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    The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays
    The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays
    The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays
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    The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays

    By Helene P. Foley

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    The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, composed in the late seventh or early sixth century B.C.E., is a key to understanding the psychological and religious world of ancient Greek women. The poem tells how Hades, lord of the underworld, abducted the goddess Persephone and how her grieving mother, Demeter, the goddess of grain, forced the gods to allow Persephone to return to her for part of each year. Helene Foley presents the Greek text and an annotated translation of this poem, together with selected essays that give the reader a rich understanding of the Hymn's structure and artistry, its role in the religious life of the ancient world, and its meaning for the modern world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 31, 2013
    ISBN9781400849086
    The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays

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      The Homeric Hymn to Demeter - Helene P. Foley

      THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER

      THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER

      TRANSLATION, COMMENTARY, AND INTERPRETIVE ESSAYS

      Edited by

      Helene P. Foley

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

      COPYRIGHT © 1994 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      POLITICS AND POMEGRANATES COPYRIGHT © 1977 BY MARILYN A. KATZ PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540

      IN THE UNITED KINGDOM: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER : TRANSLATION, COMMENTARY, AND INTERPRETIVE ESSAYS / HELENE P. FOLEY.

      P. CM.

      INCLUDES A TRANSLATION, THE GREEK TEXT, A LITERARY COMMENTARY, A DISCUSSION OF THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES AND RELATED CULTS OF DEMETER, AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY H. P. FOLEY, AND 5 PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ARTICLES ON THE POEM AND RELATED ISSUES.

      INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

      ISBN 0-691-06843-7 — ISBN 0-691-01479-5

      1. HYMN TO DEMETER. 2. HYMNS, GREEK (CLASSICAL)—TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH. 3. HYMNS, GREEK (CLASSICAL)—HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 4. DEMETER (GREEK MYTHOLOGY) IN LITERATURE. 5. ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES IN LITERATURE. 6. DEMETER (GREEK MYTHOLOGY)—POETRY. I. FOLEY, HELENE P., 1942– . II. HYMN TO DEMETER. ENGLISH & GREEK. 1993.

      PA4023.H83H66 1993

      883′.01—DC20 93-761

      THIS BOOK HAS BEEN COMPOSED IN GALLIARD

      THE PAPER USED IN THIS PUBLICATION MEETS THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS OF ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997)

      (PERMANENCE OF PAPER)

      THIRD PRINTING, WITH BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDUM, AND FIRST PRINTING IN THE MYTHOS SERIES, 1999

      HTTP://PUP.PRINCETON.EDU

      PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

      7 9 10 8

      ISBN-13: 978-0-691-01479-1 (pbk.)

      ISBN-10: 0-691-01479-5 (pbk.)

      For Nicholas Foley

      CONTENTS

      LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

      PART 1. THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION, COMMENTARY, AND BACKGROUND 1

      TEXT AND TRANSLATION OF THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 2

      COMMENTARY ON THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 28

      BACKGROUND: THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES AND WOMEN’S RITES FOR DEMETER 65

      PART 2. INTERPRETIVE ESSAY ON THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 77

      INTERPRETING THE HYMN TO DEMETER 83

      THE THEOLOGY OF THE MYSTERIES 84

      VARIANTS OF THE MYTH AND THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VERSION IN THE HYMN TO DEMETER 97

      FEMALE EXPERIENCE IN THE HYMN TO DEMETER 103

      MARRIAGE 104

      GENDER CONFLICT AND THE COSMOLOGICAL TRADITION 112

      THE MOTHER/DAUGHTER ROMANCE 118

      THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MYSTERIES 137

      THE HYMN TO DEMETER AND THE POLIS 142

      CHRISTIANITY AND THE HYMN TO DEMETER 150

      THE INFLUENCE OF THE HYMN TO DEMETER AND ITS MYTH 151

      APPENDIX 169

      Eleusis and Athens 169

      The Hymn to Demeter as a Panhellenic Poem 175

      PART 3. FURTHER INTERPRETATION: CONTRIBUTED ARTICLES 179

      WITHDRAWAL AND RETURN: AN EPIC STORY PATTERN IN THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER AND IN THE HOMERIC POEMS 181

