The Homeric Hymns

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 433 conclusions auxquelles il parvient : il montre comment le mendiant Iros de l’Odyssée peut être interprété comme un doublet « parodique » d’Ulysse et comment, de même, Barabbas peut être tenu pour un doublet de Jésus (273–275). Le rapprochement qu’il fait de ces deux cas de « doublets » les désigne à l’attention du lecteur de manière interne à chacune des deux traditions, et l’apport demeure, que l’on accompagne ou non l’auteur jusqu’au bout pour admettre sur cette base un rapprochement des deux traditions. On se trouve donc devant un livre animé d’un souffle généreux et qui, de bout en bout, respire une indéniable ferveur de la découverte accompagnée du désir de convaincre. A chacun de décider s’il accepte les propositions qui s’y trouvent avancées, quelle part il en admet, ce qu’il rejettera et pourquoi, mais une chose est certaine : il serait surprenant que le lecteur ne ressente pas au bout du compte moins d’irritation que de reconnaissance à l’égard de l’auteur. C’est mon cas, et je suis heureux de l’admettre. Universit e de GenÁ eve Andr e Hurst The Homeric Hymns: Interpretive Essays. Edited by Andrew Faulkner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xvi, 400. In the opening pages of The Homeric Hymns: Interpretive Essays Andrew Faulkner remarks that despite increasing recent interest in this group of thirty-three diverse hexameter poems, which were often controversially attributed, even in antiquity, to “Homer,” “there has never been a volume of collected essays devoted to the corpus of Homeric Hymns.” The book aims “to provide for the reader a foundation for approaching the study of the Hymns” (23). Faulkner’s brief introduction addresses the problem of dating the Hymns, which seem to have been composed from the seventh century b.c. to the classical period or later, and identifies a few larger questions concerning their performance, function, and genre. The volume’s first section includes essays on each of the longer Homeric Hymns, whereas essays in the second section attempt to define more closely the collection of Hymns as a whole. Faulkner’s own valuable essay in Part II on the history of the collection until the hellenistic period supplements this introduction. The authors of these essays include both younger scholars and major players in recent scholarship on the Hymns in the context of archaic Greek poetry: Jenny Clay, author of the most influential recent book on the corpus, The Politics of Olympus (Princeton 1989; second edition, 2006), Claude Calame, William D. Furley, Gregory Nagy, Nicholas Richardson, Martin West, as well as Faulkner himself, who has published a recent commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (Oxford 2008). This choice of authors ensures that the reader will be introduced to important scholarly issues concerning the Hymns, but, due to the organization of the volume, the book may prove less accessible to those seeking a foundation for studying the Hymns. The latter should begin by reading the essays in the second part of the volume, which address larger issues concerning origins, performance, and genre critical to analyzing the corpus as a whole. The essays on each of the longer hymns in Part I offer much more technical close readings that often assume familiarity with earlier scholarship and an understanding of the broad, still highly controversial issues addressed in Part II. Further, many of the essays in this volume represent different and contradictory perspectives on the poems and on the corpus as a whole. Limited cross references in footnotes sometimes allow the reader to pursue these 434 PHOENIX conflicting perspectives, but most of the volume apparently went to publication without authors being invited to read and respond to each other’s work, even though there are occasional brief acknowledgements of the views of others (e.g., 248). Hence the reader is by and large left to reconcile various interpretations and approaches for him or herself. Overall, a synthetic effort in the introduction to frame the essays and the conflicting views that they represent would have helped to make

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