). In line 47-8, the narrator states that “οὐδέ τις ἔτλη
/ Φοῖβον δέξασθαι καὶ πιοτέρη περ ἐοῦσα” (“none, however rich, ventured to accept Phoibos” 47-8).
The qualification of πιοτέρη (“richer”) contrasts the places that do not dare to accept Apollo all the
more poignantly with rocky barren Delos. 23
In lines 49-50, something peculiar happens: in line 49, Leto sets foot on Delos. This is easily
conceivable in terms of interaction with an island. In the next line, however, Leto starts to address
Delos as though she is speaking to a thinking and autonomous entity rather than a simple
geographical given. This is difficult to conceive for the modern mind, especially since
personification usually entails that an abstraction or inanimate entity is given human features
more or less completely. To set foot onto an island and start a conversation with it in a single
sentence seems a bit much for the human mind to conceive. However, as Webster argues, in the
Greek mind, personification was not an either-or affair: mixed forms were not uncommon, and on
closer inspection, the personification of Delos turns out to be more conceivable than it initially
seems, for the only human capacity that Delos is endowed with in the Hymn to Apollo is the ability
to speak. As opposed to Delos in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, as will be seen later on in this thesis,
Delos cannot run or swim and is never described as inhabiting a female body. The space of Delos,
therefore, in this Hymn remains conceived of as a geographical space, albeit one that can voice an
opinion.
Leto’s speech to Delos provides the narratees unambiguously with the way Leto sees the
island: she tells the island that “ἄλλος δ’ οὔ τις σεῖό ποθ’ ἅψεται, οὐδέ σε τίσει, / οὐδ’ εὔβων σέ γ’ ἔσεσθαι
ὀΐομαι οὔτ’ εὔμηλον, / οὐδὲ τρύγην οἴσεις, οὔτ’ ἂρ φυτὰ μυρία φύσεις.” (“No one else is ever going to
engage with you or honor you, for I do not see you ever being rich in cattle or sheep, nor will you
bring forth a harvest or grow abundant fruit trees” 53-5). Here, Leto mentions the complete
barrenness she finds and tells Delos that this situation will never change by itself. The only way for
23
Only in line 67 ff. does it become clear that Apollo is feared because he is said to become a wild (ἀτάσθαλον) god that
may spurn or even destroy places that do not please him.
18
Delos’ to turn this situation around would be, Leto argues, to accept Apollo and his temple: then,
Leto tells the island, “βοσκήσεις θ’ οἵ κέ σ’ ἔχωσιν / χειρὸς ἀπ’ ἀλλοτρίης” (“you will feed your
inhabitants form the hand of others” 59-60). Leto thus confronts Delos with a choice: either remain
a barren, meaningless spot in the Aegean, or become a prominent place of worship and full of
riches from elsewhere.
The narrator then tells that Delos feels glad (“χαῖρε” 61) about this proposal, but in the
subsequent speech, the island voices its fears and hesitation. The island admits that the birth of
Apollo would indeed change her status in the world: “αἰνῶς γὰρ ἐτήτυμόν εἰμι δυσηχὴς / ἀνδράσιν,
ὧδε δέ κεν περιτιμήεσσα γενοίμην” (“for I am indeed terribly ill-famed among men, and in this way I
can become highly esteemed” 64-5). Nevertheless, Delos is also afraid to be spurned by Apollo
since she has a rocky soil: “ἐπεὶ ἦ κραναήπεδός εἰμι” (“as I am indeed rocky of soil” 72). Here again,
the term κραναός recurs, albeit in a slightly different variation: Delos calls herself κραναή with
respect to her πέδον (soil). The meaning of κραναός is nevertheless exactly the same and here Delos
confirms Leto’s take on the island by admitting that her observations as to the island’s barrenness
are correct: this is stressed by Delos’ use of the particle ἦ (“indeed” or “truly”). The narratees now
know that all parties involved (the narrator who focalises the island through Leto, Leto herself and
Delos) agree that the island is in a sorry state before Apollo is born. At the same time, Delos fears
that things may take a turn for the worse if Apollo spurns her and she therefore exacts an oath
from Leto that Apollo will establish his “περικαλλέα νηὸν” (“beautiful temple” 80) on Delos before
proceeding to other places. After Leto has sworn this oath, the narratees are told that “Δῆλος μὲν
μάλα χαῖρε γονῇ ἑκάτοιο ἄνακτος” (“Delos rejoiced over the birth of lord Far-shooter” 90).
Then, the episode concerning the missing Eileithyia starts and the goddesses send Iris to
fetch the absent goddess. Here, the narrators tells that “αἱ δ’ Ἶριν προὔπεμψαν ἐϋκτιμένης ἀπὸ νήσου”
(“the others [the goddesses present at the birth] sent Iris off from the well-cultivated island” 102).
The qualification of Delos as well-cultivated (ἐϋκτιμένης) seems very strange considering the island
has heretofore been qualified as barren and rocky. If one looks closely, however, it becomes clear
that the one focalising Delos here is the narrator, for there are no other candidates. It seems, thus,
that once Leto has settled on the island and has started to give birth to Apollo, the island
undergoes a change: no longer is it barren and rocky, but it is suddenly well-cultivated. In the eyes
19
of the narrator, Delos at the time of the birth is no longer the Delos that Leto found during her
wanderings. Rather, the transformation of the island is already in full swing during the birth.
When Eileityia has been fetched, the birth of Apollo can be completed. The narratees are
told that Leto clasps the palm tree that was introduced in line 18 (“ἀμφὶ δὲ φοίνικι βάλε πήχεε” 117)
and leans on the “λειμῶνι μαλακῷ” (“the soft meadow grass” 118). That the narrator focalises the
island as having a “λειμῶνι μαλακῷ” again seems to contradict the island’s rocky barrenness. This
could be interpreted as part of the transformation that the island is undergoing. Then, the
narratees are told that as Apollo is born, the earth underneath Leto smiles: “μείδησε δὲ γαῖ’
ὑπένερθεν” (118). As Richardson notes, this is a recurring theme that expresses “cosmic joy at a
divine birth or epiphany” (99). In the process of change that Delos is undergoing, the smiling of the
earth may be interpreted as part of this process of change: Delos is beautified by the birth of
Apollo.
When Apollo has completed a miraculous growth spurt, has taken up his attributes and
sets out into the world, the cosmic joy on the part of the island continues:
χρυσῷ δ’ ἅρα Δῆλος ἅπασα
βεβρίθει καθορῶσα Διὸς Λητοῦς τε γενέθλην,
γηθοσύνῃ ὅτι μιν θεὸς εἵλετο οἰκία θέσθαι
νήσων ἠπείρου τε, φίλησε δὲ κηρόθι μᾶλλον.
ἤνθησ’ ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.
All Delos was laden with golden growth as it beheld the offspring of Zeus and Leto, in joy
that the god had chosen her to make his home out of all the islands and mainland, and had
given her his affection from the heart. (136-9)
Even though this passage is not entirely uncontested (two important manuscripts omit it), it
nevertheless seems to fit the transformation that Delos undergoes through the birth of Apollo:
from a barren place that is qualified as κραναή, Delos becomes important and fertile because of the
miraculous, transforming effect of Apollo’s birth.
After a priamel in lines 143-45 in which the spheres of influence of Apollo are mentioned,
the narrator tells that Delos pleases Apollo most:
ἀλλὰ σὺ Δήλῳ Φοῖβε μάλιστ’ ἐπιτέρπεαι ἦτορ,
ἔνθα τοι ἑλκεχίτωνες Ἰάονες ἠγερέθονται
αὐτοῖς σὺν παίδεσσι γυναιξί τε σὴν ἐς ἄγυιαν·
οἱ δέ σε πυγμαχίῃ τε καὶ ὀρχησθυῖ καὶ ἀοιδῇ
μνησάμενοι τέρπουσιν, ὅταν καθέσωσιν ἀγῶνα.
20
φαίη κ’ ἀθανάτους καὶ ἀγήρως ἔμμεναι ἀνήρ,
ὃς τότ’ ἐπαντιάσει’, ὅτ’ Ἰάονες ἀθρόοι εἶεν·
πάντων γάρ κεν ἴδοιτο χάριν, τέρψαιτο δὲ θυμὸν
ἄνδρας τ’ εἰσορόων καλλιζώνους τε γυναῖκας
νῆάς τ’ ὠκείας ἠδ’ αὐτῶν κτήματα πολλά.
πρὸς δὲ τόδε μέγα θαῦμα, ὅου κλέος οὔποτ’ ὀλεῖται,
κοῦραι Δηλιάδες Ἑκατηβελέταο θεράπναι·
But it is in Delos, Phoibos, that your heart most delights, where the Ionians with trailing
robes assemble with their children and wives on your avenue, and when they have seated
the gathering they think of you and entertain you with boxing, dancing, and singing. A man
might think they were the unaging immortals if he came along when the Ionians are all
together: he would take in the beauty of the whole scene, and be delighted at the spectacle
of the men and the fair-girt women, the swift ships and the people’s piles of belongings.
And besides, this great wonder, the fame of which will never perish: the Maidens of Delos,
the servants of the Far-shooter: (146-155)
Whereas one would expect the narrator to inform his narratees how Apollo established his cult on
Delos and to expand on the cult’s beginnings, the narrator jumps to a later moment in time when
Apollo’s cult is already well-established in the Greek world. One finds three focalisations in this
short passage: in second-person narration, the satisfied god first focalises the island and his cult.
From Apollo’s perspective, a sense of delight plays an important part, as “ἐπιτέρπεαι” (“you delight”,
146) and “τέρπουσιν” (“they entertain you”, 150) suggest. Another perspective of the Delian festival is
offered by a (potential) anonymous witness who would take in the scene on a visit to the island.
This potential witness also feels a sense of delight (τέρψαιτο “he would be delighted” 153), but also a
sense of wonderment that is missing from the divine perspective of Apollo: to the human passerby, the Ionians seem to be divinities themselves (“ἀθανάτους καὶ ἀγήρως” 151), the entire scene is
beautiful and enchanting (“χάριν” 153), the island is bustling with people and, as Leto had promised
to rocky Delos, full of riches (“κτήματα πολλά” 155). In line 156, the narrator takes over focalisation
and one finds here the deictic τόδε (in “τόδε μέγα θαῦμα”, “this great wonder” 156). 24 This and the
use of the deictic marker ἐνθάδε in lines 168 and 170 makes clear that the narrator finds himself on
the island during the festival. Here, the world of the narrative and the narrator coincide. In this
passage, it is thus confirmed from three different perspectives (Apollo’s, the anonymous witness’
and the narrator’s) that Delos has transformed into a bustling space where the Ionians gather: after
24
Cf. De Jong (2009), who analyses this passage as a metalepsis.
21
Apollo’s birth, Delos may still be rocky (cf. “ἐπὶ Κύνθου … παιπαλόεντος” “on rugged Cynthus” 141),
but it is no longer κραναή: the island’s potential seems to have been realised.
2.3 The Politics of Power: interpreting the Hymn to Apollo
In the preceding close reading of the Delian section of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, it has been
established that in the Hymn, the island Delos undergoes a profound change when Leto gives birth
to Apollo: from a rocky, barren, ill-famed place, Delos turns into a space that is rich, not only in
terms of visitors and the rich gifts that accompany them, but also in terms of the quality of the
island itself: a most prominent example of this qualitative change occurs when Leto has started to
give birth to Apollo on Delos and the island is qualified as “well-cultivated” (102). After having
uncovered by narratological means that (and how) this transformation of space takes place in the
text, my next step is to contemplate how this transformation may be interpreted.
In order to explain the conception of the Delian space in the Hymn to Apollo, I will start by
briefly discussing three passages of texts from widely different periods of time. In all these texts,
foreign space is regarded by a narrator who views this space in the guise of a type of coloniser. I
will first quote the relevant passages from modern to ancient, and then discuss the common
aspects as to the conception of foreign space that they have in common: 25
(1) When I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South
America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that
time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked
particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say,
“When I grow up I will go there.”. (Heart of Darkness 22)
(2) Their land is spacious and void, and there are few, and do but run over the grass, as do
also the foxes and wild beasts. They are not industrious, neither have art, science, skill or
faculty to use either the land or the commodoties of it. (Robert Cushman “Reasons and
Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of
America” 4).
(3) νῆσος ἔπειτα λάχεια παρὲκ λιμένος τετάνυσται,
γαίης Κυκλώπων οὔτε σχεδὸν οὔτ’ ἀποτηλοῦ,
ὑλήεσσ’· ἐν δ’ αἶγες ἀπειρέσιαι γεγάασιν
ἄγριαι· οὐ μὲν γὰρ πάτος ἀνθρώπων ἀπερύκει,
25
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was published in 1899 and Robert Cushman’s essay in 1621.
22
οὐδέ μιν εἰσοιχνεῦσι κυνηγέται, οἵ τε καθ’ ὕλην
ἄλγεα πάσχουσιν κορυφὰς ὀρέων ἐφέποντες.
οὔτ’ ἄρα ποίμνῃσιν καταΐσχεται οὔτ’ ἀρότοισιν,
ἀλλ’ ἥ γ’ ἄσπαρτος καὶ ἀνήροτος ἤματα πάντα
ἀνδρῶν χηρεύει, βόσκει δέ τε μηκάδας αἶγας.
A rough island stretches outside the harbor, neither near nor far from the Cyclopes' land, a
wooded one, on which there are countless wild goats, for the coming and going of men
does not drive them away, nor do hunters enter it, who in forests suffer sorrows as they
haunt mountain peaks. So, filled with neither flocks nor fields, all its days unplowed
and unsown instead, the island is without men but feeds bleating goats. (Homer Od. 9.11624)
In these three passages from widely different time periods, two trends can be discovered: a first
trend is that the foreign space is cast in terms of emptiness, even when this is not true in a literal
sense, as in Cushman’s essay, where the New World is clearly already populated by native
Americans. These narrators seem to qualify any space as empty or blank that has not been
cultivated in a manner that is accepted as fruitful in the culture of the narrator and narratees. A
second trend is that the narrators signal fruitful aspects of the foreign space they are discussing:
thus, the narrator of Heart of Darkness feels attracted to places that look “particularly inviting”,
while Cushman and Odysseus cast this “invitingness” of the foreign space in specific terms of
natural riches and agricultural possibilities. These two trends, thus, seem to be constant factors in
the encounter of foreign space in literature.
If one brings these two signalled trends to bear on the representation of Delos in the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo, one finds that Delos is to a certain extent indeed cast as an empty island:
only the island’s geographical features such as Mount Cynthus, the palm tree and the river Inopos
are mentioned, while it remains unclear whether the island has any inhabitants at all. At any rate,
it is presented as a blank space in the sense that it is meaningless in the Greek world presented in
the hymn: “ἄλλος δ’ oὔ τις σεῖό ποθ’ ἅψεται, οὐδέ σε τίσει” (“no one else is ever going to engage with
you or honor you” 53), as Leto tells Delos. As to the second trend, the island Delos at first seems a
coloniser’s nightmare rather than an island full of potential: the island is, from a perspective that is
commonly shared in the Greek world, thoroughly infertile, as Leto points out to Delos in line 54-5
(“οὐδ’ εὔβων σέ γ’ ἔσεσθαι ὀΐομαι οὐδ’ εὔμηλον, / οὐδὲ τρύγην οἴσεις, οὔτ’ ἂρ φυτὰ μυρία φύσεις.”, “I do
not see you ever being rich in cattle or sheep, nor will you bring forth a harvest or grow abundant
23
fruit trees”). Delos is thus the exact opposite from the Goat Island that Odysseus describes in Od.
9.116ff. Nevertheless, as I hope to have shown in my narratological close reading of the passage, the
island Delos is not entirely conceived of as being a space that is utterly useless: the epithet κραναός
suggests that, like Ithaca in the Odyssey, the island has, from the perspective of Leto, the wandering
goddess who, as a type of coloniser, is in search of a place to claim in order to give birth to Apollo,
the potential of bringing forth a powerful, unique being: Odysseus is the fruit of rocky, barren
Ithaca in the Odyssey, and similarly Apollo is the fruit of rocky, barren Delos. Exactly because it has
no natural riches at all and consequently not much to lose does the island Delos constitute the
ideal place for Apollo’s birth. Therefore, Delos forms the perfect place for Leto to claim or
“colonise”, as it were. The representation of Delos thus, in its own way, conforms to the trends that
I have identified earlier in texts in which foreign space is confronted.
