Dulce Et Decorum Est: the Homeric Hymn to Ares

 In the Homeric Hymns the Hymn to Ares is a rebuttal to the notion in popular media that Ares is incompetent, amoral, or evil. This Hymn, on the other hand, is a warrior's prayer for courage and discipline in battle and preferably no need to go to war in the first place. The initial lines of the Hymn are a list of complimentary epithets. Such a list is a common feature of the beginning of Homeric Hymns and often a primary component of abbreviated Hymns. I wonder, therefore, if such introductions were not pedagogical tool for memorizing the appropriate epithets. In contemporary times, the line "immortal, invisible, god only wise" is virtually unforgettable. These epithets could further provide an inspiration for the poet to fill the space between the invocation and the missa est, either with a known tale or a tale of his own invention appropriate to the god and rendered unverifiable by attribution to a distant region. A contemporary example of the former could be the responses before and after the Gospel, which in liturgical traditions is determined by a lectionary; an example of the latter could be the Prayers of the People, which contains sufficient flexibility to include quotidian concerns.

The Clever Old Man: An Essay on The Hymn to Hermes

 The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is sometimes placed in time between the more serious hymns and the satirical Battle of the Frogs and the Mice. It certainly leans towards a folkloric content while maintaining the format of its more sober brethren! Yet one of the features of epic structure is its flexibility - episodes may be expanded, contracted, or omitted depending on the whims of the audience and performer or broad time restrictions. Shorter and longer Hymns appear within this corpus. In Homeric Hymn 4, the longer and better-known Hymn to Hermes, the interactions of Hermes and Apollo with the Old Man are brief, since the Hymn is about Hermes and Apollo rather than Hermes and mortals; yet the Old Man is the only mortal featured, and the Hymn is insistent on the relationship of Hermes to both immortal gods and mortal Men. If Hermes possesses such important ties to mortals, the Old Man is the only mortal with whom he has any relationship within the Hymn. The Old Man's interaction with Hermes and Apollo, therefore, warrants examination. 

Hermes' interaction with the Old Man is brief; how threatening Hermes' speech is depends on one's perspective, but it is certain that Hermes has instructed the Old Man to pretend he did not see nor hear the things he saw and heard. In many contexts, that would be an instruction to lie, an extraordinary and impossible demand when the Old Man's next encounter with a god is one with the god of prophecy! Yet there is one specific place where falsehood and truth are so bound that one could tread the middle path between the two: a court of law. The interaction between Hermes and Apollo, after all, is a legal comedy. The Greek word used to describe Hermes' account of his actions before the throne of Zeus, the god of oaths as well as the father of the litigants, is not 'alethia', the more common word for truth, but rather 'atrekeos', the meaning of which is more closely 'technically correct'. This meaning of truth is consistent with the Old Man's reply to Apollo's interrogation: the Old Man reveals to Apollo his interaction with Hermes but only claims to have to seemed to see it: a day-old baby driving cattle backwards with Hellenic snowshoes is so surprising that one might well assume it was a hallucination. Many gods would be displeased by this betrayal, but Hermes, as a god of prevarication and precocious cleverness, might admire the quickness of such a mortal. The Old Man's fate is not revealed in the Hymn because this Hymn is about gods rather than Men. Yet in a version of Hermes' deeds in a less high register, one in which the role of Hermes as guide of Men took precedence over Olympian sibling rivalry, the Old Man's role would become pivotal.

The key lies in the exact word Apollo uses when he asks the Old Man if he has seen anyone rustling his cattle: he uses the word 'anera'. This term means either 'mortal', as in 'King of Men and Gods' or 'adult male'. In casual speech, the difference between 'anera' and 'tina' 'who' would be trivial, but this is a legal comedy, and in legal matters much that is trivial elsewhere attains significance. When Apollo asks the Old Man whether he has seen an 'anera', the Old Man can answer in the negative because Hermes is not a mortal nor is he an adult male. This level of semantics is not unique to the origin of Hermes: Apollo, who is consistently referred to as 'son of Leto' in the Hymn, was born on a floating island due to Hera's restrictions on Leto's place of parturition, while Zeus was hidden in a cradle hung from the ceiling so that he was technically neither in heaven nor on earth nor in the sea. The Old Man, in order to keep up with the gods of the Hymn, must operate on a commensurate level. 

A focus on the Old Man in the Hymn to Hermes is inconsistent with the general structure of the Homeric Hymns, which privilege the experiences of immortals. This privilege obscures the importance of the Old Man to the Hymn and his potential centrality to a telling of the story in a less elevated register. The framing of the Hymn as a legal comedy restores this element, or, if the material was lowbrow in origin, preserves some small portion in the august halls of Homeric epic.