      MARY LOUISE LORD

      SOME FUNCTIONS OF THE DEMOPHOÖN EPISODE IN THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 190

      NANCY FELSON-RUBIN AND HARRIET M. DEAL

      CONCERNING THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 198

      JEAN RUDHARDT; TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY LAVINIA LORCH AND HELENE P. FOLEY

      POLITICS AND POMEGRANATES: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER 212

      MARILYN ARTHUR, WITH A PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR WRITTEN TWENTY YEARS LATER

      FAMILY STRUCTURE AND FEMININE PERSONALITY 243

      NANCY CHODOROW

      BIBLIOGRAPHY 266

      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ADDENDUM 281

      INDEX LOCORUM 283

      GENERAL INDEX 289

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      After p. 75

      1. Hades’ abduction of Persephone. Apulian red-figure hydria of the fourth century B.C.E. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Miss Matilda W. Bruce, 1907 (07.128.1).

      2. Marble relief of Demeter and Korê (or Hekate?) with torches. Ca. 460 B.C.E. Eleusis Museum 5085. Photo German Archaeological Institute at Athens, Eleusis 298.

      3. The Torre Nova Sarcophagus. Palazzo Borghese, Rome. Photo courtesy of the German Archaeological Institute, Rome.

      4. The Return of Persephone: Persephone rising from the earth in the presence of Hermes, Hekate, and Demeter. Attic red-figure bell-krater, attributed to the Persephone painter. Ca. 440 B.C.E. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1928 (28.57.23).

      5. Demeter’s Return to Olympus. Attic black-figure hydria. Ca. 520 B.C.E. Martin Von Wagner Museum 308, University of Würzburg. Photo: K. Oehrlein.

      6. General Plan of the Sanctuary at Eleusis (by John N. Travlos), illustration 17 from Carl Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), Bollingen Series 65.4.

      7. Attic clay stand from Eleusis depicting Demeter enthroned with a polos and garland, Korê wearing a polos and holding a branch, and a procession of worshipers. Athens, National Museum 501. Ca. 500 B.C.E.

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      OVER THE DECADE of the 1980s, the traditional Western canon has been subject to ardent defense and criticism. The privileging of the works of upper-class, Western, white males in standard introductory humanities courses across the United States has been at the center of this controversy. In many cases these courses have been adjusted to include a few token works by female, minority, or non-Western authors. Even this minimal gesture is more difficult in the case of Greco-Roman antiquity. Classical works often form a substantial part of the reading list of such courses, but few Greek and Roman authors were nonwhite or female. As a scholar and teacher of courses on women in antiquity, I often found myself consulted about what could be done. This book developed as part of an attempt to reconsider the syllabus of the typical core curriculum in response to the questions that have been raised about it. Western culture courses will continue to be taught (if not necessarily required) for many good reasons: above all to provide an understanding of the strengths and limits of the tradition. In reading Western literature critically, as anthropologists of the tradition, we must ask questions of the texts that the original authors might not have dreamed of asking. At the same time, when we introduce new texts into such courses, they should ideally continue to provoke dialogue of the same depth and complexity as well as to articulate in a provocative fashion with those already included.

      Classical literature, far more explicitly than much later Western literature until the nineteenth century, virtually begs us to ask questions about gender. Plato and Aristotle confronted such issues directly. Most Greek comedies and tragedies commonly taught put gender conflict at the heart of the plot and allow their female characters to challenge male authority and assumptions: Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, to name a few. As male-generated texts, these works reflect anxieties and concerns experienced by at least some Greek males about the nature of their society. What is largely missing, however, is a female perspective that could provide a glimpse of what ancient women meant to each other and the concerns that were of greatest significance to them. Although we have very little to go on in this respect, the fragments of the poet Sappho have of late been successfully taught in translation to a broad, general audience. In my view the text that can best supplement Sappho in putting the experience of ancient women and its symbolic importance into some perspective is the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, even though the anonymous author (or authors) of the poem was far more likely to have been male. (Sappho herself wrote hymns, but those who recited in the public contexts where the Hymn to Demeter was likely to have been performed would have been largely or perhaps exclusively men.)