Having established that the relationship between Leto and the barren island Delos
resembles in certain aspects the relationship between coloniser/explorer and a space that qualifies
for colonisation, I will now explore whether such a reading can shed further light on the hymn. If
one takes Leto to be a type of coloniser, the transformative birth of Apollo could be interpreted as
a form of Greek appropriation of Delos: 26 as Apollo, a Greek god par excellence, is born on the
island, Delos becomes part of the Greek world. From a meaningless space that is desolate and
κραναή, the island becomes quite suddenly “ἐϋκτιμένης” (“well-cultivated” 102) and from there
blends into the bustling pan-Ionian cult centre where the narrator of this hymn is himself
performing. The birthing of Apollo may thus be regarded as a form of “colonisation” by means of
which Delos gains significance and a place within the Greek world. In this respect a term
introduced by Edward Said in Orientalism seems particularly applicable, namely that of
imaginative geography. According to Said, imaginative geography is “the universal practice of
designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is ‘ours’ and an unfamiliar space beyond ‘ours’
which is ‘theirs’” (54). If one reads Delos in the light of imaginative geography, the island is initially
a space that falls outside of the familiar world of Greece, but that after the transformative event of
Apollo’s birth becomes Greek, and therefore part of the world of the narrator and narratees.
26
I use the term “colonisation” (and related terms) rather broadly in this thesis: here, it denotes a relationship of power
in which one nation, polis or other group has control over another subjugated space and its inhabitants. It does not
necessarily denote the establishment of a new satellite polis.
24
Also interesting in the light of the transformation of space and imaginative geography is
the notion of the poetics of space as proposed by Bachelard (even though he focuses on the
architectural aspects of domestic space): he presents the notion that the objective space of a house
– its corners, corridors, attic and rooms – is far less important than what poetically it is endowed
with – the imaginative or figurative qualities which one experiences in the space. The
transformation of Delos can be read as entailing not necessarily an objective change – the island
remains geographically the same, with its features intact – but a subjective change: in the
experience of the Greek narrators and the embedded (narrator-)focalisers, the rocky island reaches
its full potential (and therefore is suddenly experienced as “ἐϋκτιμένης” (“well-cultivated” 102)
without necessarily being “ἐϋκτιμένης” in a literal, objective sense): in their experience, Delos
changes from an anonymous patch of land in the middle of the Aegean to a highly important cult
centre in the larger Greek world. From a space that is experienced as profane, Delos becomes a
sacred space.
Furthermore, one may read in the fears that Delos utters a form of ambiguity on the part of
the colonised party: on the one hand, the island gladly welcomes the fame and wealth that the
birth of the god will bring, but on the other hand the island also fears the effect the subjugation to
an as yet unfamiliar power will have: Delos projects the possibility that she will end up in an even
sorrier state if she allows Apollo to be born on the island: “ἔνθ’ ἐμὲ μὲν μέγα κῦμα κατὰ κρατὸς ἅλις
αἰεὶ / κλύσσει, ὁ δ’ ἄλλην γαῖαν ἀφίξεται ἥ κεν ἅδῃ οἱ / τεύξασθαι νηόν τε καὶ ἄλσεα δενδρήεντα· /
πουλύποδες δ’ ἐν ἐμοὶ θαλάμας φῶκαί τε μέλαιναι / οἰκία ποιήσονται ἀκηδέα χήτεϊ λαῶν.” (“Then I shall
have the mighty waves surging over my head in a mass for evermore, and he will go to another
land, wherever it pleases him to make his temple and his wooded groves, while it will be the
octopuses and the dark seals that make their homes in me, all untroubled in the absence of people”
74-8). It is only after the swearing of an oath that Delos, the space that is to be incorporated into
the Greek world, agrees to the birth of the god.
Now that I have provided a reading of the Delian section of the Hymn to Apollo in which
power relations play a role, I will propose a possible way to solve some of the contextual and
interpretative issues that surround the hymn. As I hope to have shown, Delos is not a neutral
space: it is a politically charged space that is incorporated into the Greek world by Leto and that
becomes the source from which Apollo conquers the rest of the Aegean: Delos, in the Hymn, is thus
25
established as a source from which power over the Greek world emanates. Furthermore, as
Constantakopolou notes, Delos was also historically regarded as an important place to have under
one’s control. Taking her cue from Thucydides’ two mentions of the dedication of the
neighbouring island of Rheneia to Delos by Polycrates, once in relation to the Athenian
intervention in Delos (3.104) and once in his Archaeology (1.13), she remarks that “it is interesting
in both these instances … that Thucydides combines the reference to the dedication of Rheneia to
Delian Apollo with a mention of Polycrates’ sea power and his rule over the islands” (48). Therefore
it seems that, she argues, “Delos in the archaic period is an arena for the display of piety and … of
power for island communities, such as Naxos and Paros, and for tyrants, such as Polycrates and …
Peisistratus” (49).
If we read the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in this light, the following contextual situation
becomes quite plausible: leaving aside the question which section of the hymn came first, West
and Burkert’s suggestion that the hymn was first performed in its entirety on a festival that
Polycrates organised on Delos when he dedicated Rheneia to the island suddenly becomes quite
attractive. If Polycrates of Samos (which had become quite a powerful dominant power in the
Aegean) had dedicated Rheneia as a display of power, as Constantakopolou suggests, no hymn
could fit this display of dominance better than the Hymn to Apollo: in the hymn, Delos becomes a
space that is at the centre of the Greek world and from where Apollo wields his power over the rest
of Greece. In the world outside of the hymn, this structure of power seems to be mirrored, for
Polycrates displays his power extravagantly on the island of Delos, thereby claiming a position of
centrality and dominance in the Aegean world. A political message of the hymn would thus be the
assertion that as Apollo exerted control over the Greek world from Delos, so does Polycrates.
Furthermore, if, as Constantakopolou also asserts, Delos indeed did occupy a central
position in the Greek world in the archaic period, one may argue that if having power over Delos
implied the assertion of dominance over the rest of the Greek world, the hymn, as performed by
Cynaethus of Chios during the festival organised by Polycrates, may have expressed, in the
presence of Greeks from all over the Aegean, that Samos was a force to be reckoned with, since
from the local space of Delos, dominance over the entire Aegean emanated. Delos was therefore
not just a local space: rather, it was a politically charged place from which dominance over the
26
Aegean was asserted by means of cultural and religious expressions such as one finds, for instance,
in the Hymn to Apollo.
27
Chapter 3
Delos in Pindaric Fragments: From Daughter of Coeus to Four-Columned Shrine
3.1
Introduction
After its first fully-fledged representation in the sixth-century Homeric Hymn to Apollo, Delos is
taken up again by Pindar in his fifth-century Paeans (V, VIIb and XII) and in his Hymn to Zeus, all
transmitted in a fragmentary state. When one reads the transmitted fragments from these Paeans
and the Hymn to Zeus, it is not difficult to see that Pindar’s representation of the island Delos
differs substantially from that of the poet of the Homeric Hymn. In this chapter, after briefly
introducing the texts at hand, I will, therefore, take a closer look at Pindar’s representation of Delos
as I did for the Homeric Hymn in the previous chapter.
3.1.1
Difficulties: State of the Text and Genre
All texts under discussion in this chapter have been transmitted in a highly fragmentary state.
Some fragments have been found in the Egyptian desert (the so-called Oxyrhynchus papyri), while
others have been transmitted as quotations in the work of other authors. The state of the texts
complicates the work of any scholar who tries to interpret them. Often, the historical context in
which the poems were composed and performed is difficult to establish with a fair amount of
certainty. More importantly, it is at times impossible to fathom even what the original (whole) text
looked like and how a surviving fragment related to its lost textual surroundings. Therefore, it will
be a difficult undertaking to analyse these snippets with the tools of narratology, for this method is
not quite meant for the analysis of loose passages without a clear textual context. Therefore, my
close-reading will have to focus, more so than in my other chapters, on the verbal (micro-) level of
the text.
Apart from the difficulty of textual transmission, the fact that three out of four texts under
discussion in this chapter belong to the genre of the paean also complicate matters a bit: while
certain generic conventions (and meaningful deviations from these conventions) can be identified
in other types of poetry, e.g. in hymnic poetry, this is far from the case with Paeans. Rather, the
28
genre of the paean has often frustrated scholars, such as Harvey, who in an attempt at defining the
sub-genres of archaic Greek Lyric, concludes that “the result of this discussion is … depressingly
negative” and who notes that attempts by others at defining the paean, a genre that did not have
any fixed characteristics in terms of form and content and that was performed under a wide variety
of circumstances (before and after battle, at symposia, in religious or ceremonial settings etc.), do
not look “very encouraging” (1955: 175).
Since Harvey’s (failed) attempt at a definition of the paean, both Käppel (1992) and
Rutherford (2001) have tried to come to terms with the genre in terms of its social function rather
than in terms of its structural elements. Käppel has suggested that the mood, form and content of a
paean depended on the Sitz im Leben of the community in which the Paean was composed and
performed: thus, according to Käppel, the paean was determined by the psychological state of a
community rather than by traditional fixed elements of the genre (13). Rutherford comes up with a
similar explanation, namely that paeans are “the assertion of the strength of the community”
through “the organization and exhibition of the collective strength of the adult males” (86). The
male chorus that performs the paean thus displays (and hence reinforces) the identity of a certain
community.
Although the work of Käppel and Rutherford helps to understand how paeans may have
functioned in a social context (i.e. as a means to express communal identity), it remains difficult to
grasp the paean as a genre – especially since the social function that Käppel and Rutherford
ascribe to the paean may be said to apply to other subgenres of Greek lyric as well. Rutherford and
Käppel’s criteria seem to be so broad as to be applicable to all types of choral lyric rather than just
the paean. Despite this complication, I propose that the Pindaric paeans that concern Delos were
songs that delegations from around the Greek world came to perform at Delos in a religious
setting. The songs of such a delegation would have performed a twofold function: on the one hand,
the delegation praised the deity and the religious site, yet on the other hand, it established
(implicitly by means of a grand, impressive performance or explicitly in the text) the identity and
power of its home community.
29
3.1.2
Summary of Paeans V, VIIb, XII and the Hymn to Zeus
Now that the textual and generic difficulties that surround these texts have been considered
briefly, it is useful to provide a brief summary of the texts under discussion for the purpose of
future reference. I have decided to discuss the texts in the temporal order of the part of the
material of Delos’ history they deal with. Thus, Pa. VIIb (which deals with the transformation of
Delos from nymph to island) will precede Pa. XII (which deals with the birth of Apollo on the
island) in my discussion and so on. 27
-
Paean VIIb: this paean has been transmitted on a number of damaged papyri, two
separate fragments of which remain legible:
o ll.1-22: the paean’s narrator calls on the muses and stresses that his treatment of
the subject matter will differ from Homer’s.
o ll. 41-52: the narrator tells of the daughter of Coeus, who fled from Zeus and was
transformed into a floating island.
-
Paean XII: also transmitted on an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, this Paean consists of one
fragment that has been transmitted in a more or less legible state:
o ll. 1-8: the narrators tells of a delegation (?) from Naxos that comes to the slope
of mount Cynthus.
o ll. 9-20: On this mount Cynthus, the narrator tells us, Zeus sat as he watched
Leto giving birth to her twins (Artemis and Apollo) on Delos.
-
Hymn to Zeus: A number of fragments of this hymn have survived, two of which (33c
and 33d) deal with Delos. These fragments 33c and 33d have survived in works of
Theophrastus and Strabo respectively:
o 33c: the narrator addresses Delos in hymnic fashion (perhaps this constitutes a
hymn (to Delos) within a hymn to Zeus). The narrator stresses that the island is
now completely immobile.
o 33d: the narrator tells how the floating island Delos was attached to the ocean
floor by four columns as soon as Leto set foot on the island.
27
In this chapter, the text and the translation of the Paeans stem from Rutherford’s most recent edition and translation
in Pindar’s Paeans: A Reading of the Fragments with a survey of the Genre (2001). I have not adopted Rutherford’s new
numbering of the Paeans (e.g. G1 instead of Paean XII).
30
-
Paean V: one fragment of a larger paean survives. The larger paean seems to deal with
the regions over which a certain community ruled. Since the poetry of Pindar can be
dated to the fifth century, the most likely candidate for this powerful community is
Athens.
o ll. 37-48: In these two stanzas, it is told that a people took hold of Delos and the
poet/narrator asks to be welcomed on the island by Artemis and Apollo.
3.1
The Representation of Delos in Pindar’s Paeans and the Hymn to Zeus: a Close Reading
Now a closer look will be cast on these Pindaric texts that deal with Delos.
3.2.1 Paean VIIb
The title given to Paean VIIb on the various papyri (most probably by Hellenistic editors) is “Π[ ] ..
[..] ΑΙΣ ΕΙΣ ΔΗΛΟΝ” (“for the … to Delos”). That Hellenistic editors ascribed such a title to this
Paean suggests that Pindar, as I have proposed earlier in 3.1.1, was commissioned by a certain
community ( here the … ΑΙΣ) to write a poem for performance by that community on the island
(ΔΗΛΟΝ), thereby offering the poem to the shrine as a type of gift (agalma). Although the
Hellenistic editors of Pindar’s poetry may not have known or understood the exact finesses of the
oral performance context, the titles they have given to poems such as Pa. VIIb should not be
disregarded, especially since they possessed, unlike scholars today, a text that was significantly
more complete. We can thus assume that Pa. VIIb was written for performance at Delos, but by
whom it was commissioned or meant to be performed remains unclear.
The first fragment under discussion goes as follows (ll. 10-22):
κελαδήσαθ’ ὕμνους,
Ὁμήρου [δὲ μὴ τρι]π̣ τὸν κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν
ἰόντες, ἀ̣[ ἀλ]λοτρίαις ἀν’ ἵπποις,
ἐπεὶ αυ[ π]τανὸν ἅρμα
Μοισα[
]μεν.
ἐ]πεύχο[μαι] δ’ Οὐρανοῦ τ’ εὐπέπλῳ θυγατρὶ
Μναμ[ο]σύ[ν]ᾳ κόραισί τ’ εὐμαχανίαν διδόμεν.
τ]υφλα̣[ὶ γὰ]ρ ἀνδρῶν φρένες
31
ὅ]στις ἄνευθ’ Ἑλικωνιάδων
βαθεῖαν ε..[..].ων ἐρευνᾷ σοφίας ὁδόν.
ἐμ̣ ο̣ι ̣̀ δ̣ὲ τοῦτο̣[ν δ]ι̣έδωκ.ν] ἀ̄θάνατ̣[ο]ν πόνον
Sing hymns, not going along the worn wagon-track of Homer, [but/but not] on the mares
of another, for [we are driving] the winged chariot [of] the Muses. I pray to the well-robed
daughter of Uranus, Mnemosyne, and her girls to provide capability. For blind are the
minds of men, whoever … seeks out the deep path of wisdom without the Heliconian
Muses. But they have given me this immortal task… (10-22)
First, one should establish the narrative situation: who is the narrator in this passage? 1 The
narrator refers to himself thrice in this passage, first in what seems like a first-person plural (“…μεν”
14). Then, the narrator switches to what has been reconstructed as a first-person singular in line 15
(“ἐ]πεύχο[μαι]”) and refers to himself with the singular “ἐμ̣ οί” in line 21. Taking into consideration
that paeans were most probably performed by a chorus, the reference to a narrating first-person
seems quite peculiar, especially when this narrator also refers to himself with a first-person plural.
A possible explanation for this is offered by Pfeijffer in his discussion of the narrative situation in
Pindar’s victory odes: 2 Pfeijffer states that “although the victory odes are performed by a chorus,
there can be no doubt whatsoever that the first-person singular or plural occurring in the odes
represents the poet, and more often than not the poet specifically in his professional role. He is the
primary narrator, being firmly present in the words sung by the chorus” (SAGN 1 216). This seems to
be, at first sight, a peculiar statement, for a welcome side effect of narratology is that one does not
have to take the real-world author of a text into consideration. But if one looks more closely,
Pindar’s poetry overflows with references on the part of the narrator to the craft of poetry and to
the poetical considerations that underlie the poetry at hand (e.g. the reference to Homer’s
“ἀμαξιτόν” in line 12 of this fragment). These metapoetical comments seem out of place when the
chorus or a member of the chorus (the performers) were to be the narrator(s). Although Pfeijffer’s
suggestion that the narrator is a poet who reflects on his craft applies only to the victory odes, it
1
Although this is not a narrative section, I have chosen to make use of narratological terms for the sake of consistency.
