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CONCLUSION
This last Hymn is representative. From the seven lines of this
little “Homeric" poem we gain background to complications and sometimes
incongruities in the extant “Homeric" epics, as we have
done also from others of the Hymns collection. The Hymns indicate
areas of interest and styles of intervention for various gods as they
were revered or feared over several early-historic generations, from
the time the earliest Hymns were composed and transcribed down to
ca. 500 BCE. Even if, like some of the others, the last one I discussed,
to Poseidon, postdates creation of the extant Odyssey, it and
they demonstrate belief about supernatural forces and personalities
that contemporary and near-contemporary ancient Greeks shared
with the Odyssey-poet, whose polytheological narrative I am undertaking
to comprehend with the aid of these Hymns and of iconographic
evidence from visual arts of the same centuries.
1 On dating see R. Janko, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns. Diachronic Development
in Epic Diction (Cambridge University Press 1982) and more recently Ken
Dowden, “The Epic Tradition in Greece", pp. 193—195, in R. L. Fowler, ed.,
Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge University Press 2004).
This paper is an amplified version of my conference paper entitled “The Offices
of Olympus" presented April 2008 at the annual meeting of the Classical Association
of the Middle West and South in Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.
2 In Iliad he is mentioned in Diomedes' account of his persecutor Lycurgus
at 6.130—140, in Odyssey as involved in the execution of Ariadne at 11.324—325.
The Hephaestian urn that eventually contained Achilles' and Patroclus' ashes was a
gift of Dionysus to Thetis (Od. 24,74—7r), as a thank-you for her protection when
he fled underwater from Lycurgus (Il. 6.136—137)?
3 Later literature connects him with another priest of Apollo, Anius of Delos,
son, too, of Apollo but also (on his mother's side) great-grandson of Dionysus.
Anius s begot three daughters Oino, Elais, and Spermo, who were drafted by Agamemnon
and miraculously provisioned the Achaean expeditionary force at Troy
with the “Mediterranean triad" of staple foods. Here, as in the Odyssey reference,
Apollo seems to be the primary source of wine — and olive oil and grain! In the
Iliad, the viniferous island of Lemnos. Confusing and often contradictory traditions
about Orpheus in relation to “Apollo" and “Dionysus" suggest that in Thrace and
on some Aegean islands a god who had some characteristics of each lies in the pre-
-literary background. (Apollo—Dionysus—Zeus relations are, of course, a huge topic,
hardly to be covered here.)
4 He was Apollo's son by a daughter of Staphylus, “Grapes", a mortal son of
the Wine-god, who perhaps bearing the same conceptual relationship to Dionysus
as Persephone does to Demeter. Anius in turn sired three daughters, Oino, Elais,
and Spermo who were drafted by Agamemnon and miraculously provisioned the
Achaean expeditionary force at Troy with the “Mediterranean triad" of staple
foods, respectively wine, olive and its oil, and grain.
5 Dim memory of viticultural prehistory might well trace the cultivated grapevine
to Thrace, whence it spread from a homeland east of the Black Sea by way
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