      As will be emphasized in my interpretive essay (Part 2 of this book), the Hymn puts the female experience of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, as well as the disguised Demeter’s interactions with the mortal women of Eleusis, at the center of its narrative; it closes with the founding of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which accepted initiates of both sexes. The Demeter/Persephone myth was celebrated in all-female rites of Demeter. Because it was as participants in religious rites from marriages and funerals to festivals that ancient women engaged most directly and significantly in the public life of their culture, a poem that illuminates that experience can give us important insights into the lives of the Greek women of antiquity.

      Nevertheless, there are many other reasons for giving this important poem a more central place than it has generally had in courses on Western culture and on classical antiquity. This book is in part an attempt to introduce general readers to the Hymn to Demeter, and to provide such readers with the background necessary to read the text in a knowledgeable and sophisticated fashion. In particular, I aim to show how the poem resonates with canonical texts like the Homeric epics, Greek drama, or the New Testament and how a knowledge of this text can correct a number of popular misapprehensions about ancient religion. Composed in the period between Homer and Hesiod and literature of the classical city-state, the Hymn offers a basis for discussing the transition between those two important periods and demonstrates the central role that ritual and cult (as opposed to myth) played in ancient religion; the poem also illustrates how the view of divinity offered in mystery cults differs from that represented in Homer and tragedy and permits us to examine a central religious mystery that is based on female experience and especially on the relation of mother to daughter. In addition, a knowledge of ancient mystery cults makes the transition to Christianity easier to locate historically and to understand.

      By treating the Hymn to Demeter separately from the other Homeric hymns, I want to present the poem as a profound short epic, an outstanding representative of an often underrated literary form, and a brilliant work of literature in its own right. The earliest writers of Greek epic attributed an equal amount of prestige to hymnic poetry, the celebration of the deeds of the gods, and to heroic epic. As Hesiod put it in his famous cosmological poem the Theogony, itself an expanded hymn to the god Zeus: Yet the poet, servant of the Muses, hymns the famous deeds of men of old and the blessed gods who inhabit Olympus. (99–101)¹ Yet hymns, including the Homeric hymns, have been relatively neglected in recent times. For all these reasons, my interpretive essay aims to provide a broad range of insights into the text itself.

      The Hymn to Demeter is a central text in Greek mythology courses precisely because it has shown itself to be accessible to analysis from many modern theoretical perspectives: Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, structuralism, sociological analysis of myth, myth and ritual theory. The poem and its subject, the myth of Demeter and Persephone, have also been of interest to a wide range of feminists such as sociologists Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan; literary critic Marianne Hirsch, who is interested in representations of the mother/daughter relation; poet Adrienne Rich; and spiritual feminists interested in appropriating pagan myths and cults of goddesses to create a new religion revolving around female deity. In fact, the Hymn to Demeter has already found its way into women’s studies courses. Although my interpretive essay (Part 2) discusses all critical approaches to the poem, it emphasizes the poem’s insights into questions of gender and female experience. The Hymn offers a challenging perspective on the relation of male and female subjects to the forms of fantasy and power that shaped ancient Greek social life. The poem’s cyclical rather than linear narrative (mother and daughter separate and unite eternally in a seasonal pattern) represents a female quest that differs significantly from the male quests embodied in the myths of Gilgamesh or Odysseus.