Where the terms “narrator” and “narratee” are used, one may as well read “speaker” and “addressee” respectively.
2
Of course, Pfeijffer is not the first to address this issue. For an elaborate status quaestionis, see A.D. Morrison (2007). I
have chosen to refer to Pfeijffer here because he, as a contributor to SAGN 1, has had to analyse the problem in
narratological terms.
32
also seems valid in the case of the paeans, especially with the caveat that this does not mean that
the narrator is the real-world Pindar (with the burden of a biography), but rather a poetic persona.
In these lines, Delos is not mentioned. Rather, one finds the narrator calling on the muses
and mentioning the τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν (“worn wagon-track”) of Homer. We know from fragments of
words that precede this fragment that the narrator has announced the topic of his song (Apollo
and his mother) already, so the audience of the performance must have been able to understand
this comment as an announcement that the poet of this paean will go about telling the story in an
unexpected way. Nevertheless, such a statement beckons close attention. Considering that
Thucydides explicitly stated that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo was composed by Homer himself
(3.102), it seems likely that Pindar did not doubt the hymn’s authorship either. The τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν
therefore must refer to the Homeric Hymn. 3 Although I would contend that, in and of itself, the
term τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν is not necessarily derogatory, it does suggest that the narrator believes that
there is room for an alternative, perhaps truer, version of the story. 4 As Bowra notes with regard to
the seventh Nemean, Pindar did consider Homer’s narrative to be biased and sometimes untrue,
for instance with regard to Homer’s representation of Odysseus and Ajax:
Pindar ascribes the undue emphasis on this [Ajax’ shameful death] to the poets, notably
Homer, who gets things wrong when he praises Odysseus too much and Ajax too little.
Against the tales of poets Pindar sets the cult of Ajax and the conclusions which he could
draw from it, and in this he finds the poets plainly wrong. Yet he admits that Homer has a
real σοφία, which is winged like his own, and that something in it calls for reverence, σεμνόν
τι. It is not a question of Homer being a bad poet; it is simply that he does not always tell
the truth. (1964: 32-3)
At any rate, one may assume on the basis of Bowra’s observation that Pindar had a critical stance
towards Homer’s content, more so than to his form. 5 This is also suggested by Rutherford with
regard to Pa. VIIb (1988: 67). At any rate, such a reference to the Homeric Hymn invites one to keep
metaliterary concerns on Pindar’s part in mind when reading the rest of the Paean, and other
3
Cf. Rutherford (1988: 66).
4
Nünlist, however, states that τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν does not constitute “Polemik gegen Homers ‘ausgetretenen’ Fahrweg”
(1998: 247). I agree in the sense that I do not believe that the Pindaric narrator detracts his predecessor, but, I do
contend that the narrator by this statement points out that there is an alternative path to be taken, by which he may
emulate Homer (at least in the respect of truthfulness).
5
For a further discussion of Pindar on Homer, mainly his supposed misrepresentation of Ajax, cf. Fitch (1924: 57 ff.).
For the interest in truth in later archaic poetry, especially in Pindar, cf. Nagy (1990: 59-60).
33
poetry in which Pindar differs from the account of the Homeric Hymn. 6 Therefore, I shall now take
a look at the remainder of Pa. VIIb, which goes as follows:
.]υνας· τί πείσομα[ι
ἦ Διὸς οὐκ ἐθέλο[ισα
Κοίου θυγάτηρ π[
ἄπιστά μ[ο]ι δέδο[ι]κ̣ α̣ κ̣ α̣μ̣[
δέ μιν ἐν πέλ̣ [α]γ̣[ο]ς ̣
ῥιφθεῖσαν εὐαγέα πέτραν φανῆναι
καλέο̣ ντί μιν Ὀρτυγίαν ναῦται πάλαι.
πεφόρητο δ’ ἐπ’ Αἰγαῖον θαμά·
τᾶς ὁ κράτιστος
ἐράσσατο μιχθείς
τοξοφόρον τελέσαι γόνον
What will I believe? That the daughter of Coeus was unwilling to [enter the bed of Zeus,
and fled to the sea.] I fear that I am saying things unbelievable and [unclear?]. But they say
that she was flung into the sea and appeared as a conspicuous rock. Sailors have long called
it Ortygia. It often travelled over the Aegean, until the strongest one desired to unite with
her and produce arrow-bearing offspring. (42-52)
In this second fragment from Pa. VIIb, one already finds a number of pointed deviations from the
Homeric Hymn: first, one finds not the island Delos, but a woman who is not named explicitly in
the remains of the Paean, but who is identified as the daughter of Coeus – which means that Delos
is Leto’s sister. 7 Fleeing from the advances of Zeus, this woman is transformed into a conspicuous
rock (εὐαγέα πέτραν: probably a pun on the name Delos, which also means “clear”) that roams the
sea. The island thus does not start out as the rocky wasteland that it was in the Homeric Hymn.
Rather, we are dealing here with a woman who has been transformed into a floating island, and
who again undergoes a transformation (to a fixed island) when Leto gives birth.
A second difference from Homer is the very poignant “καλέο̣ ντί μιν Ὀρτυγίαν ναῦται πάλαι”
(“Sailors have long called it Ortygia” 48). Whereas the Ortygia of the Homeric Hymn, where Artemis
was born, was located “elsewhere”, outside the world of the Aegean (cf. pages 13-14 above), and
certainly did not denote Delos, Pindar conflates the two places in Pa.VIIb. One finds here what
seems like a bold statement on Pindar’s part that claims that he is most certainly not following
6
In line 12, there are some major problems with the text: in the lacuna, one may either read that the narrator tells that
he is driving the horses of others (perhaps meaning other muses than Homer’s?), or that the narrator states that he is
not driving on the horses of others (perhaps meaning that he is able to represent the truths of the Muses better? Or
that, apart from deviating from Homer, he is also deviating from all other accounts of Delos – thereby claiming a type
of poetic independence?). For a discussion of textual problems and possible solutions in this line, cf. Rutherford (2001:
247-9).
7
This could be read as an intertextual reference to Hesiod’s Theogony 404-9, where it is stated that Phoebe and Coeus
had two children, Leto and Asteria.
34
Homer’s wagon-track (“ἀμαξιτόν” 11), but rather is devising his own, in which even the essentials
may differ from the well-known Homeric account: Pindar’s Delos is not the Delos of the Homeric
Hymn, for both its name (Ortygia) and its features (a transformed daughter of Coeus who floats
around as a rock) are completely different. Although the narrator does openly seem to doubt the
credibility of this story by stating “ἄπιστά μ[ο]ι δέδο[ι]κ̣ α̣ κ̣ α̣μ̣” (“I fear that I am saying things
unbelievable and [unclear?]” 45), such a remark may serve to reinforce the version of the story that
he is narrating. Likewise, e.g. in O. 9.35ff., the Pindaric narrator distances himself from the myth of
Heracles fighting with the gods, claiming that this story is improbable and even impious. Although
the narrator here creates a distance between himself and what he narrates, he does not say that
what he tells is false. The Pindaric narrator is thus known to distance himself from his narrative
(here also effected by using καλέο̣ ντί in line 48) while asserting implicitly that what he tells is true
nonetheless.
At any rate, Pindar’s representation of Delos differs greatly from the conception of Delos in
the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: in these few fragmentary lines, Delos is first conceived of as a woman
(Coeus’ daughter) (stage 1), then as a rock floating in the sea (“εὐαγέα πέτραν” 47) (stage 2), and
finally as an island that became fixed when the “τοξοφόρον γόνον” (52) of Zeus and Leto was born
(stage 3). 8
3.2.2 Paean XII
The title given to Paean XII on the papyrus is “ΝΑΞΙΟΙΣ ΕΙΣ ΔΗΛΟΝ” (“For the Naxians to Delos”),
probably due to the appearance of Ναξόθεν in line 6 of the paean. One may thus assume that this
paean was performed by a delegation from Naxos on Delos (as an agalma). Since Paean XII is a
relatively short fragment, I have decided to open this section by providing the text under
discussion in full:
...].οισιν ἐννέ[α Μοί]σ̣ αις
μ]άλα δ’ Αρτέμιδ[ος Λα]τωϊον, Ἀσ[τερία,
λέ]χος ἀμφέπο[ισ’ ἄν]θεα τοια[σδ’] ὑ̣μνήσιος δρέπ̣ ῃ· θαμὰ δ’ ἔρ̣[χεται
Να]ξόθεν λιπαρο̣τρ̣ ό̣ φων θυσί[ᾳ
μή]λων Χαρίτεσσι μίγδαν
Κύ]ν̣θιον παρὰ κρημνόν, ἔνθα [
κελαινεφέ’ ἀργιβρένταν λέγο[ντι
Ζῆνα καθεζόμενον
8
For τᾶς meaning “until” in line 50, cf. Schmidt (1975: 39ff.).
35
κορυφαῖσιν ὕπερθε φυλάξα̣ι π̣ [ρ]ονοί[ᾳ,
ἁνίκ’ ἀγανόφρων
Κοίου θυγάτηρ λύετο τερπνᾶς
ὠδῖνος· ἔλαμψαν δ’ ἀελίου δέμας ὅπω̣ [ς
ἀγλαὸν ἐς φάος ἰόντες δίδυμοι
παῖδες, πολὺν̣ ῥο̣ ̣θ́ ̣[ο]ν̣ ἵε̣ σαν ἀπὸ στομ[άτων
Ἐ]λείθυιά τε καὶ Λ̣ ά̣[χ]ε̣σις· τε̣λε.αι δ’ ολ[
κα]τελάμβανον.[...]
… with the nine Muses … [carefully] guarding the bed where Leto gave birth to Artemis,
Asteria (?), you pluck the flowers of such poetry. And there often comes from Naxos…for
the sacrifice of sleekly reared sheep in the company of the Graces to the Cynthian cliff,
where they say that black-clouded, bright-thundering Zeus sat above the heights and
guarded with providence, when the mild-minded daughter of Coeus was released from her
sweet birth-pang. When the twins shone like the sun, moving towards the bright light,
Eleithuia and Lachesis emitted a great noise from their mouths. (2-18)
In this fragment one may discern two “phases”: in lines 2-8, the narrator tells of the present state of
the island. This is signalled by the use of present tenses (“δρέπῃ” and “ἔρ̣[χεται” in line 5). In line 8- 9
the mention of Mount Cynthus prompts a shift back into the past (“ἔνθα … λέγοντι”). After this
shift, the past tense is used to signal that the narrator is now narrating the birth story that took
place long before the island reached its present state (“λύετο” 13, “ἔλαμψαν” 14, “ἵεσαν” 16). Phase 1, ll.
2-8 thus deals with the present state of the island, while phase 2, ll. 10-18 deals with the birth that
took place in the mythical past.
In the first phase of the fragment, one finds that Asteria/Delos is addressed with the phrase
“ἄνθεα τοιασ- / δ’ ὑμνήσιος δρέπῃ” (“you pluck the flowers of such poetry” 4-5). If the text as
presented here by Rutherford is correct, it seems that the narrator is again providing a
metapoetical comment, referring perhaps not only to his own poem, but also to the status of the
island as a space that has gained an important place in literature as a whole. At any rate, the island
is presented here as a place that has been endowed with meaning by literary texts, more
specifically poetry. Thus, one is prompted to note the differences between Pa. XII and the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo.
Here again, one finds a number of remarkable differences between Pindar and the Homeric
Hymn. First, Pindar’s account deals not only with the birth of Apollo, but with the birth of both
Artemis and Apollo (“δίδυμοι / παῖδες” 15-6). Secondly, whereas Zeus is almost completely absent in
36
the hymn, here, he overlooks the proceedings with his “πρόνοια” (“providence” or “foresight” 11)
from mount Cynthus. It thus seems that Zeus plays an important role as a type of orchestrating
deity in Pindar’s version. A third difference is that there seems to be no trouble in getting
Eileithyia, who is hidden by Hera in the account presented in the Homeric Hymn, to be present at
the birth. Through the presence of Eileithyia, the narrator of Pa. XII seems to suggest that Hera
may not have felt (or at the very least expressed) her anger as much as her counterpart in the
Homeric Hymn. Finally, it is remarkable that whereas pregnant Leto is in grave pain (during nine
days and nights) in the Homeric Hymn, her birth-pangs are here referred to as “τερπνᾶς” (“sweet” or
“pleasant” 13). I would suggest that this is, in narratological terms, a prolepsis on the part of the
narrator that refers to the happy outcome of the birth. As Rutherford points out, this also has the
effect of downplaying Leto’s suffering. This, in combination with the seeming absence of Hera’s
wrath, leads Rutherford to connect Pa. XII and VIIb and argue that the events in these Paeans are
all orchestrated by Zeus: “Pindar has him supervising the birth in Pa. XII and planning for it by
preparing a place for Leto to give birth in Pa. VIIb” (1988: 73).
Having briefly listed the differences between Pa. XII and the Homeric Hymn, it is time to
turn to the representation of the island space in the paean under discussion. When one looks
closely at the text, it stands out that not many spatial features of the island are given: only mount
Cynthus is mentioned explicitly in line 8, and seems to serve to connect the first phase (the
“present”) of the paean with second phase (the “mythical past”). In a sense, mount Cynthus is given
as a stable factor in the different incarnations (or stages) of the island. That one should keep the
different stages of the island in mind is stressed by the fact that the narrator refers to the island as
Ἀστερία in line 3, thereby calling to mind that Delos was once a woman (the daughter of Coeus
from Pa. VIIb).
The narrator here refers to Delos as Asteria in a phase of the paean in which he is dealing
with the present state of the island. At this point, Delos is not a woman anymore (Asteria, stage 1),
nor a floating island (stage 2). Rather, it is a fixed island in the narrator’s present (stage 3). What
the narrator is doing here is quite remarkable, since he gives the island of stage three a name that is
intricately connected with stage one and endows it with agency. In other words, personification of
the island here briefly takes place. Since this is an instance of personification, a brief excursus into
types of personification may be useful.
37
Personification is, unfortunately, a concept that has not been given a lot of consistent
critical attention. Since the workings of personification deserve a large study in and of themselves,
it goes too far to delve into the matter deeply here. Nevertheless, the four degrees of
personification that Webster has suggested may serve to make the gradual differences in
personification between Pindar and Callimachus (whose Hymn to Delos will be discussed in
chapter 3) explicit. The strongest degree of personification is deification, when an inanimate entity
is given the status of a divine power. The next degree is strong personification, in which human
qualities of the personified abstraction are clearly seen (15). Then comes weak personification, in
which “a single quality suggests that the abstract idea is conceived personally or is given some sort
of independent reality” (15). Finally, at the bottom of the scale comes what Webster terms
“technical terminology”. In this final degree, the personification has become idiomatic in daily
language, and has therefore lost all of its poignancy. An example of “technical terminology” would
be a phrase such as “the foot of the mountain” (15).
The personification of the island Delos/Asteria in line 3 of Pa. XII may be qualified as a
weak personification, since only a single human quality is ascribed to the island (namely the
picking of flowers).
3.2.3 Pindar’s Hymn to Zeus (fr. 33c and fr. 33d)
Fragments 33c and 33d (quoted in Theophrastus and Strabo respectively) are generally considered
to be part of a hymn (to Delos) within a hymn (to Zeus). Rutherford notes, based on Snell’s
suggestion that one of the Muses may be the narrator of this section that “since the Hymn seems to
have contained a catalogue of Zeus' wives, there is a chance that the Muses sang one song for each
wife, in which case fr. 33c and fr. 33d will have come from the one about Zeus' relationship with
Leto” (1988: 74). Although it is possible that Zeus’ bed-partners are hymned separately, there is
nothing in 33c or 33d to suggest that the (covert) narrator is one of the Muses. I start with a
discussion of fr.33c. 36
χαῖρ’, ὦ θεοδμάτα, λιπαροπλοκάμου
παίδεσσι Λατοῦς ἱμεροέστατον ἔρνος,
πόντου θύγατερ, χθονὸς εὐρεί36
The text of the fragments stems from Snell-Maehler (1975). The translation is taken from Rutherford (1988: 74).
