Homeric Hymn to Apollo

The Homeric Hymn to Apollo is the third and one of the longest of the collection, and it falls into two clearly distinct parts: a Delian section on the birth of Apollo on the floating island of Delos, and a Pythian section on his founding of the oracle at Delphi, including his slaying of the she-dragon there. Whether these were ever a single poem is an old and unresolved question in classical scholarship; the two halves differ in geography, emphasis and perhaps date, and many editors treat them as originally separate hymns joined in transmission.

The hymn is also one of antiquity's most quoted self-portraits of the oral poet. In the Delian section the singer addresses the girls who form the chorus at Apollo's festival and asks them, if anyone should come and ask who is the sweetest of singers, to answer that he is a blind man who lives in rocky Chios, a passage ancient readers took as the signature of Homer himself, and modern readers take as a precious, if conventional, glimpse of how such poetry presented its own performance. The ascription to Homer is ancient and, like the rest of the collection, not accepted.

The historian Thucydides quotes several lines of the Delian section in the fifth century BCE as evidence for the ancient Ionian festival at Delos, which makes the hymn one of the few in the collection with an external, datable citation confirming its antiquity by the Classical period. Callimachus and other Hellenistic poets drew on its Delphic material, and the hymn's account of Apollo's birth and his choice of Delphi shaped how later Greek literature imagined the god's two great cult centers.

The hymn contains a famous self description: the poet says he is a blind man who dwells in rocky Chios, a passage ancient readers took as the composer identifying himself, and it is this passage that later tradition used to support attributing the whole work, and eventually the Iliad and Odyssey as well, to Homer, an identification most modern scholars reject for the Homeric Hymns generally even where they accept it is old. The passage is quoted, remarkably, by Thucydides in the fifth century BCE, who cites the hymn's description of the festival at Delos as evidence for the ancient character of Ionian religious gatherings there, making this one of the earliest surviving instances of one ancient Greek author quoting another by name in something like the way an ancient testimonium is used, and confirming the hymn, or at least its Delian portion, was already old and already circulating as an identifiable, citable text by Thucydides's own time.

Performance context matters here as much as authorship: hymns of this kind were composed for recitation by rhapsodes, professional performers of epic verse, at religious festivals rather than for private reading, and the Delian portion in particular fits the Ionian festival at Delos that Thucydides describes, complete with competitions among singers, which several scholars have suggested explains its otherwise puzzling self promotional request that the Delian maidens remember the blind singer of Chios kindly among visitors, a plausible bid by a real, competing performer for future recognition embedded within an ostensibly religious composition.