      My translation of the Hymn to Demeter is designed to be literal but readable, while following as closely as possible the original lines of verse; the commentary gives the reader important literary and historical background. Readers interested in poetic translations of the Hymn should consult the efforts of Athanassakis (1976), Boer (1970), Hines (1972), and Sargent (1973). Although the Hymn represents a myth that had particularly deep associations with the cult whose founding it describes—to the point where participants imitated events in the narrative throughout the rites—I have deliberately chosen to separate the discussion of the content of the Mysteries themselves, along with other closely related cults of Demeter based on this myth, from my examination of the Hymn itself. Most of our sources for the Mysteries come from periods later than the Hymn and we do not know, even though parts of the cult are founded during its narrative, what form they may have taken at the early date of this poem. More important, scholarly discussion of the content of the Mysteries has tended to distract readers of the Hymn from examining the poem on its own terms. The Greek text is reprinted from the Oxford text of N. J. Richardson (1974) unless otherwise noted. It is included for the sake of readers who would like to follow the text and commentary with the original. I have been unable to acknowledge fully my debt to Richardson’s magisterial commentary.

      The interpretive essay, which represents my own reading of the Hymn, is in some respects openly tendentious. It also orients the reader to the collection of essays on the poem reprinted at the back of the book. Each of these essays on the Hymn was selected both for its intrinsic excellence and for the important role it has played in the history of criticism of the text. Each also represents a different approach to interpreting the poem. Because the methodologies employed in these essays have proved valuable in the study of Greek poetry generally, they expose readers to techniques that can be used elsewhere. Mary Louise Lord’s essay builds on the work done in comparative studies in Mediterranean and Near Eastern mythology and oral epic to show how the same underlying story patterns are at work in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hymn to Demeter. Jean Rudhardt’s essay locates the Hymn and its narrative in the context of early Greek cosmology. Nancy Rubin’s and Harriet Deal’s narratological analysis illuminates the connections between the divine story that frames the narrative of the poem and the separate encounter between Demeter and mortals at its center. Marylin Arthur offers a reading of the poem that combines Freudian, feminist, and structuralist perspectives. Also included is an essay on the psychology of the mother/daughter relation by the sociologist Nancy Chodorow, which, together with the Freudian and post-Freudian material in the essay by Marylin Arthur, forms the background for my own interpretation of the mother/daughter relation in the poem.

      Readers should begin the book with the translation and commentary, along with the section on the Eleusinian Mysteries and related cults of Demeter, because all the essays assume a knowledge of the text and the historical background of the Mysteries. My own interpretive essay depends on and adds to the arguments presented in the reprinted essays. It has been designed as a continuous argument, but its sections can be read separately. Readers with a theological or narratological bent will find of special interest the sections of the interpretive essay on The ‘Theology’ of the Mysteries, Gender Politics, and the Psychology of the Mysteries, as well as the essays by Lord, Rubin and Deal, and Rudhardt. Mythology students will profit from the sections on The ‘Theology’ of the Mysteries, Variants of the Myth, Gender Politics, and ‘The Mother/Daughter Romance, as well as the essays by Lord, Rudhardt, and Arthur; important extant versions of the myth in Greek and Roman antiquity are listed at the beginning of the commentary. Those concerned with gender studies will want to read both my interpretive essay and the essay by Arthur. The Appendix on Athens and Eleusis and The Hymn as a Panhellenic Poem" addresses scholarly controversies tangential to a literary interpretation of the Hymn to Demeter. It treats the historical and literary context in which the Hymn was probably composed.

      Because this book is designed to be accessible to the general reader, footnotes have been kept to a minimum and reference is made wherever possible to works in English. Spellings of a few familiar ancient Greek names (such as Aeschylus) are Latinized, their most familiar form in our culture; all other names, such as Korê, retain the Greek spelling. All abbreviations used in the text are defined in the Bibliography under the name of the relevant author, e.g., Page GLP. A reference such as frag. 63 Nauck indicates that Nauck is the editor of the volume of fragments referred to. The contributed articles in Part 3, all previously published, have been edited only to conform stylistically with each other and the book as a whole (see individual notes at article beginnings for other minor changes). Jenny Clay’s recent literary study of the Homeric hymns, The Politics of Olympus, came out after this book was well under way. I hope that this book will whet the appetite of enthusiastic readers to read Clay’s study, Richardson’s commentary, and the recent essay by Parker (1991), as well as other books and essays cited in the notes and in the bibliography.