38
ας ἀκίνητον τέρας, ἅν τε βροτοί
Δᾶλον κικλῄσκοισιν, μάκαρες δ’ ἐν Ὀλύμπῳ
τηλέφαντον κυανέας χθονὸς ἄστρον.
Hail, O heaven-built one, most lovely branch for the children of shining-haired Leto, O
daughter of the sea, unmoved marvel of the broad earth, called Delos by mortal men, but
by the blessed ones of Olympus known as the far-shown star of the dark-blue earth. (1-6)
At first sight, this typical hymnic address (χαῖρ’ + hymned entity in 1ff. and an attributive section in
4 ff.) does not seem to differ as radically from the Homeric Hymn to Apollo as Pa. VIIb and Pa. XII
did. Nevertheless, if one takes a closer look at the verbal level of the text one notices that Pindar
here again follows his own version rather than Homer’s “τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν” (Pa. VIIb 11).
One may notice that in line 2, the narrator refers to Delos as “ἱμεροέστατον ἔρνος”. Such a
reference should strike those who are familiar with the Homeric Hymn as peculiar: firstly, the island
of the Hymn is never given such a paradisiacal superlative as ἱμεροέστατον. Also, the noun ἔρνος
(“young sprout, shoot” (I.1) or “offspring” (II.1) according to LSJ) should strike one as odd, since in
the Homeric Hymn, Delos is simply an insignificant island without any history to speak of before
Leto sets foot on it. Rather, it seems that the narrator is here yet again following the version of the
story that one also finds in Pa. VIIb and Pa. XII, for if one takes the island to be Leto’s sister Asteria,
who is only a relatively recent addition (ἔρνος) to the Aegean, one can also understand why this
island is qualified as ἱμεροέστατον: the island is so lovely to Leto’s children because it is, unlike the
other islands of the Aegean, family.
The qualification of the island as “ἀκίνητον” in line 4 (“unmoved or motionless” according to
LSJ I.1) likewise only makes sense to those who keep in mind that Pindar’s version is not that of the
Homeric Hymn. This immobility on part of the island only makes sense to those who know that in
Pindar’s version the island goes through three stages, namely that of woman, floating island and
fixed island. The island is thus addressed in this fragment in its third, fixed state. 37
Furthermore, in line 5 and 6 one may note that the narrator contrasts two focalisations of
the island: to humans, the island is simply “Delos” (“Δᾶλον” 5), but to the gods on mount Olympus,
the island is a “τηλέφαντον κυανέας χθονὸς ἄστρον” (“a far-shown star of the dark-blue earth” 6). On
the surface, this seems to mean that Delos is to the Olympians what a bright-shining star in the
37
According to Depew, the island’s qualification as immovable also may have constituted an allusion to the popular
belief that Delos was never afflicted by earthquakes (1998: 165).
39
skies is to humans, namely a marvel. If one looks more closely at the qualification of the island as
an ἄστρον, one may connect this reference to the partly similar-sounding name of the island’s
previous incarnation Asteria. 38 Thus, I would contend, humanity could be said to conceive simply
of an island, whereas the Olympians know its origins and what made the place special before Leto
even set foot on it. If one keeps the Pindaric denial of Homer’s “τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν” in mind (Pa. VIIb
11) as well as the fact that in all his accounts of Delos he has consistently developed his own
version, one may even go a step further and tentatively argue that the narrator is implicitly
suggesting that Homer, who saw simply the island Delos, only had “human” knowledge, whereas
he shares the Olympian perspective and has the ability to see the truth of the island’s multiple
layers. 39 Such a reading is perhaps a bit far-fetched but not entirely improbable, especially
considering the Pindaric narrator’s continuous deviation from the Homeric representation of
Delos and the apparent denial of Homer’s ability to see and tell the truth one finds in other poems,
as I will discuss in section 3.3.1. I will now first turn to fragment 33d. of Pindar’s Hymn to Zeus:
ἦν γὰρ τὸ πάροιθε φορητὰ
κυμάτεσσιν παντοδαπῶν ἀνέμων
ῥιπαῖσιν· ἀλλ’ ἁ Κοιογενὴς ὁπότ’ ὠδίνεσσι θυίοισ’ ἀγχιτόκοις ἐπέβα
νιν, δὴ τότε τέσσαρες ὀρθαί
πρέμνων ἀπώρουσαν χθονίων,
ἂν δ’ ἐπικράνοις σχέθον
πέτραν ἀδαμαντοπέδιλοι
κίονες, ἔνθα τεκοῖσ’ εὐδαίμον’ ἐπόψατον γένναν.
For before, it was tossed on the waves by the blasts of all sorts of winds. But when Leto, the
daughter of Coeus, raging with the agony of imminent labour, set foot on her, then it was
that the four straight pillars with adamantine bases rose from the roots of the earth, and on
their capitals held up the rock, where she gave birth, and beheld her blessed offspring. (110)
In this fragment of the hymn within the hymn, the narrator has clearly reached the narrative
section of his song, in which the island is no longer the addressee since it is now referred to in the
38
As Rutherford suggests (1998: 74).
39
One should keep in mind that the Homeric narrator also got his material from the Muses and therefore was an
omniscient a narrator as well. One should also note that there is a contradiction present in Pindar’s critique of Homer,
especially with regard to the accusation of lying; for how can a narrator lie whose information comes from the Muses
as well? It seems then, that Pindar’s critique of Homer is, in a sense, a type of Spielerei, a manner in which the Pindaric
narrator could assert his own emulative literary identity.
40
third rather than the second person. In this short fragment, there are again a few elements that
make clear that the narrator is following the decidedly Pindaric version of events. Firstly, one may
note that Leto is explicitly referred to as the daughter of Coeus (“Κοιογενὴς” 3), just as she was in Pa.
XII 13. Since in Pa. VIIb 44 Asteria is referred to as the daughter of Coeus, it is safe to assume that
every time this Coeus is mentioned, the family connection between Delos/Asteria and Leto is
stressed. Secondly, the narrator stresses that the island undergoes a transformation as soon as Leto
sets foot on it: before the arrival of Leto, the island is “φορητὰ”, i.e. moveable. Here the island is thus
in its second Pindaric stage, namely that of floating island. It is only through the arrival of Leto and
the divine birth that takes place on the island that it becomes fixed (and thereby enters its third
stage).
The fixing of the island merits a closer look, since it is cast in quite specific terms: four
straight pillars (“τέσσαρες ὀρθαί … κίονες” 5-9) with adamantine bases (“ἀδαμαντοπέδιλοι” 8) rise
from the ground, with the island (the rock, “πέτραν” 8) on top of its capitals (“ἐπικράνοις” 7). One
may notice that what the narrator is constructing here is an architectural metaphor in which, as
Smith suggests “the rock set atop the upright columns becomes the pediment, a triangular space
on which the Greeks often set a mythological scene” (2008:74). By means of this metaphor, the
narrator, however, also demonstrates the most important change the Delic space undergoes when
Leto sets foot on it and the birth takes place: the island becomes a sacred place. The gap between
the mythical stage and the island’s eventual state is thus bridged by the textual construction of a
temple that fixes Delos and transforms it into the (sacred) space with which the fifth-century
audience of Pindar must have been familiar.
3.2.4 Paean V
In Paean V a chorus sings of a community that apparently took possession of (at least) Euboea and
Delos. Because a marginal scholion states that these invaders came “ἀπ’ Ἀθηναίων” (“from Athens”),
this paean has been given the title “ΑΘΗΝΑΙΟΙΣ ΕΙΣ ΔΗΛΟΝ” (“For the Athenians to Delos). The
legible section of the paean consists of a little over two stanzas:
Εὔ-]
βοιαν ἕλον καὶ ἔνασσαν·
41
ἰήϊε Δάλι’ Ἄπολλον·
καὶ σποράδας φερεμήλους
ἔκτισαν νάσους ἐρικυδέα τ’ ἔσχον
Δᾶλον, ἐπεί σφιν Ἀπόλλων
δῶκεν ὁ χρυσοκόμας
Ἀστερίας δέμας οἰκεῖν·
ἰήϊε Δάλι’ Ἄπολλον·
Λατόος ἔνθα με παῖδες
εὐμενεῖ δέξασθε νόῳ θεράποντα
ὑμέτερον κελαδεννᾷ
σὺν μελιγάρυϊ παιᾶνος ἀγακλέος ὀμφᾷ.
They took Euboea and dwelt there.
Ieie Delian Apollo! And they made homes in the scattered islands rich in flocks, and held
far-famed Delos, since Apollo of the golden locks gave them the body of Asteria to settle.
Ieie Delian Apollo! There may you, children of Leto, graciously welcome me as your
servant, to the resounding, honey-voiced strain of a glorious paean. (35-48)
Although this paean does not deal with the myth of Delos’ various incarnations and the birth of
Apollo (or Artemis), it is nevertheless an interesting text in the sense that it connects events from
the realm of history with the realm of myth. If one looks closely at the text, one finds that a type of
colonisation or migratory history is told: in the first stage (35-6), Euboea is taken, in the second
stage (38-9), the community spreads to the islands and in the third stage (39-41), Delos, poignantly
called the “Ἀστερίας δέμας” (“the body of Asteria” 42) is taken by the community. According to both
Rutherford (2001: 297) and Bing (1988: 98), what is sung of here is the account of the Ionian
migration from Athens. If one accepts that this paean was performed by the Athenians on Delos
somewhere over the course of the fifth century, this song, which narrates the Ionian migration of
centuries earlier, takes on quite a powerful political dimension. I will discuss the exact political
implications of the performance of such a song by the Athenians below in my section on
interpretation. What does deserve to be noted at this point is that Apollo, who is said here to give
Delos to the migratory Athenians/Ionians, was, as Dougherty notes (1993: 4), closely associated
with colonisation and similar power politics.
42
The Ἀστερίας δέμας of line 42 may be classified as a case of weak personification, since the
island is not given any fully-fledged human characteristics or agency, yet is given a body and a
female name. What this weak personification effects, however, is that the island becomes
gendered, so to speak: the past female incarnation (stage 1) of the island seeps into its present state
as an island on which a group of settlers can establish a community (stage 3).
In the final stanza of this fragment, the narrator calls on the children of Leto and asks to be
received on Delos (“ἔνθα” “there” 44). Here, one again encounters the Pindaric rub between
performance situation and narratorial situation: as I have established earlier, the narrator in Pindar
generally does not coincide with those who are uttering or performing the text. Rather, the
narrator can be conceived of as a persona of the poet. Therefore, we may assume that the one
asking for acceptance “there” is the narrator and thus the poet of the song rather than the chorus
(the delegation from Athens) that performs the song. At the same time, however, one can suppose
that some sort of tension between the narratorial voice and the voice of the chorus existed in a
performance context like the one we presuppose for this paean (i.e. on Delos, at a festival).
Although it falls outside of the scope of this thesis to explore the tension between chorus and
narrator, one may suppose that the performance context added an extra dimension to the text we
have today.
3.3
Interpreting the Pindaric Fragments in the light of Poetics and Politics
In the previous chapter, I read the representation of Delos in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo in the
light of politics. There, I concluded that Delos was represented as a wasteland – albeit with
potential – in need of cultivation, and that in contextual terms the Hymn itself may have been a
way on the part of Polycrates of Samos to display and assert his power and influence in the Aegean.
In this chapter, I will look at the way Delos is represented in terms of politics by Pindar. At the
same time, the stance of the Pindaric narrator towards the narrative of the Homeric Hymn calls
one’s attention to metapoetical concerns. I will start with a discussion of the metapoetical aspects
at play in Pindar’s representation of Delos.
43
3.3.1
Pindar and Homer
Whereas, as far as we know, no fixed narrative – for a narrative only becomes quite fixed when it is
written down – preceded the Homeric Hymn, the Pindaric narrator could be said to have to
position his representation of Delos in relation to that of the Homeric Hymn. 40 And indeed one
finds the Pindaric narrator – who has been identified as a poet above – openly contesting (what he
considered to be) Homer’s narrative of the island in Pa. VIIb, when he tells his Muses not to go
“τριπτὸν κατ’ ἀμαξιτόν” (“on the worn wagon-track” 11) of Homer.
Pindar’s representation of Delos is worlds away from that of the Homeric Hymn. Without
recapping all the details that I have mentioned in section 3.2, the most important deviation on the
part of Pindar may be summarised as follows: as opposed to the version of the Hymn, Pindar’s
Delos goes through three stages. In the first stage, the island is not yet an island, but Leto’s sister
who flees the advances of Zeus. 41 Then, the first transformation of space takes place: the space of
Asteria’s body transforms into a floating island, which constitutes the island’s second stage or
incarnation. When Leto is in need of a place to give birth to her twins (as opposed to the Homeric
Hymn), she turns to her floating sister (Leto does not seem to be in the difficult situation in which
one finds her in the Homeric Hymn, neither is the island cast as an undesirable place – rather, it
seems to be Leto’s first choice). When the birth takes place, Delos undergoes a second
transformation and is fixed to the ocean floor by four columns. In terms of content, then, Pindar’s
version deviates in almost every possible way from that of the Homeric Hymn.
One may then wonder what the narrator, who takes on poetical interests in other Pindaric
poems as well, means to effect by this radical rewriting of the story of Delos: how does he express
his relationship to Homer and tradition? In order to clarify the Pindaric narrator’s stance towards
tradition elsewhere, it may be useful to briefly look at a passage from Nemean 6, where the Pindaric
narrator states: 42
40
I consider the fact that Thucydides cites the Hymn in 3.104 as evidence that it was disseminated throughout the
Greek world early on.
41
Leto and Asteria are connected by the narrator by means of Coeus, their father, in Pa. VIIb 44, Pa. XII 13 and fr.33d 3.
The family connection between the two is also established by the allusion to Hesiod Theog. 404ff.).
42
The text is that of Snell-Maehler, the translation that of Race in the Loeb edition.
44
καὶ ταῦτα μὲν παλαιότεροι
ὁδὸν ἀμαξιτὸν εὗρον· ἕπομαι δὲ καὶ αὐτὸς ἔχων μελέταν·
τὸ δὲ πὰρ ποδὶ ναὸς ἑλισσόμενον αἰεὶ κυμάτων
λέγεται παντὶ μάλιστα δονεῖν
θυμόν. ἑκόντι δ’ ἐγὼ νώτῳ μεθέπων δίδυμον ἄχθος
ἄγγελος ἔβαν
The older poets found in such deeds as those a highway of song, and I myself follow along,
making it my concern. But the wave that rolls in the path of the ship is said to disturb every
man’s heart the most. On my willing back I accept a double burden, and have come as a
messenger. (53-57b)
In this passage, according to Pavlou, Pindar “likens himself to previous poets but then moves on to
mark a distinction” (2008: 532). As the narrator notes, his predecessors have created a path – here
referred to as the now-familiar “ἀμαξιτὸν” – that is well-trodden. Here, the narrator notes that he
follows this path, but at the same time he stresses that there is a break between the work of his
predecessors and that of himself (“τὸ δὲ πὰρ ποδὶ ναὸς ἑλισσόμενον αἰεὶ κυμάτων / λέγεται παντὶ
μάλιστα δονεῖν / θυμόν” 55-7). The narrator is thus linking himself to tradition and at the same time
distancing himself from it. At any rate, the Pindaric narrator has a complex, almost paradoxical
relationship with the works of his predecessors (cf. Pavlou 535).
There are, as Bowra has pointed out (1964: 32-3), cases in which the Pindaric narrator
explicitly criticizes the work of his predecessors, most notably Homer, e.g. in N.7.20-23: 43
ἐγὼ δὲ πλέον’ ἔλπομαι
λόγον Ὀδυσσέος ἢ πάθαν
διὰ τὸν ἁδυεπῆ γενέσθ’ Ὅμηρον·
ἐπεὶ ψεύδεσί οἱ ποτανᾷ <τε> μαχανᾷ
σεμνὸν ἔπεστί τι· σοφία
δὲ κλέπτει παράγοισα μύθοις.
