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The New Politics of Olympos: Kingship in Kallimachos' Hymns by Michael Brumbaugh

2020; Classical Association of Canada; Volume: 74; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/phx.2020.0004

1929-4883

Monica Park,

Classical Antiquity Studies

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 151 The New Politics of Olympos: Kingship in Kallimachos' HYMNS. By Michael Brumbaugh. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 2019. Pp. 298. Michael Brumbaugh's The New Politics of Olympos poses an interesting question: how do Callimachus’ Hymns contribute to an emergent Hellenistic discourse on kingship? He tackles this issue through a careful consideration of the Hymns specifically in the new material context of the poetry book and the various intratextual relationships observable between the hymns when read as an intentionally ordered ensemble (3, 11). Those familiar with Jenny Strauss Clay’s The Politics of Olympos (Princeton 1989) will recognize the allusion in Brumbaugh’s title. Where Clay demonstrates how the relations between the Olympian gods as depicted in the four major Homeric Hymns (as well as Hesiod’s Theogony and Homeric epic) contribute to the archaic discourse on Panhellenism, Brumbaugh intends to show how Callimachus’ Hymns recast those divine family dynamics for the Hellenistic age (4). The book comprises two main parts: Part I (Chapters One to Three) serves as an extended commentary on the Hymn to Zeus, and Part II (Chapters Four to Six) covers the remaining five hymns. It proceeds by a series of close readings of the Hymns, mostly in the order in which they appear in the manuscript tradition, although the Hymn to Zeus is given by far the most attention. It may be surprising to note with the author that this is the first monograph-length treatment of Callimachus’ Hymns in English (13). The immense difficulty of pinning these poems down to a single thematic point—not to mention their variation in tone, narrative framing, and even metre—has led to a tendency in modern scholarship to focus on individual hymns instead. Brumbaugh has therefore undertaken a challenging task, and he has produced a work that sheds fresh light on divine relations as a kind of extended political allegory. The introduction clearly lays out the author’s twofold aim of evaluating the Hymns as a poetry book and as part of a nascent discourse on Hellenistic kingship. The historical context for publication of the Hymns is introduced briefly (and in more detail in individual chapters), but one misses a discussion here and elsewhere of the material context of book culture and, perhaps more importantly, of audience. Indeed, it is worth noting that discussion of the Hymns as a poetry book is largely absent in Part I; one must wait until Part II for this thread of the argument to be picked up again. Chapters One to Three all treat the Hymn to Zeus, which acts as the keystone for Brumbaugh’s reading of the Hymns. Chapter One contends that Callimachus refashions the story of Zeus’ violent succession as told in Hesiod’s Theogony and crafts “a counternarrative to quell anxieties surrounding the first dynastic transition” (22) from Ptolemy i Soter to Ptolemy ii Philadelphus. The chapter is tightly argued and builds on a general scholarly consensus for the dating of this hymn. Brumbaugh focuses on Callimachus’ techniques of distancing the narrative from Hesiodic precedent, often by omission (e.g., avoiding mention of Zeus’ thunderbolt because of Ptolemy ii’s half-brother and rival to the throne, Ptolemy Keraunos, 47), in order to emphasize dynastic continuity. Chapter Two offers a close reading of the second half of the hymn while homing in on the themes of kingly justice and virtue, as well as the relationship between kings and poets (54). Hesiod continues to be an important counterpoint here. The explicit aims of Chapter Three are to examine the relationship between king and poet in the light of “discourses of the patron-client relationship, the hymnic charis economy, and the language of the Ptolemaic court” (90). Brumbaugh’s approach to Callimachus’ hymns in this and 152 PHOENIX subsequent chapters is heavily influenced by scholarship on Pindar. In both Chapters Two and Three, I was left wanting more discussion of what it might mean, culturally and literarily, to move from the archaic basileus to the Ptolemaic one. It would also have been helpful to include a more extended discussion of the Hellenistic/Ptolemaic hymn in its literary and cultural context and its relationship...