The Chryses Episode as an Epichoric Hymn

Abstract

This chapter discusses hexametrical hymns in the archaic period that were closely tied to local rituals, such as processions, sacrifices, libations and so forth, that focused on epichoric deities and that detailed the interactions between the gods and men and how good relations might be established between them. The discussion is framed around the well-known Chryses episode in the Iliad and argues that a good deal of the first book of the poem—how Agamemnon insults Apollo’s priest, how the god responds with the widespread slaughter of the Greeks, and how eventually the god is mollified—was originally composed as a freestanding hexametrical hymn to Apollo designed for performance in the local sanctuary of Apollo Smintheus on the Troad. The chapter focuses on the unanticipated paean-singing at Chryse and the two variant proems to an “older Iliad” that seem to reflect an earlier stage of composition, in which the poem began by focusing on the anger of Apollo (a common theme, for a local hymn), rather than the anger of Achilles, and discusses a variety of other cases in which shorter epichoric hymns seem to have been embedded into Panhellenic narratives: the so-called “Hymn to the Muses” at the start of the Hesiodic Theogony, the Eleusinian episode at the heart of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, or the Delian and Crisaean sections of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo.