Why did the Homeridae choose to elaborate the prooimion? What was it about the hymn form that appealed to them? With such scarcity of data, any reconstruction can, of course, be only speculative, but within that limitation, can we make any correlation between the nature of the hymnic genre and such evidence as we have of its historical function? The rhetorical figure at the heart of the genre seems to point the way. That figure is apostrophe or the direct address by the poetic voice, as when, for example, the hymnist addresses the god. Tracking the operation of apostrophe in the Homeric hymns leads to an analysis of the hymn in which it is most prominent, the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. This is also the hymn in which the poetics of the genre—for example, the context of performance, the relation between the hymnist and his subject, his audience, and his “father” Homer—are an overt theme. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo presents a vision of poetic and prophetic practice that assimilates the hymnist’s achievement to the power claimed in the hymn by Apollo himself. This text would seem to offer a complete picture of what the Homeridae were attempting to accomplish with the elaborated prooimion, except that its version of Apollo is both expanded and qualified by the other major hymn that concerns poetry and prophecy, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. The complementary and contradictory relation between these two hymns sheds light upon the genre and its history.

What can the “son of Homer” do, after the fixation of Homeric epic? He can develop a new Homeric genre, a new and more self-referential Homeric speech, out of the single convention of epic that points to the poet’s voice. The opening apostrophe of epic can be expanded, via a relative clause, into a narrative of the god’s traditional ἔργα “works,” where the Homeridae can emulate (or parody) epic art. And when apostrophe is not just expanded but also exploited, the hymn can be more than an emulation of epic. While shorter and introductory, this πάρεργον “subordinate or secondary business” can exceed the primary genre in its glorification of the poetic voice. For when its close matches its opening, the hymn becomes one grand invocation, one grand display of the power not just to describe, but to epiphanize a god through speech.

This function of the apostrophe is most clear in the hymn where the figure is most prominent, the hymn to the gods’ own hymnist, Apollo. In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo we find a profusion of apostrophe and doubling (even the “number” of the text, whether it is singular or a plural, is in question), a profusion sometimes faulted as proof of careless or multiple authorship. These formal features demonstrate the re-presentational capacity of the hymnic voice: apostrophe makes present again its addressee, while doubling re-presents particular diction or themes. This doubling becomes the form and apostrophe the figure for the power attributed in the content of the hymn to its three poetic/prophetic speakers—Apollo, the Delian Maidens, and the hymnist himself—the power of unerring re-presentation. Apollo’s oracle re-presents the will of Zeus; the chorus of Delian Maidens, θεράπναι “attendants” of Apollo, re-present the voices of those attending the festival at Delos and sing a hymn to Leto, Apollo, and Artemis; the hymnist re-presents himself singing at the Delian festival this very Homeric Hymn to Apollo. For in the midst of describing the scene at the festival, the hymnist apostrophizes the Delian Maidens: O Maidens, he says, remember me and whenever you are asked to name the pre-eminent poet, answer “the blind man from Chios,” that is, “Homer” (166–172). Through this extended apostrophe, the hymnist turns narration into a demonstration of his own voice re-presenting the voice of the pre-eminent poet, the father “Homer.” This, it would seem, is what the hymnic apostrophe offered the “son of Homer,” a mode by which to re-present the voice of the father, the voice of poetic supremacy, a re-presentation that emulated Apollo’s own poetic and prophetic role.

But the Homeric Hymn to Apollo does not tell the whole story of that god’s relation to poetry and prophecy. The rest of the tradition comes in the Homeric {135|136} Hymn to Hermes, the “sequel” to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo both in content and in the order of our corpus. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes revises and adds to the earlier account. Here the first act of Hermes after his birth is to invent the lyre, while in the earlier hymn the first act of Apollo after his birth is to claim possession of the lyre as the precondition of his oracular accuracy. Hermes then tries to steal Apollo’s cattle by the trick of driving the herds backwards so that their hoofs point in the opposite direction from their actual movement. When the ruse is discovered, he exchanges the lyre for the stolen cattle. Now the defining “property” of each god is an original possession of the other. No sooner is this trade completed than Apollo gives Hermes what he had sworn to retain as his exclusive possession, μαντεία “oracular speech.” He describes the responses of Hermes’ new μαντεία as discernibly true and false, while revealing the similarly double but indistinguishable voices of his own oracle. Now who is the unerring prophet and who the thief? Each god seems to imitate the other.