      I am extremely grateful for the valuable comments I have received on an early draft of the manuscript from the students in my 1990 class on Women in Antiquity. Darice Birge, Erwin Cook, Frederick Griffiths, Marianne Hirsch, Vivian Nyitray, Dirk Obbink, Robert Parker, Nicholas Richardson, Richard Seaford, Karen Van Dyke, and Christian Wolff offered helpful suggestions for revision on an earlier draft. Duncan Foley gave the manuscript a final reading. I also profited from the opportunity to present oral versions of some parts of the interpretive essay at Smith College, Reed College, Emory University, Georgia State University, Oxford University, and a seminar in the Columbia Humanities Program. Deborah Boedeker and the other anonymous referee for Princeton University Press also provided valuable suggestions for revision. Marta Steele served as a careful copy editor for the Press. Revisions of this manuscript were made during the tenure of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

      I also wish to thank Classical Journal for the permission to reprint the essay by M. L. Lord, to Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica for the permission to reprint the essay by N. Felson-Rubin and H. Deal, to The Johns Hopkins University Press and Arethusa for the permission to reprint the essay by M. Arthur, to Museum Helveticum for permission to reprint a translated version of the essay by J. Rudhardt, to Stanford University Press for the permission to reprint the essay by N. Chodorow, and to Oxford University Press for the permission to reprint N. J. Richardson’s Greek text from The Hymn to Demeter (1974). I am also grateful for permission to quote from modern poems influenced by the Demeter/Persephone myth. An excerpt from Edgar Lee Master’s Persephone appears through the permission of Ellen C. Masters. A quotation from Dorothy Wellesley’s Demeter in Sicily appears courtesy of Withers Solicitors, 20 Essex Street, London WC2R 3AL. New Directions Publishing Corporation and Carcanet Press granted permission to quote from H.D.’s Demeter, in her Collected Poems 1912–1944, copyright 1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Quotations from Kathleen Raine’s Transit of the Gods appear courtesy of Hamish, Hamilton, 57–59 Long Acre, London WC2 E9JL. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. granted permission to quote from Robert Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs, in The Mills of the Kavanaughs, copyright 1951 by Robert Lowell and renewed 1979 by Harriet W. Lowell. An extract from The Return of Persephone by A. D. Hope from his Collected Poems appears courtesy of A. D. Hope and Collins/Angus & Robertson Publishers. Excerpts from The Book of Persephone by Robert Kelly (copyright 1978 by Robert Kelly, all rights reserved) are reprinted by permission of the publisher, McPherson and Company, P.O. Box 1126, Kingston, New York 12401. A part of Carolyn Kizer’s Persephone Pauses, from Mermaids in the Basement, copyright 1984 by Carolyn Kizer, is reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, Washington 98368. Excerpts from Michèle Roberts’s Persephone descends to the underworld and Persephone gives birth, published in The Mirror of the Mother, are reprinted by permission of Methuen London. Excerpts from Enid Dame’s Persephone appear courtesy of West End Press, and part of Margaret Atwood’s Double Persephone is reprinted by permission of Margaret Atwood, (c) 1980. W. W. Norton, Inc., granted permission to quote from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born.

      I am dedicating this book to my son Nicholas Foley, who loves the story told in the Hymn to Demeter.

      ¹ See also Odyssey 1. 338. Clay 1989: esp. 4–5 discusses the tradition of the criticism of the Homeric hymns. In ancient Greek tradition, the hymn remained an important literary form and enjoyed renewed popularity in the Hellenistic period.

      PART ONE

      THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION, COMMENTARY, AND BACKGROUND

      THE HOMERIC HYMN TO DEMETER

      Translated by Helene P. Foley

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