ZBORNIK - Matica srpska

Odysseus' western archipelago before entering the Gulf of Corinth—
Ithaca itself, “and Dulichium, Same, and wooded Zacynthos" (l. 429
= Od. 9.24!) — resonates with another voyage of no return so far as
the crew is concerned, Odysseus' homeward one on the Phaeacian
ship in Odyssey 13.
A number of the shorter Hymns remark collaborations in one
“art" or other between. No. 25, to Muses and Apollo, celebrates the
collaboration in music between Apollo and the Muses; No. 27, the
second of the two hymns to Artemis in the collection, proclaims
musical ensemble between both of Leto's children and the Muses.
In both instances the Muses, though not given a specific number,
are plural. Their joining with the XÀritej in No. 27 suggests that
they, too, are a trio. In the epics, however, Muse is normally singular.
16 The singular Muse is the divine spirit whom the Odyssey-poet
invokes at the outset, and the one who Odysseus guesses taught
Phaeacian singer Demodocus — unless was it Apollo? (Od. 8.488).
According to little Hymn No. 21 to Apollo, the swan, as in Plato's
Apollonian dialogue Phaedo (84e—85b), is Phoebus' particular
bird, and it may therefore be so at two points in Iliad where this
and other avian species are associated with Asian peoples (2.459—
465 and 15.690—694). Swans are not only Apollonian, however,
since heroes named Cycnus are associated with Helius (a friend of
the Sun's son Phaëthon) and with Ares (whose son so named collides
with Heracles in a combat frequent in Black-figure vase-
-paintings); and this handsome bird is also associated with Aphrodite,
as her conveyance, and with Leda, as her lover the disguised
Zeus. Because no swan is mentioned in Odyssey, this multiplicity
does not affect my larger project of reading the gods' work there.
More pertinent is the aforementioned Apollo-Dionysus blending
in Hymn No. 26, where Dionysus frisks amid laurel (dÀcnh) inaddition
to his more familiar ivy. In Hymn 4 to Hermes, the industrious
infant god makes a fire-stick “taking a glorious branch of
laurel" (dÀcnhj ÈglaÁn Ózon Ñl3n, 109) and stripping it. We
might understand this as adding insult to injury, since the thief will
use the fire he thus ignites to complete the sacrifice of a pair of stolen
cows that belonged to his brother, the God of Laurel. We return
to Hermes below.
The one and only occurrence of laurel in Homeric epic, already
remarked above, is in the description of the entrance to Polyphemus'
cave. Wine from Apollo's priest Maron, also already noted,
plays an important role in the episode. In the Odyssey, which mentions
Dionysus only twice — neither time with reference to wine
(11.325, 24.74) — Apollo seems to be “in charge of" wine, which
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