Formal doubling and its thematic counterpart commence with the first words of the hymn, μνήσομαι οὐδὲ λάθωμαι Ἀπόλλωνος ἑκάτοιο “I shall remember and I shall not forget Apollo who works from afar” (1). There is a place or category of being remembered and another of being forgotten. The hymnic voice claims to control the difference between the two and to put Apollo in the place of the wholly remembered, the fully present. This mastery over μνήμη “memory” and λήθη “forgetfulness,” this ability to re-member, re-peat, and re-present the absent past, is expressed in the form of the repetition we find here—first, the μνήσομαι “I will remember” and then, the litotes of “remembering,” that is, οὐδὲ λάθωμαι “I will not forget.” In this doubling there occurs a return of the same—that is, the “remembering”—but at a later time and place in the sequence of the narrative. As in Platonic ἀνάμνησις “recollection,” there is an assertion of—a striving and a desire for—full re-presentation now in the present of what was fully present in the past.

Apollo is always present “everywhere” and always well re-presented in song. The implication of this parallelism and of the possible pun in νομοί is that the hymning of Apollo must represent the reality of the god: as he covers all geographical νομοί (νομός “place of pasturage, field, range”), so too his hymn must contain all the νόμοι (νόμος “melody, type of song”) or the entire “range” of its possibilities, a total re-presentation that would transcend the limits of time and space. And indeed, the whole of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo is an attempt to realize that goal.

Why a hymn to Apollo must so insist on its power of re-presentation becomes clear when Apollo himself emerges as a speaking presence in the text. Upon bursting his swaddling bands, Apollo’s first act is a “speech act.” It is introduced formally by an apostrophe that answers the one that earlier at line 120 marked his birth:

Thus unbound, the god avers:

Apollo’s words identify him as the divine counter-part of the power displayed by the hymnic voice. If he may possess the lyre and the bow, Apollo will re-present to humankind the oracles of Zeus. The basis of this reciprocity is evident in the structure common to the lyre, the bow, and the oracle. As we see in the simile in the Odyssey by which Odysseus’ testing of the bow is likened to the test of a lyre (xxi 404–410), and as may be implied in Heraclitus’ perception of the “palintropic harmony” of the two instruments (Heraclitus {140|141} [22] B51 DK), archaic Greek thought perceives in the bow and the lyre the capacity of attaining an exact mark of sound or space, if the string is plucked properly. That such attainment is also the property of the βουλὴ Διός “plan of Zeus” is implied by the metaphor in νημερτέα “unerring,” an alpha-privative compound of νη– “not” + the root of ἁμαρτάνω “miss the mark.” The “plan of Zeus” is an arrow that never misses its mark, is never sharp or flat. And so, moreover, is the re-presentation of it by Apollo, for the verb χρήσω “I shall unerringly repeat”—a cognate of χρή “it must be” and χρεών “that which must be”—implies the accuracy of cosmic necessity. Zeus is the primary archer of the mind, and Apollo, by virtue of his skill with lyre and bow, is his unerring porte-parole. To hymn Apollo, therefore, the hymnic voice must re-present the god’s straight arrow, his ideal re-presentation of Zeus’ similarly unerring will. Like Apollo, the hymnist must be ἕκατος “he who works from afar” or more precisely, ἑκατηβόλος “he who can cast from afar” the straight shaft of speech that hits the present mark.