I believe that Odysseus’ story has become greater than his actual suffering because of
Homer’s sweet verse, for upon his fictions and soaring craft rests great majesty, and his skill
deceives with misleading tales.
43
The text is again that of Snell-Maehler, and the translation again that of Race.
45
This passage clearly demonstrates Bowra’s argument that Pindar’s narrator did not criticise
Homer’s form, i.e. his poetic skills, but that he did distance himself from Homer’s content.
Although it is couched in compliments, Pindar’s narrator essentially accuses Homer of being a liar.
At any rate, one may conclude that when Pindar criticises Homer, it generally has to do with (the
veracity) of the poetry’s content.
In this respect, one may well find an explanation for Pindar’s deviation from the Homeric
Hymn in fr.33c in terms of content. Here, the narrator tells that, depending on who the focaliser is,
there are two ways of conceiving of the island. For mortal mankind, the island is simply “Delos”
(“Δᾶλον” 5), but to the gods on mount Olympus, the island is a “τηλέφαντον κυανέας χθονὸς ἄστρον”
(“a far-shown star of the dark-blue earth” 6), which hints at the island’s human incarnation Asteria.
What the narrator then seems to suggest is that the perspective from Mount Olympus is allencompassing and takes the various incarnations of Asteria/Delos into account, whereas the
limited human perspective simply sees an island. If one then keeps in mind that the Pindaric
narrator has criticised the veracity of Homer’s poetry in N. 7 as well as the narrator’s reference to
Homer’s representation of Delos as a “worn wagon-track” (“τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν” Pa. VIIb 11), the
following picture arises: the narrator presents himself as someone who shares the knowledge and
perspective of the Olympians, for he can see the truth of the island’s various incarnations. Homer,
whom the narrator rebukes by referring to his version as τριπτὸν – which is not in and of itself a
word with negative connotations, but which does suggest a certain amount of triteness –, then
seems to have possessed merely a human perspective on the island. Pindar’s narrator, then,
implicitly asserts that he possesses a deeper insight into the essence of the island than his Homeric
predecessor did.
Admittedly, I am perhaps reading a bit much into this passage. Nevertheless, the following
has been established: first, Pindar frequently reflected on his position with regard to tradition.
Secondly, Pindar criticised Homer’s content and doubted the veracity of his poetry. Thirdly, Pindar,
in Pa.VIIb explicitly distances himself from Homer, and fourthly, his representation of Delos differs
on almost every point from Homer’s. The combination of these considerations calls for an
explanation, and it is in the contrast between the human and the divine perspective that I have
found it. What Pindar, then, implicitly seems to establish on a metapoetical level, is his superiority
to Homer – at least in terms of content.
46
3.3.2
The Politics of Power
As I have pointed out in the previous chapter, Delos constituted a decidedly political space in the
Hymn to Apollo. Here, I would like to argue, something similar is the case, albeit something more
relevant in the light of fifth-century Athenian hegemony. I will start by looking at the text,
however, before I bring the context to bear on it.
In the Pindaric fragments under discussion in this chapter, Delos/Asteria goes through
three stages. In the first stage, the narrator ascribes agency and free will to Coeus’ daughter, for in
Pa. VIIb 43, she flees from Zeus because she does not want to share his bed. She is then changed to
her second state, that of a floating island. This first transformation constitutes a loss of agency: the
passive πεφόρητο (“was borne”) of Pa. VIIb 49 suggests that the floating island has no say over the
direction in which it moves. In fr.33d this lack of agency is repeated in very similar terms when the
narrator states that the island was φορητὰ (“carried” 1) on the waves by blasts of winds. When the
island is transformed into a fixed sacred space, one finds that the four pillars simply rise up from
the ground and fix the island like a temple: Delos has no say or active role in this process. Rather,
the island is cast as a silent entity that is tossed around and fixed by others. Whereas Delos was
given a voice and at least some form of agency in the Homeric Hymn, it is, in Pindar, simply an
entity to which things happen. In its various transformations, it has absolutely no say. If one reads
this in colonial terms, one could argue that the colonised party, Delos, is given no chance to
express how it feels under the changes it undergoes. 44
What deserves to be stressed is that with the addition of the island’s previous incarnation
as Asteria, the daughter of Coeus, Pindar effects that the island becomes clearly gendered and
conceptualised as female. If one takes into consideration that gender and colonisation generally go
hand in hand – the colonised space and its inhabitants being cast as female, weak and without
agency, whereas the coloniser is figured in terms of masculinity and power – a new light is cast on
Pindar’s representation of Delos. Now, one can suddenly make sense of the presence of Zeus in Pa.
XII. In the first encounter between Zeus and Asteria, she refuses and flees him. Because of this
flight, Zeus, a masculine god par excellence, changes her into a floating island and thereby strips
her of all her agency, hereby asserting his power. It is noteworthy that in Pa. VIIb it is stated that
44
I am, admittedly, “reading against the grain” here.
47
Asteria/Delos found herself in this powerless state “τᾶς ὁ κράτιστος / ἐράσσατο μιχθείς / τοξοφόρον
τελέσαι γόνον” (“until the most powerful one desired to lie with her and produce bow-bearing
offspring” 50-2). Again, it is masculine Zeus who decides what happens to the island and when it
happens. It is then not unlikely that the four pillars that rise up from the ocean floor in fr.33d are
also the work of Zeus. In this light, it is telling that Zeus overlooks the proceedings of the birth in
Pa. XII: in Pindar’s version, he has been pulling all the strings all along. Whereas in the Homeric
Hymn to Apollo, Zeus was absent and the birth of Apollo constituted a change from wasteland to
Greek space, it seems that in Pindar’s version, passive, female Delos is tossed around by her
coloniser, Zeus, who exercises his power over her and transforms her according to his will.
If one then brings the connection between gender, colonisation and (more broadly) the
assertion of dominance to bear on Pa. V, it seems that the performance of this paean by an
Athenian delegation somewhere in the fifth-century (most likely after the establishment of the
Delian league in 477) functioned as a means by which Athens implicitly asserted its dominance
over Delos, and thereby the entire Aegean. But one should always start from the text. Therefore, I
briefly recall the following lines:
ἐρικυδέα τ’ ἔσχον
Δᾶλον, ἐπεί σφιν Ἀπόλλων
δῶκεν ὁ χρυσοκόμας
Ἀστερίας δέμας οἰκεῖν·
And [they] held far-famed Delos, since Apollo of the golden locks gave them the body of
Asteria to settle.
As I have established earlier, the island Delos is here cast in a weak personification (Ἀστερίας
δέμας). By means of this reminder of the island’s origin as a woman, the space of Delos is explicitly
gendered. The Athenians thus take possession of an island that is accessible like a passive female
body of which a masculine power only needs to take possession. If one looks more closely, the
narrator does not suggest that the Athenians simply took possession of this female body. Rather,
the narratees are informed that Apollo himself, who happened to be the god who was most closely
associated with colonial efforts as well as the most prominent offspring of the island, gave the
Delos to them. 45 The Athenian control over Delos is thus given an air of divine sanction. By such a
45
With regard to the role of Apollo and his oracle in the colonisation process cf. Dougherty (4).
48
cunning feat on part of the narrator, the performance of this Paean on Delos seems to have served
as a legitimisation of Athenian hegemony over the Aegean.
Although I have focussed on Pa. V and the way in which it may be said to function as a
means by which the Athenians displayed their dominance over the Aegean, the same may of
course go for the paeans performed on Delos by delegations from other places, such as Naxos. It
thus seems that Delos was still, in the fifth century, an important place in the Aegean from which
power and control over the Aegean emanated. The Athenians knew this: they did not establish the
treasury of the Delian League on Delos for nothing.
49
Chapter 4
Delos in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos: From Free-roaming Independence to
Voluntary Submission
4.1 Introduction
This chapter will be concerned with the representation of Delos in Callimachus’ long Hymn to
Delos. This poem is generally considered to have been written somewhere between 275, when
Ptolemy Philadelphus annihilated a body of mutinous Gaulish mercenaries (clearly referenced in
the hymn in lines 185-87) and 262/1, when the Ptolemaic fleet lost an important naval battle near
Cos after which their power in the Aegean declined sharply. 46 The qualification of Ptolemy in line
165 of the poem as a θεός ἄλλος, which points to the establishment of the cult of the Theoi Adelphoi
(the deified royal couple who were also brother and sister) in 272/1 constitutes a further clue in
pinpointing the poem’s date of composition. Furthermore, the fact that Ptolemy’s sister and wife
Arsinoë II is not mentioned in the poem seems to point to a date of composition after her death
(which is datable to 270). Contrary to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Pindar’s fragments, the date
of composition of the Hymn to Delos can thus be established quite specifically. Such relative
precision will make it easier to connect the Hymn to Delos to its immediate political context.
In this chapter, I will first, in section 4.1, introduce the Hymn to Delos and set the scene for
further discussion in the chapter by a brief introduction to Callimachus’ poetics and Ptolemaic
politics. Then, in section 4.2, I will analyse and discuss certain passages from the Hymn to Delos.
Since the poem is of considerable length, it is impossible to discuss it in a line-by-line fashion.
Therefore, I have selected a number of poignant scenes in which Delos is represented by the
narrator for close reading. In section 4.3, I will discuss Callimachus’ manner of representing Delos
in the light of poetical and political concerns, as I have done for other authors in the preceding
chapters. I will start, however, by briefly providing a summary of the Hymn to Delos for reference
purposes. This synopsis is a combination of that provided by Bing (1988: 146) and Mineur (1984: 34):
46
Cf. Ferguson (1980: 121), Mineur (1984: 16) and Bing (1988: 91-2).
50
-
ll. 1-10: proem: announcement of the hymn’s subject and motivation (Delos’ primacy among
the Cyclades and Apollo’s wish to have his birthplace sung).
-
ll. 11-27: short characterisation of Delos (an unattractive island, yet preeminent among
great islands and under Apollo’s protection).
-
ll. 28-54: the so-called γοναὶ Δήλου (the narrator considers his theme for song, mentions
Poseidon’s creation of islands and contrasts Asteria, who is free to roam wherever she
pleases and only undergoes a change (in term of naming and becoming fixed) when Apollo
is born on the island.
-
ll. 55-259: this mention of the birth of Apollo leads the narrator to tell of the γοναὶ
Ἀπόλλωνος.
- ll. 55-85: Hera’s wrath has caused Leto to wander around looking for a place to give
birth to Apollo. This is, however, next to impossible since Ares guards the mainland
and Iris guards the islands. All localities flee from Leto in fear of punishment.
- ll. 86-98: Apollo threatens Thebes from the womb and prophecies that he will punish
Niobe. He announces that his birthplace should be pure.
- ll. 103-52: The river Peneius, after fleeing initially, decides that he wants to receive
Leto no matter the consequences. When Ares threatens to annihilate the river, Leto
decides to continue her travels, since she does not want Peneius to be destroyed.
- ll. 162-95: When Leto nears Cos, Apollo again speaks from her womb and prophecies
that Cos is to be the birthplace for “another god”, Ptolemy Philadelphus. He then tells
his mother to take him to Asteria.
- ll. 197-214: Asteria comes to a halt and accepts Leto and Apollo, thereby defying Hera.
- ll. 215-48: Iris, who guards the islands, reports to Hera and is likened in her slavish
behaviour to one of Artemis’ dogs. Hera is angered, but decides not to punish Asteria
since she refused Zeus’ advances.
- ll. 249-59: Apollo is born.
-
ll. 260-74: By the mention of Apollo’s birth, we return to the γοναὶ Δήλου: the island is
covered in gold and Asteria tells that she will no more be a floating island.
51
-
ll. 275-324: Delos today (taboo on death and war, the various cults and rites: origins of the
offerings of the Hyperboreans, the Geranos – a dance invented by Theseus after having left
Crete – and of the dancing-and-biting ritual of mariners who pass the island).
Having provided a synopsis of the Hymn to Delos, I will now turn to a brief introduction of
Callimachus’ Poetics.
4.1.1
Callimachus’ Poetics
Callimachus never made a secret of the type of poetry he preferred. In the prologue to the Aetia, he
states that Apollo has given him the following instructions: 47
καὶ γὰρ ὅτε πρώτιστον ἐμοῖς ἐπὶ δέλτον ἔθηκα
γούνασιν, Ἀ[πό]λλων εἶπεν ὅ μοι Λύκιος·
’.......]... ἀοιδέ, τὸ μὲν θύος ὅττι πάχιστον
θρέψαι, τὴ]ν Μοῦσαν δ’ ὠγαθὲ λεπταλέην·
πρὸς δέ σε] καὶ τόδ’ ἄνωγα, τὰ μὴ πατέουσιν ἅμαξαι
τὰ στείβειν, ἑτέρων ἴχνια μὴ καθ’ ὁμά
δίφρον ἐλ]ᾶν μηδ’ οἷμον ἀνὰ πλατύν, ἀλλὰ κελεύθους
ἀτρίπτο]υς, εἰ καὶ στειν̣οτέρην ἐλάσεις.’
τῷ πιθόμη]ν·
For when I put a writing-tablet on my knees for the first time Apollo Lycius said to me: “…
poet, feed the sacrificial animal so that it becomes as fat as possible, but, my dear fellow,
keep the Muse slender; besides, I also urge you to go where big wagons never go, to drive
your chariot not in the same tracks as others and not along a wide road, but along
untrodden paths, even if you will drive it along a more narrow one.” I obeyed him. (Aetia fr.
1 20-9)
Essentially, two poetic principles are propagated here: first, excessive length should be avoided in
poetry (the poet is told to keep his Muse slender, “λεπταλέην” 23). The term λεπτός (from which
λεπταλέην derives) constitutes something of a keyword in Callimachus’ poetics: its possible
meanings, according to LSJ, include adjectives such as “fine” (I.2), “thin” (I.3) and “refined” (II.1).
The slender Muse, then, stands for poetry that concerns short episodes of myth rather than longwinded material of epic scope, as well as for a language that is “refined”, which in Callimachus
often comes down to a verbal creativity that consists of witticisms and the contrast between
diction and content. Second, the poet should avoid presenting the same stories in the same ways as
47
The text and translation of the Aetia are Harder’s (2012).
52
his predecessors and some of his contemporaries did: thus, the poet is told to seek out the
untrodden roads (“κελεύθους ἀτρίπτους” 27-8), i.e. to narrate unusual, alternative versions of certain
myths. That Callimachus often voiced these sentiments in his poetry, as well as the reference to his
critics, e.g. the Telchines earlier on in the Aetia prologue (1), suggests that these Callimachean
conceptions of poetry may not have been uncontested in the world outside of the Museum. And
indeed, as Bing points out, “Alexandrian verse as we know it from Theocritus, Callimachus, Aratus
etc., proves rather to have been the exception in the Hellenistic Age, and lengthy, traditional epics
prevailed as the norm” (50). 48 Although only a few fragments from Hellenistic epic survive, one
finds in these fragments poetry that is full of epicisms that do not clearly allude to anything, but
rather serve to lend the narrative the venerable tone of epic poetry. In this context, the poetics of
Callimachus and the other poets from the Museum community stood out, and a certain amount of
polemic on the part of these poets is to be expected. Since references, be it implicit or explicit, to
the poetics that Callimachus propagates can be found in most of his poetry, it is likely that the
Hymn to Delos will form no exception.
4.1.2
Politics: Callimachus and Ptolemy Philadelphus
Callimachus’ works were the products of a poet who worked in the Museum of Alexandria, an
academy dedicated to the Muses that had been conceived of and funded by Ptolemy I. In the light
of the political situation that had arisen after the death of Alexander the Great – the empire had
been divided among his generals, among whom Ptolemy I – , the Museum could be seen as a way
in which the Ptolemies laid claim to the cultural heritage of the Greek world and thereby to
“Greekness”, even though they were located in Egypt and had Macedonian roots. As Said has
pointed out, cultural artefacts often accomplish political ends (1994: 56). The project of the
Museum, the collection of Greek texts in the library and the establishment of a flourishing
academic community in a myriad of disciplines may then be interpreted as a way of laying claim to
Greek culture, past and present. And if Greece was in the right hands in Alexandria culturally
48
Klooster, in Poetry as Window and Mirror (2011), argues, however, that the Museum poets and Epic poets competed
with each other and had to fight for their positions.
