User:UndercoverClassicist/Homeric Hymn to Heracles the Lion-Hearted
The Homeric Hymn to Heracles the Lion-Hearted
Form and function[edit]
Johannes Haubolt has argued, based on the hymn's similar conclusion to that of the Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus (generally regarded as an epilogue), that the Hymn to Heracles was similarly an epilogue in origin.[1]
Reception[edit]
The third-century BCE poet Theocritus wrote Idyll XXIV, or Herakliskos ('Little Hercules'), in which he uses allusion to the Homeric Hymn to create what Barbara Hughes Fowler has called "a mixture of the burlesque and archaising".[2] Theocritus echoes the opening of the Homeric Hymn by beginning the poem with "Heracles, a ten-month-old child".[a] The poem goes on to humorously retell the story of the infant Heracles's strangling of the snakes sent by Hera to kill him, including a twin brother of Heracles who kicks away his blanket and tries to flee from the snakes in terror.[3]
Footnotes[edit]
Explanatory notes[edit]
- ^ In Greek, Ἡρακλέα δεκάμηνον
References[edit]
- ^ Hall 2012, p. 135.
- ^ Fowler 1989, p. 48.
- ^ Fowler 1989, p. 49.
Bibliography[edit]
- Fowler, Barbara Hughes (1989). The Hellenistic Aesthetic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 9780299120443.
- Hall, Alexander (2012). 'To the Beguiling Dance of the Gods': Genre and the Short Homeric Hymns (Ph.D). University of Wisconsin–Madison.