did not separate religion from other activities, but included it in the sense that the gods and their entourage made themselves felt, and demanded recognition, in all walks of life. It might be true to say that the gods then were as omnipresent and omnipotent as the Internet today. As this spreads its tentacles into almost all our activities nowadays, and watches over our shoulder, so then the Greeks believed they lived and prospered by the grace of the gods and suffered, and died, by the will of the gods. Nevertheless it is important to remember that at this time “religion” was organized only in the sense that the early polis began to choose its priests, that is, the functionaries who would supervise sacrifice on the various civic altars, and the times that was appropriate. Otherwise there were many freelancers: prophets, seers, purveyors of the Mysteries, healers, and so on.13 They were a motley crew, as Aristophanes liked to point out later.14 Their reputation was, no doubt, predicated on their apparent success. The Greek army attacking Troy had its Chalcas; the Spartans at Plataea their Teisamenos; the Ten Thousand in Xenophon’s Anabasis their Silanos (1.7.18), or generally “prophets” (4.3.17 μάντεις).15 Likewise, holy scripture had never been organized into a unity like the books of the Bible; there were sacred texts such as those composed by hexameter poets such as Orpheus, Musaios, Olen, but these did not form a coherent unity, and nobody tried to force them into such. Thus “religion” did not exist as a recognized body of sacred scripture. All these people and entities vied with each other for the truth,16 as, indeed, did the gods. There was competition and rivalry among the gods, as there was among holy men on earth. True, as Herodotus says, Homer and Hesiod did their best to give the Greeks a theogony, and organize their worship into something like a coherent system (2.52), but their works were still poetry and nothing like holy law, or catechism.
So when the gods and ritual are invoked in lyric poetry we should bear this in mind. The poets were calling on a vast conglomerate of traditional hiera (lit. “sacred things”), by no means to be scorned in its numen (lit. “holy power”), but not part of what might be called a system politic. The famous case of Sappho fr. 1 Campbell takes the form of a genuine private prayer to Aphrodite with many features of the ancient prayer-hymn;17 we would, I think, certainly admit this piece to the category “private religion,” but it is equally certainly not a cult hymn in the sense of a song repeatedly sung by a congregation engaged in cult worship. Or we might take several of Alcaeus’ fragments in which recognized gods are called upon, again, with many features of the traditional hymn, but with a recognizable purpose of calling the gods’ support for Alcaeus’ faction (his stasis) on Lesbos.18 Again, definitely religion, but hardly “official” worship. Later on, some genuine cult hymns do indeed come to light. One of the most interesting is the Cretan Hymn for the Great Kouros.19 Its precise dating is a matter of debate but it may be very old. The inscription which transmits it to us is, admittedly, much later. But this indeed is genuine cult lyric, with a recognizable lyric meter (ionics) and a refrain (ephymnion) which no doubt rang out when the congregation sang it. Some other “authentic” cult hymns are equally late: the inscriptions on the Athenian Treasure-House at Delphi recording hymnic compositions by Limenaios and Athenaios are hymns to Apollo in ionic meter for the ritual known as Pythais (a procession from Athens to Delphi).20 Again, clear cases of cult hymns, but originating in the second century BC. In this essay the texts we collected in Furley and Bremer 2001 will be largely taken as read; it will perhaps be of greater interest to the reader if we concentrate here on new developments: new texts and new approaches. Let us begin with the latter.
Some Recent Research
A new line with regard to the choral lyric of Pindar and Bacchylides has been taken by Barbara Kowalzig, whose central hypothesis is that the fragments of Pindar and Bacchylides, sung by choruses representing their state of origin, contain myths which reflect local, or regional, history.21 That is, the myths which they relate are aetiological in the sense that they give an aition or grounding, to the social history of the performers and recipients of one such example of choreia. An example: Pindar’s sixth Paian tells—among other things—of Neoptolemus’ death and burial at Delphi. Kowalzig argues that this myth somehow reflects the ambivalent position of the Amphictyons at Delphi: they exert control over Delphi but are not actually the local owners of the cult. Neoptolemus’s position can be seen as somehow analogous: an opponent of Apollo, yet buried, and given hero worship within the cult precinct. Similarly Kowalzig examines missions to the Delia festival during the period of Attic hegemony: cities positioned themselves with respect to the Delian League by contributing—or staying away—from the festival. One might say that they voted by their dances.22 With great attention to detail and vast scope of the socio-political history of each cult locality she attends to, Kowalzig has illuminated above all the socio-historical dimension of the myths sung by Pindar and Bacchylides, with particular focus on their cult poetry. Myth is never innocent in these compositions, but rather encoded history, or even politics.
The dissertation by Yuriy Lozynsky (2014) takes up the gauntlet thrown down by Kowalzic, and Furley and Bremer, in the sense that he argues against a monocausal interpretation of cult lyric in favor of a plurality and hierarchy of factors in their composition. Yes, they employ hieratic rhetoric (Furley and Bremer), and reflect local socio-political realities (Kowalzig), but there are other factors as well, and Lozynsky makes it his job to show the various components, or layers of significance, in these texts. The key ingredient in his work is that of “stakeholders,” that is, the various parties who are involved and interested in the presentation of a cult hymn.23 Of course there are the gods, the actual addressees of a hymn, but the human side is not simply the audience. Lozynsky identifies “hosts,” for example, the Delphians, or Delians, where the hymns are performed, the presenters, who are usually a trained chorus, perhaps from a different city, such as Athens or Thebes, the poet who composes the hymn, and perhaps other performers such as musicians. His thesis quite rightly points to the performance context of cult hymns, and how the various stakeholders influence the shape and content of the hymnic text. This work could perhaps be linked to the essay by Carey, which seeks to identify the identity and singing voice of monodic compositions and choral works.24 The important point here is the way singers “construct” their identity and “negotiate” a relationship with the deity or entity hymned.
An interesting development was also marked by Laura Swift’s monograph on sacred songs mirrored in Attic drama.25 The idea here—one anticipated in more rudimentary terms by Furley and Bremer in Greek Hymns—was that the choruses of Greek drama frequently sing songs which are “like” cult hymns or traditional songs but embedded, of course, in the dramatic context. Her book is less focused on the formal attributes of choral lyric and how they recur in tragic choruses; she concentrates more on the imagery and context suited to the lyric forms and how these are mirrored in tragedy. An example is the paianic song in Sophokles’ OT in which the chorus sing a long paian which forms the parodos of the play. The audience is perhaps led to believe in salvation when it hears this type of song, but, if so, it is deceived, as the play gradually leads to disaster. Similarly in Euripides’ Ion, paianic song in honor of Apollo by the chorus, stands in contrast to Apollo’s negative role in the play. There is, in the opinion of Swift, a tension between paianic mood and the development of the play.26 She also considers epinician, a genre which traditionally and socially celebrates great deeds, but the epinician sung by the chorus in Euripides’ Herakles leads to an ironic effect when juxtaposed with Herakles’ butchering of his family. One might in fact align the thrust of this work with the older subject of tragic irony, but played out in a new arena. Here the tragic motif examined is the choral song imitating genres of choral lyric placed contrapuntally to the development of the tragedy. Another aspect of her work is the alignment of gender in choral song and the heroine of the play. Thus, partheneia and hymenals for female leads and epinikia and paians for men. The choral lyrics here are not always, it seems, placed contrapuntally to the plot; if I understand her correctly, the third stasimon of Euripides’ Helen, a notoriously difficult piece, can be seen as a kind of partheneion in that Demeter must become reconciled to her daughter’s gender (i.e., sexuality), which