53
speaking, so it would be in the right hands if it were to become an actual part of the Ptolemaic
empire.
And indeed, one finds that the Ptolemies vied for dominance over the Greek mainland and
the Aegean during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. From 286 onwards, the Ptolemies
controlled the Nesiotic League, a political alliance of islands in the Aegean of which Delos
constituted the political and religious centre. In theory, the islands remained independent, but in
practice, whoever was in charge of the Nesiotic League was in charge of islands that were part of
it. 49 At the time that the Hymn to Delos was composed by Callimachus, then, Delos not only
constituted a significant area in cultural terms, but in political terms as well. Thus, one would
expect that the representation of Delos in the Hymn has political implications – be it explicit or
implicit – as well.
4.2 The Representation of Delos in the Hymn to Delos: a Close Reading
I will start this close reading with the proem of the Hymn which I will cite in full: 50
Τὴν ἱερήν, ὦ θυμέ, τίνα χρόνον †ηποτ† ἀείσεις
Δῆλον Ἀπόλλωνος κουροτρόφον; ἦ μὲν ἅπασαι
Κυκλάδες, αἳ νήσων ἱερώταται εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖνται,
εὔυμνοι· Δῆλος δ’ ἐθέλει τὰ πρῶτα φέρεσθαι
ἐκ Μουσέων, ὅτι Φοῖβον ἀοιδάων μεδέοντα
λοῦσέ τε καὶ σπείρωσε καὶ ὡς θεὸν ᾔνεσε πρώτη.
ὡς Μοῦσαι τὸν ἀοιδὸν ὃ μὴ Πίμπλειαν ἀείσῃ
ἔχθουσιν, τὼς Φοῖβος ὅτις Δήλοιο λάθηται.
Δήλῳ νῦν οἴμης ἀποδάσσομαι, ὡς ἂν Ἀπόλλων
Κύνθιος αἰνήσῃ με φίλης ἀλέγοντα τιθήνης.
What time or when, O my soul, wilt thou sing of holy Delos, nurse of Apollo? Surely all the
Cyclades, most holy of the isles that lie in the sea, are goodly theme of song. But Delos
would win the foremost guerdon from the Muses, since she it was that bathed Apollo, the
lord of minstrels, and swaddled him, and was the first to accept him for a god. Even as the
Muses abhor him who sings not of Pimpleia so Phoebus abhors him who forgets Delos. To
Delos now will I give her share of song, so that Cynthian Apollo may praise me for taking
thought of his dear nurse. (1-10)
49
Brill’s New Pauly s.v. Nesiotai.
50
The text is that of Pfeiffer, the translation stems from Mair’s Loeb.
54
It is remarkable that the narrator has chosen to open his poem with τὴν ἱερήν and delay the
mention of Δῆλον as the hymned object of his song to the second line. At any rate, the effect seems
to be that the introduction of Delos gains more saliency due to this delay. The island’s name, Δῆλος,
also recurs four times in the proem alone (in lines 2, 4, 8 and 9). This is especially remarkable since
the island is only referred to as Delos nine times throughout the entire hymn. 51 By referring to the
island by the name of Delos four times in such a short span of text the narrator seems to urge his
narratees to call the island to mind qua island. That is, the narratees supposedly imagine the island
as a familiar geological given. Although Delos is qualified as the κουροτρόφον of Delos in line 2, this
does not necessarily disturb the narratees’ conception of the island: in Webster’s terms, this is only
a weak personification, and a previously attested one at that (e.g. Ithaca in Od. 9.27). Likewise in
line 4, the narratees need not necessarily be disturbed by the use of ἐθέλει. This is again a type of
weak personification that need not demand a change in the way the narratees are to conceive of
the island: Mair’s translation of the word as a modal verb (“would”) is quite telling in this respect,
and the use of the verb metaphorically of places is also attested, e.g. in line 45 the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter (of geological phenomena).
When the narrator tells that Delos bathed (“λοῦσέ” 6) and swaddled (“σπείρωσε” 6) the
infant Apollo – exactly the two actions that the goddesses present at the birth performed on the
god in the Homeric Hymn 120ff. – the island becomes very difficult to picture. Here, one cannot
dismiss this “clash” metaphorically anymore: a metaphor is generally defined as a figure of speech
in which a word or phrase that literally denotes one kind of object or idea is used in place of
another in order to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. In this case, the analogy between
an inanimate island and the highly concrete acts of an animate subject (e.g. a nurse or the
goddesses of the Homeric Hymn) is far from evident at all. Here, we are dealing here with
personification, a trope closely related to metaphor: whether the narratees can make sense of it or
not, the fact remains that very concrete actions that can only be performed by humans are
ascribed to inanimate Delos. Since this happens twice or even thrice (if one counts the less
concrete “ᾔνεσε” in line 6 as well) in one line, one can speak of, in Webster’s terms, strong
personification.
51
The island’s alternative name, Asteria, occurs eight times in the hymn, but not quite so densely as Delos does in this
short span of text.
55
At the same time, one could argue that one should posit here an eponymous nymph who
does the bathing and swaddling and performs the actions that can only be performed by an
animate entity. Such a solution, however, does not turn out to be satisfactory. This will become
clear when one turns to a later passage in the Hymn, in which the narrator tells of Delos’ mobility
prior to the birth of Apollo:
σὺ δὲ στεινοῖο παρ’ ὀξύν
ἔδραμες Εὐρίποιο πόρον καναχηδὰ ῥέοντος,
Χαλκιδικῆς δ’ αὐτῆμαρ ἀνηναμένη ἁλὸς ὕδωρ
μέσφ’ ἐς Ἀθηναίων προσενήξαο Σούνιον ἄκρον...
But thou hadst run to the swift straits of the narrow Epirus with its sounding stream. And
the same day, turning thy back on the waters of the sea of Chalcis, thou didst swim to the
Sunian headland of the Athenians... (44-7)
Here, it is very difficult to conceive of two different entities, the inanimate geographical given of
the island Delos on the one hand and a nymph that belongs to it and performs the actions for
which an animate entity is required on the other: the actions of running (“ἔδραμες” 45) and
swimming (“προσενήξαο” 47) can strictly only be performed by a living entity. If one posits a local
nymph for every action that requires an animate agent, one would conceive of the nymph running
and swimming through the sea. This, however, is impossible to connect with the movement of the
island. Rather then, it seems that the island itself is doing the running and swimming, even though
this is not easy to conceive of.
Could it then be that the island and the nymph are two aspects of one and the same entity?
In other words: could the narrator and his narratees imagine an island that is a nymph and a
geological formation at the same time? This is indeed what Clarke argues with regard to archaic
poetry: “in the early Greek conception of landscape there was a narrow but very deep vein of
imagery which made it possible for mountains to be imagined as divinities in anthropomorphic
form” (1997: 67). He illustrates this statement by means of Hittite artefacts that feature mountain
gods depicted as men with rock-like clothing and large cones, resembling mountain tops, on their
heads (75). Although this is an interesting line of thought with regards to archaic poetry, it seems
unlikely that Callimachus and his contemporaries could still conceive of the connection between
inanimate geological objects and their anthropomorphic manifestations without flinching. As
Klooster points out, literary critics were already literal-minded early on: a notable example is the
56
fourth-century Zoilus of Amphipolis, nicknamed “Homeromastix” (Scourge of Homer), who
pointed out implausibilities and other (perceived) mistakes in the poetry of Homer (forthcoming:
14).
It rather seems then, as Klooster argues, that Callimachus is purposefully making it difficult
for his readers to imagine the island as well as the other geological entities that are personified in
the poem. This becomes especially clear in lines 82-5, when the narrator interrupts his narrative of
the fleeing localities, and exclaims:
ἐμαὶ θεαὶ εἴπατε Μοῦσαι,
ἦ ῥ’ ἐτεὸν ἐγένοντο τότε δρύες ἡνίκα Νύμφαι;
Νύμφαι μὲν χαίρουσιν, ὅτε δρύας ὄμβρος ἀέξει,
Νύμφαι δ’ αὖ κλαίουσιν, ὅτε δρυσὶ μηκέτι φύλλα.
Goddesses mine, ye Muses, say did the oaks come into being at the same time as the
Nymphs? The nymphs rejoice when the rain makes the oaks to grow; and again the
Nymphs weep when there are no longer leaves upon the oaks. (82-5)
Here, the narrator hints at the Hamadryads, nymphs who were supposedly closely connected to
their trees (e.g. in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). What the narrator asks here is the question that
his narratees may have posed from the beginning of the poem: what is the relationship between a
natural phenomenon and an anthropomorphic entity connected with it? The answer, whether it is
provided by the Muses or by the narrator himself (this is not clear in the text), is not very
enlightening: it points to a sympathetic bond between the two, but does not resolve the question.
And perhaps this is not a question that the narrator is aiming to resolve. Rather, Klooster points
out, “this may be interpreted as Callimachus’ way of obliquely commenting upon what he
perceived as a vexed point when it came to the exegesis of certain passages from archaic poetry”
(13).
Although the island is extremely difficult if not utterly impossible to visualise, it is
nevertheless cast in certain terms that may shed some light on the qualities that the narrator
ascribes to it:
κείνη δ’ ἠνεμόεσσα καὶ ἄτροπος †οἷά θ’† ἁλιπλήξ
αἰθυίῃς καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπίδρομος ἠέπερ ἵπποις
πόντῳ ἐνεστήρικται· ὁ δ’ ἀμφί ἑ πουλὺς ἑλίσσων
Ἰκαρίου πολλὴν ἀπομάσσεται ὕδατος ἄχνην
57
Wind-swept and stern is she set in the sea, and, wave-beaten as she is, is fitter haunt for
gulls than course for horses. The sea, rolling greatly round her, casts off on her much
spindrift of the Icarian water. (11-14)
At face value, this passage recalls what one found in lines 27-8 of the Hymn to Apollo, that is, an
island that is in a miserable state before Leto sets foot on it: “ἑκάτερθε δὲ κῦμα κελαινόν / εξῄει
χέρσονδε λιγυπνοίοις ἀνέμοισν” (“on both sides the dark waves came up on the shores under the
keening winds”). Callimachus’ island is also surrounded by a tumultuous sea (“ἁλιπλήξ” “wavebeaten”) and wind-swept (“ἠνεμόεσσα”). If one looks closely, however, the language is not as
strongly negative as in the Homeric Hymn: the adjective “ἠνεμόεσσα” does not necessarily denote
the same as the “λιγυπνοίοις ἀνέμοισν” of the Homeric Hymn. 52 Likewise, the sea, although it is
“πουλὺς ἑλίσσων” (“rolling greatly” 13), is nowhere near as threatening as the κῦμα κελαινόν that
surrounds Delos in line 27 of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Although the narrator “activates” the
Homeric Hymn as an important intertext by means of this allusive description of the island, he also
departs from it by weakening the Homeric terminology and stressing that the island is fixed in its
place (“ἄτροπος” 11 and “ἐνεστήρικται” 12). Here, a second version of the story, the one told in the
Pindaric fragments, in which a floating island is fixed into place when Apollo is born, is also
activated. In this short passage, Callimachus’ narrator then draws the narratees’ attention to the
texts of his two eminent colleagues and predecessors. It then seems that, by alluding to these
predecessors and slightly deviating from them at the same time, the narrator implicitly invites one
to read metapoetical statements into his Hymn.
At the same time, of course, what one finds here is a description of the island, not before
Leto sets foot on it, but afterwards, in the narrator’s “here and now”. On the one hand, the use of
the perfect and present tense in this passage points in this direction, and on the other, as will
become clear over the course of the Hymn (and may be clear to those who recall the Pindaric
fragments already), it is only after the birth of Apollo that Delos becomes a fixed island. Purely at
face value, then, the Callimachean narrator is repeating the familiar paradox that a small,
seemingly insignificant island can be of such importance: in lines 16-22, it is told that Delos leads
all the other, larger islands such as Corsica, Euboea, Sardinia and Cyprus (“ἀεὶ δ’ ἔξαρχος ὁδεύει”
“she ever leads the way” 18).
52
Mineur points out ad loc. that “windy” is a “common epithet of high or exposed places and mountains in Homer and
other poetry” (60).
58
Yet Callimachus’s poetry is rarely straightforward. If one focuses on line 12, it says that the
island is a “fitter haunt for gulls than course for horses (“αἰθυίῃς καὶ μᾶλλον ἐπίδρομος ἠέπερ ἵπποις”).
Taken literally, this seems an illustration of Delos’ supposed wretched state. Yet at the same time,
as Smith points out (2008: 101), there was in fact a real race course on Delos, which Thucydides
mentioned in 3.104 when he stated that when the Athenians purified Delos in 426/425, they also
instituted the Delian games, to be celebrated once every four years: a new contest was the horse
race. The Callimachean narrator, then, invites his narratees not only to remember the
representation of Delos in earlier texts, but to keep the contemporary, third-century Delos in mind
as well. 53 And the contemporary situation of Delos in the third century happened to be that of a
powerful island (the centre of the Nesiotic League) that in turn stood under the control of Ptolemy
Philadelphus, Callimachus’ patron. In this short description then, the narrator invites his narratees
to interpret his account on multiple levels: on a literal level – which turns out to be a level that
frustrates the narratees since the island as presented in the Hymn defies visualisation –, on a
metapoetical level and on a contemporary political level.
In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and the Pindaric fragments, change was an important
element of Delos’ story: in the Homeric Hymn, Delos changed from a rocky wasteland with
(hidden) potential into a bustling cult centre. In the Pindaric fragments, the nymph Asteria
changed into a floating rock in the sea and subsequently – when Apollo was born – she was fixed
to the ocean floor. These three incarnations of the island were strictly separated from each other:
when the island was still a woman, she went by the name Asteria, when she had turned into a
rocky geological formation, she was referred to as Delos. Of course, I found in the previous chapter
on Pindar that at times the narrator purposefully applied a name that belonged to one incarnation
to another, but this never hindered the narratees’ conception of stage in which the island found
itself and served to create an identifiable special effect. Looking how the Callimachean narrator
conceives of the transformation(s) of Delos, one finds the following in lines 35-40:
σὲ δ’ oὐκ ἔθλιψεν ἀνάγκη,
ἀλλ’ ἄφετος πελάγεσσιν ἐπέπλεες· οὔνομα δ’ ἦν τοι
Ἀστερίη τὸ παλαιόν, ἐπεὶ βαθὺν ἥλαο τάφρον
οὐρανόθεν φεύγουσα Διὸς γάμον ἀστέρι ἴση.
τόφρα μὲν οὔπω τοι χρυσέη ἐπεμίσγετο Λητώ,
53
During the period of Ptolemaic dominance over the Nesiotic League, games were organised in honour of
Philadelphus. The race course was then still in use when the Hymn to Delos was written.
59
τόφρα δ’ ἔτ’ Ἀστερίη σὺ καὶ οὐδέπω ἔκλεο Δῆλος.
But no constraint afflicted thee, but free upon the open sea thou didst float; and thy name
of old was Asteria, since like a star thou didst leap from heaven into the deep moat, fleeing
wedlock with Zeus. Until then golden Leto consorted not with thee: then thou wert still
Asteria and wert not yet called Delos. (35-40)
Here, one recognises Pindar’s three stages of the island: from woman to floating island and
eventually to a fixed island. Unlike Pindar, however, the narrator here states that Asteria was the
name of the floating island rather than the nymph, because the name Asteria is said to come from
the way in which she jumped into the sea “ἀστέρι ἴση” (“like a star” 38). This mention of a “star”
reminds one of Pindar’s Hymn to Zeus, where Delos was said to appear to the gods as a “τηλέφαντον
κυανέας χθονὸς ἄστρον” (“a clear star of the dark-blue earth” fr. 33c. 6). According to Bing, a poignant
difference lies in Callimachus’ choice of the word αστήρ rather than ἀστρον: both nouns may
denote a star that is fixed in the sky, but only αστήρ may denote a shooting star as well.