Accordingly, the hymn responds to Apollo’s voice with a sequence in which apostrophe, doubling, and the thematization of poetic re–presentation are no longer intermittent but in fact take over the text. The poet’s first “cast” is the next apostrophe, the five-word, line-filling invocation of Apollo:

A five-word, line-long apostrophe occurs earlier as well, when the island of Delos addresses Leto: Λητοῖ, κυδίστη θύγατερ μεγάλου Κοίοιο “Leto, most glorious daughter of great Koios” (62). But here the device calls attention to itself by the four word-initial alphas (αὐτὸς, ἀργυρότοξε, ἄναξ, Ἄπολλον) and by its placement of the two parallel epithets, ἀργυρότοξε “of the silver bow” and ἑκατηβόλ᾿ “he who can cast from afar” on either side of ἄναξ “lord” and surrounding them, the two defining terms, the pronoun αὐτός “you yourself” and the proper noun Ἄπολλον. Then, as in the opening priamel, the invocation of presence is answered by a description of geographic omni-presence (141–145 ~ 21–24), a doubling marked by the repetition in lines 144–145 of lines 22–23. Such rings conventionally signal closure, but here, in a repetition of the opening manipulation of invocation and dismissal, the closed subject is at once re-opened with a second apostrophe and the selection once again of Delos out of the god’s spatial range: {141|142}

In this new end/beginning, however, the hymn becomes completely self-referential, as the subject of this hymn to Apollo now becomes its very performance at the Delian panêguris by the hymnist who identifies himself as “Homer.”

Like the earlier instances of the verb, this apostrophic χαίρετε “farewell” signals an ending, and this time the closure seems confirmed, since the vocative is followed by the imperatives of exchange between divinity and poet with which the hymns regularly conclude. Indeed, this exchange seems to complete the movement of the hymn toward self-reference through the harmony of its poetic and prophetic speakers:

The content of the Hymn has become its performance. More precisely, the narration has become the appeal for the prize of poetic preeminence. As narration has become narrating, so the hymnist seeks perpetual victory in and through a display of the poetic and prophetic capacity he shares with Apollo and the Delian Maidens. As with Apollo and Zeus, this “son” describes his unique function as a re-presentation of the “father”—the “blind man from Chios,” “Homer” himself. Like Apollo’s oracle, the κλέος “fame” that he offers the Delian Maidens is ἐτήτυμόν “accurate.” His speech also resembles that of Apollo’s θεράπναι “attendants” and would be a fair recompense, therefore, for their words of praise. For he re-presents the speech of a man who comes to Delos, just as they re-present the voice of “each man” there, and he even re-presents the speech of the Delian Maidens themselves, the very words for which he asks. In this virtuoso performance, prize-winning re-presentation re-presents the prize-winning it seeks. After such a sign of completion, we expect an end to the hymn.

The Pythian hymn carries out this double framework both in its apostrophe, in its confirmation of Apollo’s original claim to the lyre, the bow, and the oracle, and in the resulting augmentation of the god’s proper name. The invocation at the start of the Delian hymn—“How then shall I hymn you, when you are in every way well-hymned?”—opens the Pythian as well (207 = 19). Here, the figure achieves an almost egregious prominence, as this opening apostrophe is extended over the next seventy-three lines through twenty second-person singular verbs. The narrative, too, reflects its Delian half by recounting how Apollo realized his first words: “May the dear lyre and curved bow be mine and I shall unerringly repeat to humankind the unerring plan of Zeus” (131–132). At the start of the Pythian hymn, the lyre indeed belongs to Apollo, as he plays for the Muses on Olympus. Then, after the opening apostrophe, the hymn selects as its subject, via another priamel, none other than the founding of Apollo’s oracle, a founding that depends, as in the god’s original utterance, upon his possession of the bow and the lyre. For he slays the dragoness with his κρατεροῖο βιοῖο “mighty bow” (301), kindles the fire in his ἄδυτον “sanctuary” by showing forth the gleam of his arrows (443–445), plays the lyre to lead his paean-singing priests to the temple (514–519), and characterizes his oracular speech as ἐμὴν ἰθύν “my straight direction” (539).

