Writing the God: Form and Meaning in Callimachus, Hymn to Athena

Abstract

This paper aims to elucidate certain features of Callimachus' Fifth Hymn in ways, which, I hope, will be suggestive for the criticism of all the Hymns. In particular, I am interested in exploring how the mythic and religious dimensions of Callimachus' poetry can be sensibly discussed, while doing justice to the very strong sense of a changed world which the poems evoke; to this end the concluding section of the paper briefly examines related aspects of the Sixth Hymn to Demeter. Section 1 briefly places Hymns 5 and 6 within Callimachus' hymnal project as a whole1, Section 2 considers the cultic frame in which Hymn 5 is set, Section 3 discusses the elegiac metre of the poem, Section 4 considers Callimachus' treatment of the myth of Teiresias, and Section 5 seeks to set Hymns 5 and 6 within our study of Hellenistic culture as a whole.