Callimachus’ use of αστήρ, then, “catches precisely that exuberant mobility that he wishes to
highlight” (1988: x101). The name Asteria then is closely connected to the island’s state as a floating
– and moving – island. The name Delos, meanwhile, seems to be used for the island in its fixed
state. And indeed, in lines 51-4, the narrator explains where the name Delos came from:
ἡνίκα δ’ Ἀπόλλωνι γενέθλιον οὖδας ὑπέσχες,
τοῦτό τοι ἀντημοιβὸν ἁλίπλοοι οὔνομ’ ἔθεντο,
οὕνεκεν οὐκέτ’ ἄδηλος ἐπέπλεες, ἀλλ’ ἐνὶ πόντου
κύμασιν Αἰγαίοιο ποδῶν ἐνεθήκαο ῥίζας.
But when thou gavest thy soil to be the birthplace of Apollo, seafaring men gave thee this
name in exchange, since no more didst thou float obscure upon the water, but amid the
waves of the Aegean didst plant the roots of thy feet. (51-54)
Especially telling is the statement that the island is given this name because it is “οὐκέτ’ ἄδηλος”
(“no more obscure” 53). This refers to the pun that one already found in Pindar’s Pa. VIIb, where
the island was referred to as an “εὐαγέα πέτραν” (“a conspicuous rock” 48).
Although the narrator establishes a pointed dichotomy between Asteria and Delos, he does
not abide by his own strict distinction between the two phases of the island: in line 316, for
instance, the narrator addresses the island as Asteria, while clearly referring to the island as a fixed
place that has become a cult centre: “Ἀστερίη πολύβωμε πολύλλιτε, τίς δέ σε ναύτης / ἔμπορος
60
Αἰγαίοιο παρήλυθε νηὶ θεούσῃ;” (“Asteria of many altars and many prayers, what merchant mariner
of the Aegean passes by thee with speeding ship?”). 54 It seems then that, as he did with the
personification of the island (cf. the proem of the Hymn in which Delos qua island was initially
recalled), the narrator creates a sense of clarity for his narratees which is soon proved to be
illusory.
While the Callimachean narrator keeps the Pindaric texts here in the minds of his
narratees, he also departs from the Pindaric account quite pointedly: if one looks at the narrator’s
statement in line 39 that Leto did not have anything to do with Delos before she gave birth to
Apollo on the island, it seems that the Callimachean narrator drops the Pindaric (and Hesiodic)
idea that Leto and Asteria were sisters. 55 According to Bing, this has much to do with the stress the
Callimachean narrator puts on Asteria’s free will (107). And indeed, in the two passages cited
above, one finds a myriad of pointers to Asteria’s agency: she is not afflicted by “ἀνάγκη” (35), a
word that pointedly recurs in the hymn in line 122 when Peneius apologetically states, after his
initial flight, “‘Λητοῖ, Ἀναγκαίη μεγάλη θεός.” (“Leto, Force is a great goddess”). This force is the brute
force with which the places that even consider receiving Leto are threatened. In the face of these
threats, the localities (islands, rivers, mountains etc.) flee Leto. This is quite strange: on the one
hand, the uniqueness of Asteria’s mobility as a floating island is stressed. On the other hand,
however, every single locality is said to take flight while they are supposedly geographically fixed
(cf. 34-5, in which the islands that Poseidon has cut off from the mainland with his trident are said
to be fixed – “ἐρρίζωσε” – to the ocean floor by him). Again, as I have established before, the
narrator is making it extremely difficult for his narratees to visualise what is going on. Bing argues
that the point of this chaos is to stress that the world before the birth of Apollo was a world of
barbarism, in which ἀνάγκη is “the dominant force of the age” to which only Asteria is immune
(118). 56 And indeed, Asteria is referred to as “ἄφετος” (“free” LSJ II) in line 36. Apollo also stresses
Asteria’s special status from the womb when he spurns Thebe and states: “εὐαγέων δὲ καὶ εὐαγέεσσι
54
The narrator also uses the name Asteria to denote the island in its fixed state in 300 (“Ἀστερίη θυόεσσα”).
55
Although the familial bond between Leto and Asteria seems to have been dropped by the Callimachean narrator, he
nevertheless refers to Leto as Κοιηὶς in line 150. This patronymic has the effect of recalling the version of Pindar in
which they were sisters. At the same time, however, Apollo’s detailed description in 191-95 of the island that his mother
should seek out suggests that Leto did not know who Asteria was (cf. Mineur ad 37).
56
Cp. also Nishimura-Jensen (290).
61
μελοίμην” (“Pure am I and may I be the care of them that are pure”. Within a world of chaos, then,
Asteria is presented a small island (“νήσος ἀραιή” 191) that is pure and free. 57
Returning to Asteria’s free will, one may note that in line 53-4, one finds that the island has
agency over what happens to her: “ἐνὶ πόντου / κύμασιν Αἰγαίοιο ποδῶν ἐνεθήκαο ῥίζας” (“amid the
waves of the Aegean didst plant the roots of thy feet”). In line 197-8, Asteria’s agency is again
asserted when she approaches Leto and offers herself to her, without needing to be convinced (as
the island needed to be in the Homeric Hymn). Neither do changes simply happen to Asteria, as
they did in the Pindaric fragments. Rather, Asteria herself asserts in line 273 “καί ἔσσομαι οὐκέτι
πλαγκτή” (“and I shall no more be a wandering isle”). Unlike her predecessors, Callimachus’ island
possesses free will and agency. 58
Another passage that merits a closer look is the one after Asteria has offered herself to
Delos:
ἡ δ’ ἀρητὸν ἄλης ἀπεπαύσατο †λυγρῆς,
ἕζετο δ’ Ἰνωποῖο παρὰ ῥόον ὅν τε βάθιστον
γαῖα τότ’ ἐξανίησιν, ὅτε πλήθοντι ῥεέθρῳ
Νεῖλος ἀπὸ κρημνοῖο κατέρχεται Αἰθιοπῆος·
And she gladly ceased from her grievous wandering and sat by the stream of Inopus, which
the earth sends forth in deepest flood at the season when the Nile comes down in full
torrent from the Aethiopian steep. (205-8)
Here, it is suggested that the flow of the Inopus, the river of Delos that is in fact dry for most of the
year, is somehow connected to the flooding of the Nile. By the establishment of a connection
between the Inopus and the Nile, the Callimachean narrator is establishing a close bond between
Egypt and Delos. It is perhaps in this light that one may best interpret Apollo’s curious second
prophecy from the womb. When Leto nears Cos, the unborn god tells his mother that this island is
reserved for Ptolemy Philadelphus:
‘μὴ σύ γε, μῆτερ,
57
The adjective ἀραιή means “slender”, a synonym for λεπτή - which the scholia have noted ad loc. As one may recall
from the Aetia prologue, “slenderness” is quite a pregnant concept in Callimachean poetics. At the same time, then, it
seems that the island Delos (small, pure, unaffected by the forces that rule others) stands for Callimachean poetry.
58
Delos in the Homeric Hymn may be said to possess free will and agency to a certain extent as well (since she gives
Leto permission to give birth to Apollo), but the only choice she can make is that between ignominy and great fame,
which really is not much of a choice. Callimachus’ island moves, talks and willingly and knowingly offers herself to
Leto: this constitutes a significantly greater degree of free will and power.
62
τῇ με τέκοις. οὔτ’ οὖν ἐπιμέμφομαι οὐδὲ μεγαίρω
νῆσον, ἐπεὶ λιπαρή τε καὶ εὔβοτος, εἴ νύ τις ἄλλη·
ἀλλά οἱ ἐκ Μοιρέων τις ὀφειλόμενος θεὸς ἄλλος
ἐστί, Σαωτήρων ὕπατον γένος·
Bear me not, mother, here. I blame not the island nor have any grudge, since a bright isle it
is and rich in pasture as any other. But there is due to her from the Fates another god, the
most high lineage of the Saviours; (162-66)
Here, one may note that Apollo speaks not simply of a great king, but of a “θεὸς ἄλλος” (“another
god” 65), thereby putting Ptolemy Philadelphus quite markedly on a par with himself. 59 A parallel
is then created between Apollo, who was born on Delos and Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was born
on Cos. Bing points out that the birth of Apollo seems to bring about a change from chaos to order,
and that, similarly, the birth (and subsequent reign) of Philadelphus may be regarded as a change
from chaos to order as well. And indeed, in the lines that follow, Apollo prophesies that Ptolemy
will protect Delphi from the Celts (and will also crush mutinous Gauls). Apollo calls these Celts
“ὀψίγονοι Τιτῆνες” (“the Titans of a later day” 174), and stresses that they attack the “Ἑλλήνεσσι”
(“Greeks” 172). Philadelphus is then presented as the saviour of the Greeks and protector of
Apollo’s oracle in Delphi, even though he is strictly not a Greek, but a Macedonian (“Μακηδόνι”
167).
An important intertext that I would like to propose is Theocritus’ Idyll 17, which was
written roughly at the same date and at the same place – the great Library – as Callimachus’ Hymn
to Delos. Idyll 17 is also known as the Encomium to Ptolemy Philadelphus, and in it, Philadelphus’
birth is described: 60
Κόως δ’ ὀλόλυξεν ἰδοῖσα,
φᾶ δὲ καθαπτομένα βρέφεος χείρεσσι φίλῃσιν·
‘ὄλβιε κοῦρε γένοιο, τίοις δέ με τόσσον ὅσον περ
Δῆλον ἐτίμησεν κυανάμπυκα Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων·
59
Of course, Ptolemy Philadelphus was – in true Egyptian fashion – honoured as a deity and even had his own cult.
Nevertheless, the fact that Apollo here calls him a θεὸς ἄλλος in a Hymn that essentially narrates the origins of a Greek
sacred place for a Greek god makes this reference to Philadelphus as Apollo’s equal quite poignant.
60
Text and translation are taken from Hunter (2003).
63
Cos cried aloud at the sight, and, taking the infant in her loving hands, she addressed him:
“May you be blessed, my son, and may you honour me as much as Phoebus Apollo
honoured dark-circled Delos. (64-7)
Here one finds again that a link between Cos (and hence Ptolemy) and Delos (and hence Apollo) is
established. Like Delos in the Hymn to Delos, Cos is the first to cradle the newborn in her arms and
address him: in her speech, she explicitly likens Philadelphus to Phoebus. Apparently then,
Callimachus was not the only one to connect Apollo and Ptolemy II. By means of this apparently
not uncommon connection between the two, a layer of contemporary politics is clearly
established.
4.3
Interpreting the Hymn to Delos in the light of Poetics and Politics
As I hope to have pointed out in the previous section, the Callimachean narrator frustrates
attempts to make sense of his Hymn on a purely literal level, and thereby urges his narratees to go
about understanding the Hymn on other levels, namely those of poetics and contemporary politics.
4.3.1
The Poetics of the Hymn to Delos
From the passages from the Hymn to Delos looked at above, an image of poetics arises that is
consistent with the poetics that Callimachus had set out in the proem of the Aetia. While the other
geological entities suffer from corruption (cp. the disqualification of Thebes by Apollo in his first
speech from the womb 88-98), Asteria is pure (“εὐαγέσσι” 98). The island is also referred to as a
“νῆσος ἀραιή” in line 191. As I have pointed out above, the scholia paraphrase “ἀραιή” as “λεπτή”,
which is a pregnant term in Callimachean poetics. As Slings points out, however, one does not
even have to appeal to the scholia in order to show how telling the choice of this adjective is (2004:
283): according to LSJ (I), ἀραιή means “thin” “slender” or “narrow”, which is not in itself a very
telling epithet for an island. Moreover, this is the first and only time that the adjective is used to
qualify an island. It seems then, that the choice of this epithet is meant to provoke some thought
and lead the attentive reader who likes to associate and puzzle towards the adjective’s synonym
“λεπτή”.
64
Asteria can then be said to represent Callimachus’ poetry: she is not too fat (like epic
poetry), and essentially pure, i.e. free from the degenerate expressions that Callimachus’ epic
contemporaries used. She is also unique, unlike the other islands that have been created by
Poseidon with the trident that the Telchines – the harsh critics of Callimachus referred to in the
prologue of the Aetia – had made for him. In a chaotic world, she is independent (“σὲ δ’ oὐκ ἔθλιψεν
ἀνάγκη” 35) and free (“ἄφετος” 36): she only submits to others when she wishes to do so herself. I
would propose that in Asteria’s mobility the Callimachean narrator also may be seen to hint at the
way in which his poetry works: his poetry may be as complex and difficult to follow as the island
that shoots from one corner of the Aegean to the other, but for the right (attentive and learned)
reader who associates and puzzles, the island will become fixed and thereby the poetry
understandable.
Callimachus also reflects on the workings of other (inter)texts and on the textuality of his
own poety. It is telling in this respect that Callimachus has chosen to treat the history of Delos, of
which two rather fixed – since they had been written down – textual accounts already existed.
According to Depew, Callimachus formally (in terms of epic language, meter and adherence to the
fixed structural elements of a hymn) calls the Homeric Hymn to Apollo to his readers’ minds and
alludes to it overtly and often. Pindar’s version, she argues, is not so openly established as an
intertext (1998: 170). Rather, Pindar’s account only comes into play when gaps open up in the text,
e.g. when after the scene with Peneius the narratees understand that Leto is in an impossible
situation: localities either refuse her, or, if they accept her, she is responsible for their destruction –
which in the case of Peneius, she cannot bring herself to be. The narrator formally solves the issue
by having Apollo point his mother to Asteria, who then offers herself to Leto without even being
asked. According to Depew this preemptive offer can only be explained by the attentive reader
who knows that in Pindar (who in turn referred to Hesiod Theog. 409), Asteria and Leto are sisters
(169). In a similar vein, one would expect that after Hera hears from Iris that Asteria has accepted
Leto, an explosion of anger would ensue. Rather, Depew points out, “Hera’s anger is calmed, as it
were, when she ‘remembers’ what happened to her in another text” (182), namely the Pindaric
version in which Asteria flees from Zeus’ amorous advances. In this Pindaric version, Zeus played a
remarkable part, as the one who seemed to orchestrate all events from afar. With this knowledge
from Pindar, Depew argues, the narratees may account for the puzzling line 259, in which it is said
65
that Zeus took away Hera’s anger: “oὐδ’ Ἥρη νεμέσησεν, ἐπεὶ χόλον ἐξέλετο Ζεύς” (“and Hera grudged
it not, because Zeus had taken away her anger”). According to Depew, then, because it is necessary
for the narratees of the Hymn to draw on knowledge they can only extract from other texts, the
Hymn to Delos “is a text that always reminds its reader that it is a text, and part of a long sequence
of texts” (181). 61 On a metatextual and metapoetical level, then, the Hymn to Delos does not only
reflect on ideal poetry, but also alerts its narratees to its status as a text in a tradition and the
complexities that attend placing oneself in such a tradition.
4.3.2
The Politics of the Hymn to Delos
As I have pointed out in the two previous chapters, Delos constituted a decidedly political space in
the Hymn to Apollo and in the Pindaric fragments. In the Hymn to Delos, I argue, something similar
is the case, although this time the representation of Delos serves to reinforce the power politics of
Ptolemy Philadelphus in the Aegean. I will first look at the text, however, before I bring the context
to bear on it.
In the previous chapters, I noted that the presentation of Delos bore similarities to the
discourses of gender and colonialism. Here again, I will look at the representation of the island in
this light, and I will focus on the change that it undergoes when Apollo is born. In the Homeric
Hymn, Delos was represented as, after initial hesitation, rejoicing over her incorporation into the
Greek world. In the Pindaric fragments, Delos had no agency at all: rather, her role was completely
passive. In Callimachus’ version, it is then remarkable that Asteria’s agency and free will are
stressed to such an extent: she is explicitly qualified as ἄφετος (“free” 36) and offers herself to Leto
unasked and in open defiance of Hera: “Ἥρη, τοῦτό με ῥέξον ὅ τοι φίλον· οὐ γὰρ ἀπειλὰς / ὑμετέρας
ἐφύλαξα· πέρα, πέρα εἰς ἐμὲ Λητοῖ” (“Hera, do to me what thou wilt: for I heed not thy threats. Cross,
cross over, Leto, unto me” 203-4). Whereas the Delos of the Homeric Hymn felt fear when Leto
approached her with the request to give birth to Apollo, the Delos of the Hymn to Delos has agency
and is in charge of her own destiny.