In this conquest that proves his claim to the bow, the god adds through his power of speech two epithets to his proper name. As the dragoness breathes her last, Apollo exults, “Now rot (πύθευ) there on the man-nourishing earth” (363). As if in sympathetic harmony, “the holy strength of Helios made her rot (κατέπυσ᾿) there. As a result now the place is called Pytho, and they call the lord ‘Pythian’ as an epithet, because there on that spot the strength of piercing Helios made the monster rot (πῦσε)” (371–374). The god commands a natural transformation, nature obeys, and at once the transformation becomes the name of the place and of the god. The property of the place is now the property of Apollo. In the same way, Apollo acquires the name of the spring Telphousa, who had tried to restrict the “name” of her property to her own proper name. She at first persuaded Apollo to build his temple elsewhere, “so that the fame (κλέος) upon the land might belong to Telphousa herself and not to him who works from afar” (275–276). Once Apollo sees through her ruse, however, he {145|146} charges, “Telphousa, so you were not destined to possess this lovely place by tricking my mind and to pour down beautifully-flowing water. Here indeed there will be my fame (κλέος) as well and not yours only” (379–381). With that, he buries her streams under a crag and builds an altar nearby, where “all pray to the lord with the epithet ‘Telphusian,’ because he shamed (ᾔσχυνε) the streams of holy Telphousa” (382–387). Apollo’s oracular “straight direction” thus proves itself preeminently in the case of Apollo himself: his words to Pytho and Telphousa are an efficacious prophecy of his property and proper names.

In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, therefore, the harmonious lyre, the straight arrow, accurate speech, and proper naming all embody the power of unerring re-presentation. This mode is claimed for the voice of the god, for the voice of his surrogates, the Delian Maidens, and for the voice of the hymnist who re-presents the voice of the “blind man from Chios.” But in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, this “straight arrow” of ideal invocation is deflected by the competing and completing mode of imitation, the mode, that is, of writing.

In the invention and subsequent exchange of the lyre, Hermes and Apollo themselves enact the relation between writing and speech. Hermes gives to Apollo that which Apollo originally had, that of which he is the origin, his “original” meaning, but in so doing, Hermes belies any stable, originary attribution. Here in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, this double origin of the lyre is not like the controlled pairings of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, where presence and absence, memory and oblivion, Delian and Pythian are clearly defined. It is the mobile doubling of inebriation, the doubling of deceptive imitation, in which the mind’s eye cannot logically separate the two origins, or at least not without calling one false and the other true. That sort of control by true/false opposition is, in fact, attempted in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, but without total success.

Hermes responds to this μῦθος of the elder with a κερδαλέος μῦθος “gainful speech” (463) in which he describes Apollo and the lyre in a way that would seem appropriate to the god. Just as Apollo had insisted on the originality of the lyre, so Hermes first insists on Apollo’s complete “knowledge” of divine utterance:

Then, as Apollo had called it a νεήφατος ὄσσα “new-spoken voice,” so Hermes casts the lyre as a sort of oracular voice, an instrument that accurately reflects the presence or absence of “knowledge” in its player:

Such an oracular instrument would appear an appropriate λιγύφονος ἑταίρη “clear-voiced companion” (478) for Apollo, a curved shell for the arrow of knowledge and straight speech. The voice of the lyre will accurately repeat the “knowledge” of its questioner, Apollo, just as Apollo’s oracular voice will accurately repeat his “knowledge” of the βουλὴ Ζηνός “plan of Zeus” (538), the knowledge that in turn repeats Διὸς ὀμφή “the voice of Zeus” (471). The doubling here seems stable and proper, therefore, to Apollo: the lyre first belonged to Hermes and it now belongs to Apollo; to knowledgeable questioning the lyre responds harmoniously and to ignorant questioning it returns dissonance.

These doublets befit the Apollo of the double hymn. They make the lyre a proper possession for him and thus promise an even exchange for the cattle that were his property. But as soon as the exchange is made, the earlier, ambivalent character of the lyre reasserts itself. A look at the intervening theft of the cattle makes clear why. After retracing the theft for which this lyre is supposed to pay, we see that no exchange of property is even.

Thus the threat posed by the writing of Hermes to the speech of Apollo is the loss of original, proper identity. Unlike invocation, which takes the name in order to re-present the god, this writing attempts to appropriate Apollo’s property, to create a double with the same property as the signified. Unlike apostrophe, in which doubling is re-presentation in a different place and not an imitation, the appropriation of writing attempts to imitate the original. Hermes makes himself a double with the same property as Apollo. He disguises his own identity and takes on Apollo’s “proper name.”

Apollo is now “peritropaic” himself, “greatly bewildering (περιτροπέων) the tribes of unenviable men” (542). For the mantic god will not simply re-present his knowledge of the “plan of Zeus,” but will present to humans two sorts of signs, a double in which the true cannot be distinguished from its imitation:

Apollo’s oracular speech is now a double in which one sign, like writing, is the indistinguishable imitation of the other, meaningful sign of speech. It offers two kinds of signs—ones not unlike the two categories of the Muses’ speech in Hesiod or the two gates of dreams in the Odyssey—one of which is common, meaningless in itself, but indistinguishable by humans from proper, meaningful speech. These signs can be read only by those who know ahead of time whether their desire to know exceeds the divine desire to reveal, that is, whether their desire transgresses the division between divine and human knowledge. But this is an exclusively divine knowledge, as far as humans are concerned. For in yet another exchange/theft, Apollo, now the twin of his younger, mercantile brother, will, as he says, “take the gifts” in any case. Apollo’s signs bear no diacritical mark.

This movement of distinct into indistinct doubles, of origin into shared originality, of proper into common property, of speech into speech with the structure of writing—this movement deflects the “straight arrow” of ideal re-presentation and blurs the target. This is the movement embodied by Hermes, by his theft of Apollo’s cattle, by his gift of Apollo’s lyre, and, finally, by Apollo too, whose prophetic speech now imitates Hermes’ writing. “Polytropic” Hermes has turned the “palintropic” harmony of Apollo’s instruments into a movement that literally “turns back” upon the god. What is the extent of this movement? Does it affect only the Apollo of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes or does it include the Apollo of the earlier hymn as well? Does the ideal re-presentation of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo remain intact?

If we look at the two hymns together, their modes of doubling no longer appear distinct. As the Derridean analysis “deconstructs” the distinction between original, living logos and derivative, dead writing by showing that speech “always already” shared the origin-less structure of writing, so the operation of imitation in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes exposes Apollo’s re-presentation as an imitation itself. By depriving Apollo of original possession of the lyre, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes dispossesses the earlier hymn of all that depends upon (that) original possession: the epiphany of Apollo as unique(ness) in name, prior(ness) in time, ubiquitous(ness) in space and accurate(ness) in speech. In light of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, what Apollo re-presents is not a/the “real thing,” but its appearance; not reality, but its compelling illusion. The insistent hymnic apostrophe does not completely re-present the god, but rather attempts to persuade the judging audience that the re-presentation is complete. This effort is unmistakable once the Homeric Hymn to Hermes supplements the story, but even in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo alone, it was “always already” evident. Consider again the three poetic/prophetic speakers. {154|155}

In establishing the prophetic authority of Apollo, the hymn ignores the contradiction between a unique, original, ubiquitous godhead and the non-original origin of his name and place of prophecy. The territorial epithets “Pythian” and “Telphusian” reflect not “proper” naming, but the taking of another’s “proper-ty.” Apollo’s name/place is stolen property, just as the cattle Hermes stole were Apollo’s “proper name.” By exposing his “own” as originally “other,” Apollo’s theft denies any stable, originary opposition between the terms: the opposition is imposed out of a desire for ownership, but all we can “own” is the property of another. The place of Apollo’s unique role, the original re-presentation of the father, is the place of his imitative appropriation of the property of the female/earth.

And what of the Delian Maidens themselves, the θεράπναι “attendants” of Apollo? It is in their song that the indecidability of re-presentation and imitation is most clear. On the one hand, the presence of the original speaker, the “each man,” establishes the difference between original and copy. But “each man” is so enchanted by the Maidens’ song that he can no longer distinguish between himself and this repetition of himself: “each man would say that he himself was speaking” (163–164). By his own testimony, the subject both asserts and denies his unique, prior status. “Each man” attributes to the Delian Maidens a re-presentation so ideal that it is indistinguishable from imitation. Like the double origin of the lyre, the mode of the Maidens’ “enchanting verisimilitude” cannot be decided. They are the θεράπναι of Hermes no less than of Apollo. {155|156}