#stallings

We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook, to name a few. Admittedly, Greek mythology has it all: love, sex, murder, incest, cannibalism, magical transformations, pirates, monsters, miracles. Surely some readers, though, will want to go even deeper, to tap into the ancient sources, incorrigibly plural and various.

These sources include Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s genesis and who-begat-whom of the gods, the Theogony. (Plus a chunk of ‘Greek’ mythology which we actually get via the Roman poet Ovid.) But much of the mythology concerning the Greek gods — not just the 12 Olympians but figures such as Hekate, Pan, the Sun and the Moon — comes to us from hymns.

In this gem of a book, Barry B. Powell gives us new translations of a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns. Organised not by chronology or manuscript but deity (starting with Zeus), it can be read straight or flipped through as a handy reference. Physically gorgeous — cloth, sewn, with a starry dust jacket and celadon-green end-papers — it would make a fine gift for a myth buff or classics enthusiast, or an ideal source book for a mythology course. With maps, sharp full-colour photographs of relevant ancient art and a glossary-cum-index (complete with pronunciation guide), the book is a pleasure to hold and easy to use, the size of a slender, well, hymnal.

Powell, a scholar and a translator who has tackled the three major epics, wears his learning as lightly as seersucker. He elucidates complex scholarly matters — manuscript traditions, Greek meter, Neo-Platonism — in layman’s language. ‘A hymn is a song to a god, originally sung, usually to a lyre,’ he begins, quietly tuning up. The hymns here are of four types: anonymous Homeric hymns; Orphic hymns associated with the legendary Orpheus; hymns composed by the Alexandrian polymath Callimachus (c. 310-c. 240 BC); and hymns by Proclus (AD 412-85), the ‘last of the great Classical Greek philosophers’, refining Neo-Platonism even as the classical world pivoted towards Christianity.

It is from the Homeric ‘Hymn to Demeter’ that we have the story of Hades and Persephone and the pomegranate seeds, so beloved of poets and artists. When Persephone, the young daughter of the agricultural goddess Demeter, is abducted by Hades, king of the underworld, we have this description:

Cheating on me

Saying mean things about me behind my back

Things I DO have to worry about my husband doing:

Buying an air fryer while I’m gone to make and eat every frozen food ever produced

Maybe bringing home, like, a bunch of stray cats

Eating 36 chocolate chip cookies at 2am

I was walking down Byron Street one day this past spring, heading to the post office in downtown Athens (an allowable outing under the lockdown—reason #2). It is a pleasant street, with one- and two-story neoclassical buildings in various stages of renovation or dilapidation, plus the odd souvenir shop and little hotel, leading up to the square of the Lysicrates monument, which was once used as a study in the Capuchin monastery. Lord Byron and his friend John Cam Hobhouse had stayed at the monastery in 1809. Byron Street abuts Shelley Street, both not far from the road known as the Street of the Philhellenes. Normally the area would have been thronged with souvenir-purchasing tourists, but Covid had left it strangely empty.

Byron works so nicely in Greek that it even has a declension. (The “Byron” of Byron Street—Vironos—is in the genitive.) Shelley, though, cannot even be written phonetically, since Greek lacks a “sh” sound. It takes a moment, looking at the street sign, to figure out what it is: Σέλλεϋ, “Selley.” Shelley remains distinctly foreign and un-Greek.