61
Cf. Klooster: “on one level, localities behave as localities, and on another level, localities behave as personified
entities. This alerts the reader to the artificial way in which Letoʹs story is told: the story really exists only as a text; it
evokes no consistent visual image of something that could exist in the actual world” (forthcoming: 18).
66
The change the island undergoes, however, as Nishimura-Jensen points out, resembles the
change women underwent when they got married (2000: 293). Like a woman who gets married,
Asteria’s name is changed into Delos when Apollo is born and she becomes inextricably tied to
him. Also, her days of wandering across the sea freely are over, as she fixes herself to the ocean
floor. Nevertheless, there is a sense of empowerment to this change, as becomes clear from
Asteria’s speech after the birth of Apollo:
‘ὦ μεγάλη, πολύβωμε, πολύπτολι, πολλὰ φέρουσα,
πίονες ἤπειροί τε καὶ αἳ περιναίετε νῆσοι,
αὕτη ἐγὼ τοιήδε· δυσήροτος, ἀλλ’ ἀπ’ ἐμεῖο
Δήλιος Ἀπόλλων κεκλήσεται, οὐδέ τις ἄλλη
γαιάων τοσσόνδε θεῷ πεφιλήσεται ἄλλῳ,
οὐ Κερχνὶς κρείοντι Ποσειδάωνι Λεχαίῳ,
οὐ πάγος Ἑρμείῃ Κυλλήνιος, οὐ Διὶ Κρήτη,
ὡς ἐγὼ Ἀπόλλωνι· καὶ ἔσσομαι οὐκέτι πλαγκτή.’
ὧδε σὺ μὲν κατέλεξας· ὁ δὲ γλυκὺν ἔσπασε μαζόν.
“O mighty and of many altars and many cities, bounteous earth, rich continents and ye
islands set around lo! I am as thou see’st – hard of tillage; yet from me shall Apollo be called
‘of Delos’, and none other among all lands shall be so beloved by any other god: not
Cerchnis so loved by Poseidon, Lord of Lechaeum, not Cyllene’s hill by Hermes, not Crete
by Zeus, as I by Apollo; and I shall no more be a wandering isle.” Thus didst thou speak and
the child drew the sweet breast. (266-74)
Here, it is remarkable that Asteria states that Apollo will be named the Delian (“Δήλιος” 269) after
her. This is a subversion of the usual pattern of a woman taking the name of her husband.
Furthermore, in line 274, Delos nurses the infant god, and thereby assumes a role, namely that of
nurse, that also brings with it a certain amount of dominance over the newborn. It seems that in
the roles that Delos assumes in relation to Apollo, she remains in charge. The Delos of Callimachus’
Hymn to Delos, is then presented as an independent island that only becomes Apollo’s birthplace
because she wishes to be. Rather than being colonised, Asteria willingly attaches herself to Apollo.
As has become clear in my close reading of section 4.2, Ptolemy Philadelphus is presented
in the Hymn as a second Apollo: the god himself urges his mother to pass by Cos because it is
reserved for a “θεὸς ἄλλος” (165). By referring to Theocritus’ Encomium, I have pointed out that
Callimachus was not the only one to establish a connection between Cos and Delos on the one
67
hand and Philadelphus and Apollo on the other. Apparently this link between himself and Apollo
pleased Philadelphus, who was the patron of both poets.
Furthermore, Delos is also associated with Egypt in the text by means of an invisible
connection between the river Inopus and the river Nile in 206-8. In the Hymn, then, the
Callimachean narrator establishes a network of connections between Cos and Egypt, geographical
locations that are important for Ptolemy Philadelphus, a latter-day Apollo, and Delos. In the light
of Philadelphus’ imperialistic ambitions, such connections are very telling. as I have mentioned in
the introduction of this chapter, Philadelphus controlled the Nesiotic League when this Hymn was
written, the centre of which was Delos. By the connection between the Nile and the Inopus, then,
the Callimachean narrator seems to suggest that the Ptolemaic dominance over Delos and the
League has its roots in natural fact. By having Apollo refer to Philadelphus as a second Apollo, the
Callimachean narrator legitimises Ptolemaic control over Delos and the Nesiotic League as well.
If one recalls that Asteria voluntarily offers herself to Leto and Apollo, one should be wary
of the implications of such a representation of the island: unlike her predecessors of the Homeric
Hymn and the Pindaric fragments, this island rushes towards Leto and happily offers herself as
Apollo’s birthplace. If one reads Philadelphus instead of Apollo – a connection that is wellestablished throughout the poem and that was apparently current among the poets of the Museum
–, one can read here a Delos that desires to be a part of the empire of Philadelphus. Rather than
being subjected and incorporated into his empire, Delos is presented as an independent island
that consciously makes the choice to attach herself to the Ptolemaic empire. The representation of
Delos as a willing island, then, can be read as a legitimisation of Philadelphus’ imperial
ambitions. 62
In the Hymn to Delos, then, one may read an unambiguous legitimisation of Philadelphus’
imperialistic ambition in the Greek world. This may come as a surprise from a poet who presented
Asteria, who stood for his poetry, as free and independent. As the Inopos was connected to the
Nile, however, so, the Callimachean narrator seems to imply, his pure poetry – his Asteria – is
connected to and sustained by Egypt and its rulers.
62
That Ptolemy Philadelphus is presented, as Bing argues (118), as the saviour of the Greek world in the Hymn to Delos
only strengthens my point: as the birth of Apollo secured peace and order in a world that was previously in disarray, so
Philadelphus protects Delphi and thereby the Greek world from the attack of Barbarians and restores order. This
securing of peace and order on Philadelphus’ part only reinforces his claim to the Greek world.
68
Conclusion
In this thesis, I hope to have shown that islands are not neutral places, but spaces onto which, due
to their compactness and isolation from the rest of the world by the sea, larger concerns may be
projected. I have focused on political and metapoetical concerns in my analysis of literary texts
that deal with Delos.
As to the first, political, concern, I have shown that the representations of Delos in the
Homeric Hymn to Apollo, the Pindaric fragments and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos all were closely
connected to the historical and political situation in which these poems were composed: I have
taken as my point of departure in this strand of interpretation Said’s notion that all texts are
products as well as reinforcers of a certain discourse of dominance. No text, then, is neutral: rather,
texts may range from having a political and imperialistic function unobtrusively, without the
narrator and the narratees necessarily being conscious of it, to being openly propagandistic.
In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, I found that the change that the island Delos undergoes
when Apollo is born resembles the process of colonisation: from a barren place with which no one
wants to be associated, Delos is, by means of the birth of Apollo, appropriated into the Greek world
and becomes a “Greek” place. Furthermore, I have connected this hymn to the suggestion of West
and Burkert that Cynaethus of Chios composed it for Polycrates of Samos, who celebrated a festival
on Delos when he dedicated the neighbouring island Rheneia to Apollo in 523/522 BC. Since Delos
is presented in the Hymn as the starting point of Apollo’s dominance over the Greek world, I have
proposed that this Hymn, if it indeed was written for Polycrates of Samos, may have served to
display Polycrates’ ambitions of dominance over the Aegean.
In the Pindaric fragments, I found that the island Delos is represented as highly passive and
as a space that had been, in a previous incarnation, a woman. When Leto arrives on the island and
Apollo is born, the island is fixed to the ocean floor by an anonymous force, possibly Zeus, without
the island having any say in the matter. I have connected this passivity and gendered previous
incarnation to the political circumstances of the fifth century BC, thereby reading the
representation of Delos as a means by which the Athenians (and others) asserted dominance over
the Aegean.
69
In Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos, Delos was represented as an island that is not reigned by
fear or passivity, but as an independent entity with a free will. She willingly attaches herself to Leto
and Apollo and puts down her own roots. This Delos then, is in control of her own change of status.
Since connections are carefully established in the Hymn between Delos, Egypt and Cos on the one
hand and between Ptolemy and Apollo on the other, Callimachus, as I hope to have shown,
legitimates Ptolemy’s control over Delos and the Nesiotic League, from which power over the
Aegean emanated.
The second concern I focused on in this thesis is that of metapoetics. Departing from the
notion that the Pindaric fragments and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos stand in a tradition, I have
looked at how these poets reflected on the work of their predecessor(s) and how they asserted
their own poetic uniqueness.
In the Pindaric fragments, I found that Pindar distanced himself from Homer’s account by
announcing that he would not follow Homer’s “τριπτὸν ἀμαξιτόν” (Pa. VIIb 11). Although this
qualification of the Homeric Hymn may not necessarily be derogatory, Pindar does assert here that
he will go about telling the story differently. By looking at Pindar’s criticism of Homer in other texts
from the Pindaric corpus, I have established that Pindar generally critiqued the truth value of
Homer’s stories. I tentatively connected this finding to fr. 33c, in which human and Olympian
views of the island are contrasted, and concluded that, in a way, the Pindaric narrator presents
himself as someone who shares the knowledge and perspective of the Olympians, for he can see
the truth of the island’s various incarnations. Pindar’s narrator, then, implicitly states that he
possesses a deeper insight into the truth of the island than his Homeric predecessor did.
In the Hymn to Delos, I found that the representation of Delos/Asteria was reminiscent of
Callimachus’ poetic principles expounded elsewhere: the island is described as slender, free from
corruption, and as an independent entity that follows her own course. These qualities can also be
found in the Aetia prologue (of a later date), where the narrator is instructed by Apollo to keep his
muse slender and to follow untrodden paths. In terms of relations with his literary predecessors, I
established that Callimachus alludes to both his predecessors: to the Homeric Hymn quite openly,
and to the Pindaric version a bit more covertly. By calling previous texts to mind and by presenting
Asteria/Delos as an entity that cannot possibly be visualised, Callimachus points to the textuality
70
of his poem: he deflates the bubble of suspense of disbelief, so to speak, and problematises the
project of placing oneself in a tradition of texts and being original in this light.
In conclusion, it seems that the subjection of the representations of Delos to different
strands of interpretation, politics and metapoetics, has proved to be fruitful. In the future, it will be
interesting to see whether other islands in other literary texts can be analysed similarly.
71
Bibliography
Allen, Thomas, W. R. Halliday, and E. E. Sikes. The Homeric Hymns. Oxford: Clarendon, 1936.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon, 1994.
Bing, Peter. The Well-read Muse: Present and past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988.
Bowra, C. M. Pindar. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964.
Burkert, Walter. “Kynaithos, Polycrates and the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.” Arktouros : Hellenic
Studies Presented to Bernard M. W. Knox on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. Eds. Glen W.
Bowersock, Walter Burkert, and Michael C. J. Putnam. New York: De Gruyter, 1979. 53-62.
Callimachus. Hymni Et Epigrammata. Ed. Rudolf Pfeiffer. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953.
—. Hymns and Epigrams. Trans. A. W. Mair. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960.
Chappell, Mike. “The Homeric Hymn to Apollo: the Question of Unity.” The Homeric Hymns:
Interpretative Essays. Ed. Andrew Faulkner. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
Clarke, Michael. "Gods and Mountains in Greek Myth and Poetry." What Is a God?: Studies in the
Nature of Greek Divinity. Ed. A. B. Lloyd. London: Duckworth, 1997. 65-80.
Clay, Jenny Strauss. The Politics of Olympus: Form and Meaning in the Major Homeric Hymns.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
Constantakopoulou, Christy. The Dance of the Islands: Insularity, Networks, the Athenian Empire,
and the Aegean World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Cushman, Robert. “Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing out of
England into the Parts of America.” Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American
History. Ed. John Demos. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 4-10.
Dougherty, Carol. The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1993.
Ferguson, John. Callimachus. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Fitch, Edward. “Pindar and Homer.” Classical Philology 19.1 (1924): 57-65.
García, John F. “Symbolic Action in the Homeric Hymns: The Theme of Recognition.” Classical
Antiquity 21.1 (2002): 5-39.
72
Harder, Annette. Aetia. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.
Harvey, A. E. “The Classification of Greek Lyric Poetry.” The Classical Quarterly 5.3-4 (1955): 157-75.
Hoffmann, Gerhard. Raum, Situation, Erzählte Wirklichkeit: Poetologische Und Historische Studien
Zum Englischen Und Amerikanischen Roman. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978.
Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Homeric Hymns, Homeric Apocrypha, Lives of Homer. Ed. M. L. West.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2003.
Homer. Homeri Opera. Ed. T. W. Allen. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1902.
—. The Iliad of Homer. Trans. Richmond A. Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
—. The Odyssey of Homer. Trans. Richmond A. Lattimore. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1996.
Jacoby, Felix. Die Fragmente Der Griechischen Historiker. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
Janko, Richard. Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns: Diachronic Development in Epic Diction. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1982.
Jebb, R. C. “Delos.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 1.1 (1880): 7-62.
Jensen, Minna Skafte. “A Note on Homer’s Use of the Word κραναός.” Classica et Mediaevalia 33
(1981): 5-8.
De Jong, I. J. F. "Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature." Narratology and Interpretation: The
Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Eds. J. Grethlein and A. Rengakos. Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2009. 81-100.
—., R. Nünlist, and A. M. Bowie. Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature.
Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
—. Space in Ancient Greek Literature. Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. Vol. 3. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
—. and Nünlist, R. Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. Vol 2.
Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Dennerlein, Katrin. Narratologie Des Raumes. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009.
Depew, Mary. "Delian Hymns and Callimachean Allusion." Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 98
(1998): 155-82.
Käppel, Lutz. Paian: Studien Zur Geschichte Einer Gattung. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992.
Klooster, Jacqueline. Poetry as Window and Mirror: Positioning the Poet in Hellenistic Poetry. Leiden:
73
Brill, 2011.
—. “Visualizing the Impossible: The moving landscape in the Delos Hymn of Callimachus.”
Forthcoming.
Laidlaw, W. A. A History of Delos. Oxford: Blackwell, 1933.
Landfester, Manfred, Hubert Cancik, and Helmuth Schneider. Brill's New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of
the Ancient World. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Miller, Andrew M. From Delos to Delphi: A Literary Study of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. Leiden:
Brill, 1986.
Mineur, W. H. Callimachus, Hymn to Delos: Introduction and Commentary. Leiden: Brill, 1984.
Morrison, A. D. Performances and Audiences in Pindar's Sicilian Victory Odes. London: Inst. of
Classical Studies, 2007.
Nagy, Gregory. Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic past. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP,
1990.
Nilsson, Martin P. Cults, Myths, Oracles, and Politics in Ancient Greece. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1951.
Nishimura-Jensen, Julie. “Unstable Geographies: The Moving Landscape in Apollonius’
Argonautica and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos.” Transactions of the American Philological
Association 130.1 (2000): 287-317.
Nünlist, Rene. Poetologische Bildersprache in der Frühgriechischen Dichtung. Stuttgart: Teubner,
1998
Parke, H. W. “Polycrates and Delos.” The Classical Quarterly 40.3-4 (1946): 105-8.
Parker, Robert. “The Hymn to Demeter and the Homeric Hymns.” Greece & Rome 38.1 (1991): 1-17.
Pavlou, Maria. “Metapoetics, Poetic Tradition, and Praise in Pindar Olympian 9.” Mnemosyne 61.4
(2008): 533-67.
Pindar. Pindari Carmina Cum Fragmentis. Ed. Bruno Snell and Herwig Maehler. Leipzig: Teubner,
1987.
—. Pindar's Paeans: A Reading of the Fragments with a Survey of the Genre. Ed. Ian Rutherford.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.
Richardson, N. J. Three Homeric Hymns: To Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2010.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994.
74
—. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Schmidt, V. “Zu Pindar.” Glotta 53 (1975): 36-43.
Slings, S. R. "The Hymn to Delos as a Partial Allegory of Callimachus' Poetry." Callimachus II. Ed.
Annette Harder, Remco F. Regtuit, and G. C. Wakker. Leuven: Peeters, 2004. 279-98.
Smith, Martyn. Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Webster, T. B. L. “Personification as a Mode of Greek Thought.” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 17.1-2 (1954): 10-21.
West, M. L. “Cynaethus’ Hymn To Apollo.” The Classical Quarterly 25.2 (1975): 161-70.
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich Von. Die Ilias Und Homer. Berlin: Weidmann, 1916.
75