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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Homeric Hymns/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by Gog the Mild via FACBot (talk) 1 July 2024 [1].

Homeric Hymns

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Nominator(s): UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:27, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is probably the "biggest", in all of technical challenge, subject matter, viewing numbers and sheer mass, that I've ever taken on. The Homeric Hymns are a hodge-podge corpus of Greek poems: neither meaningfully "Homeric" nor technically all "Hymns", but an interesting and until-lately quite neglected area of ancient literature. Most survive only in fragments and at least two were discovered by chance in an eighteenth-century barn, but we have them to thank for, among other stories, the most famous retelling of the myth of Demeter and Persephone. I have done my best to chart the winding thread of the Hymns' influence, from most of the greatest hits of ancient literature, to some pretty obscure late antique and medieval works, through to a surprisingly wide slice of modern culture: Botticelli, Goethe, Shelley, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Alfred Hitchcock and Neil Gaiman. If you like arcane textual criticism and ridiculously long bibliographies, this one's for you. If you don't, I hope you'll give it a look anyway. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:27, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SC

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Definitely up for this one. I have a couple of others to sort first, but I shall return (to quote MacArthur). - SchroCat (talk) 22:07, 6 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you: not that it needed much, but I've popped a few comments on your cookery FAC as well. UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:26, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • For two of the image captions (bust of Homer and fragmentary painting) you given the century as "2nd" and "1st". For the others you have "fifteenth-century", "sixth and the fourth centuries". Consistency is key (fully written out would be my advice, but the choice is yours)
  • "The Homeric Hymns did influence": or possibly "The Homeric Hymns influenced"?
    • Personally, I like did influence slightly better (though there's not much in it for me), as we're drawing a contrast with the direct influence of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively limited until the fifth century. The Hymn to Hermes was a partial exception... further up. There might, however, be a better way of doing this whole thing. UndercoverClassicist T·C 16:30, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Thomas William Allen published a series of four articles in The Journal of Hellenic Studies on their textual problems between 1894 and 1897": were the problems only there between 1894 and '97?
  • For the table, neither the notes or ref columns should be sortable
  • FN 49 pp. should be p.

Kudos for taking on such a body of work and for producing such an interesting and readable article. - SchroCat (talk) 16:23, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

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  • Putting a placeholder down for later. One drive-by comment: some of the entries in the "subject matter" column have full stops and others do not. As none of them are complete sentences, none should have full stops -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 07:31, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks, Chris -- looking forward to it. Good eye on the full stops; I've fixed those. UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:50, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period (that is, until 1453), though continued" - I think "They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period (that is, until 1453), but continued" would be better grammatically
  • "The earliest of the Homeric Hymns were composed in a time period where oral poetry was common" => "The earliest of the Homeric Hymns were composed in a time period when oral poetry was common"
  • "Many of the hymns with a verse indicating that another song will follow" - I think there's a word missing here (maybe "end"....?)
  • "As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns are known" => "As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns were known" (2016 was eight years ago)
    • "Are" is correct here: it implies that the state of affairs continues, whereas "were" implies the opposite (compare "as of 1959, there are 50 states in the USA", or "as of this morning, I'm the CEO"). UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:56, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • Hmmm, it still reads weirdly to me - if I was writing a football article I wouldn't personally write "As of 1925, Sheffield United have won the FA Cup four times", I'd write "As of 2024, Sheffield United have won the FA Cup four times" to make clear that it is the current state of affairs rather than the then-state of affairs just shy of 100 years ago, even though the number of wins hasn't changed in that time. But I'm not going to hold up the nom over this little quibble -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 10:53, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        I agree, but I don't think we've actually got the sources to say that: the source being from 2016, it can only itself be evidence for the state of play until then (that situation hasn't changed, but we'd need a second source to actually say that). I'm also not sure we want to set ourselves up with a continually moving treadmill: if we did find a 2024 source and stick it in, we'd have the same problem in 2025, and 2026, and so on ad infinitum. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "and the only edition to date that has printed digammas in their text" => "and the only edition to date that has printed digammas in its text"
    • I prefer "their" (the hymns') here: I think both are defensible but "their" is slightly more precise (since the edition includes notes, apparatus criticus and so on that are not strictly the text of the hymns). UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:56, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Notes g, i, j, and k don't need full stops
  • That's all I got - fabulous work! -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 07:14, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support -- ChrisTheDude (talk) 10:53, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Support from Tim riley

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A most impressive article. Some minor cavilling:

  • "and their collection as a corpus likely dates to this period" – unexpectedly AmE phrasing: in BrE one might expect "...probably dates..."
Oops -- I did mean to do this one: now fixed. UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:30, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period" – this is the first of nine "comparatively"s in the text. One of them is quoting René Nünlist and can't be remedied, but the other eight bring to mind Gowers's comment: "Timid writers who shrink from positive statements have a bad habit of using comparatively and relatively to water down their adjectives and adverbs, forgetting that those words can properly be used only when some comparison is expressed or implied." I don't think that can be said of the eight "comparatively"s here.
    • Auditing: the plan was to use "comparatively" when there is an implied comparison (usually, to the rest of Greek literature):
      • Their influence on Greek literature and art was comparatively small until the third century BCE: I think this one's kosher: it wasn't small as such, but it was smaller than that of other texts, in particular the Homeric epics. It was also smaller than their influence on later literature.
      • They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period: as above, I think this one's good, since they weren't absolutely neglected (some poets used them)
      • iterative narration ... which is comparatively rare in ancient Greek literature: the implied comparison is with singulative narration: I suppose we could do "which is much rarer in ancient Greek literature than..."?
      • the Homeric Hymns generally place greater focus on single events than the Homeric epics ... resulting in what he calls a comparatively "slow" narration: there's a comparison here with the epics.
      • The Homeric Hymns are quoted comparatively rarely in ancient literature: this one's dubious: the implied comparison is to other texts, particularly the epics. I do think some sort of adverb is useful here, since "rarely" would be a bit too strong. Could do "relatively" just for variety?
      • In late antiquity ... the direct influence of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively limited until the fifth century: as above: there's an implied comparison with other periods, but it's not as strong as some of the others. However, some kind of adverb is useful here still, I think.
      • Although they received comparatively little attention in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: I've changed this one to relatively for much the same reasons as the last two.
        • I'm happy to accept your rationale for all the above. If there's one thing I loathe more than most about GAN and FAC it's reviewers (happily few) who say "I'd write it this way and so therefore must you". I hope never to be such a reviewer. (And nor are you, as I know from your valuable reviews of my offerings.) All the same, I might make some of the comparativelys "not much" or "seldom" or "infrequently", but I pass the ball back to you. Tim riley talk 14:13, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "(that is, until 1453)" – this is the first of seven parenthetical instances of "that is," and the phrase rather outwears its welcome, me judice. Three instances come in the space of 150 words in the Composition section. Some of the instances seem to me useful, such as "in a vernacular language (that is, not in Latin)" but I really think you could blitz those like "Hellenistic (that is, 323–30 BCE) Alexandria" and "singulative narration (that is, accounts of specific events related in sequence), where the meaning and grammar are both secure without "that is".
    • I've removed it except where it's useful to be clear that it's defining the whole, rather than a subset of it: for example the succeeding Byzantine period (that is, until 1453), where it's useful to be clear that "until 1453" is another way of writing "the Byzantine period" rather than a greater degree of precision.
  • "all of the surviving manuscripts of the hymns date to the fifteenth century" – unexpected and I think unneeded "of".
  • "The Homeric Hymns were first published in print by Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. George Chapman made the first English translation of them in 1642" – perhaps drop "of them"?
  • "an artificial literary language (Kunstsprache) derived largely from the Aeolic and Ionic dialects of Greek" – not sure why the German term is mentioned here: the blue link goes to an English one.
    • Kunstsprache is the normal term in Anglophone scholarship for what the Homeric dialect is (see Google Books results here. Strictly speaking, it has a slightly more specialised and precise meaning than "artificial literary language", which is really my explanation of the term, so I think it has value here. I've added a link to the footnote which goes into a bit (well, a lot) more detail about what we mean when we say this word. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:03, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Irene de Jong has contrasted the narrative focus" – a word or two of introduction to Irene de Jong would be helpful.
  • "René Nünlist has also suggested" – likewise for René Nünlist. Helps the reader see why the person's views are of interest.
    • I've tried to follow a wise colleague's words (courtesy ping to User:Caeciliusinhorto) and avoid giving introductions that would amount to "the classicist..." for views that we would expect to come from a classicist (this was a view fairly widely expressed in the recent-ish FAC on Beulé Gate. Where the person has some other claim to fame (Ezra Pound, for example), I've tried to make that clear so that the reader doesn't assume that they're necessarily a subject-matter expert. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:16, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • There's no one right answer to this. I am perhaps permanently influenced (not to say scarred) by this comment at the 2011 peer review of my revision of Thomas Beecham:
"Sir Adrian Boult": I don't know who this guy is nor why I should care what he thinks. Since the reader, like me, may be too lazy to click, I suggest a brief characterisation of him.
But I quite see your point of view, and I happily leave the matter in your hands here. Tim riley talk 14:13, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • "the didactic poem Phainomena" – for those, e.g. me, who are unfamiliar with the term "didactic poem" a concise explanation would not go amiss. One knows what both words mean, but not quite what the two together mean, or whether the didacticism of the poem is material here.
  • "earliest known poet to use them" – I think I'd hyphenate "earliest-known" – otherwise he's the earliest of known poets to use them.
  • "the Restoration playwright and poet William Congreve" – pushing it a bit to call Congreve (b. 1670) a Restoration playwright? I have the impression that the term is normally applied up to about the end of the 17th century, and not as late as 1710.
  • "In 1744, he released a revised version of his 1710 Semele: An Opera, with music by George Frideric Handel and a newly-added passage of the libretto quoting Congreve's translation of the Hymn to Aphrodite" – this baffles me. Who is "he"? Despite reading and rereading I can't construe the text as meaning anyone but Congreve, but he was long dead by then.
  • Semele – could perhaps do with a blue link.

That's all from me. I think you have achieved an exemplary distillation of a great deal of information, and made it comprehensible to the lay reader. Tim riley talk 11:26, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am happy to support the elevation of this article to FA. It seems to me to meet all the FA criteria (and has impressed me mightily). Tim riley talk 14:13, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from The Morrison Man

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Not sure if me looking over the article again would be good practise after also handling the GA (though if more comments are needed, I'm always available), but I would still like to just pop in here and wish you good luck during the review! The Morrison Man (talk) 19:17, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you: that's very kind. I don't think there's any problem with GA reviewers coming back for another go at FAC (@FAC coordinators: please do correct me if I'm wrong), as it's a different set of standards, but equally you've more than done your time in reading and reviewing the article the once (and with your very helpful comments since the nomination). UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:33, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Morrison Man, there will be no problem at all with this. Your already being familiar with the article is a pleasant bonus. Gog the Mild (talk) 20:48, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll be sure to take another look at it, in that case! The Morrison Man (talk) 20:53, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@The Morrison Man: apologies for the prod, but are you still planning to give this a look? UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:20, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, apologies for not letting you know sooner. My comments should be up tomorrow! The Morrison Man (talk) 14:00, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Whoops, seems like my changes didn't save and I haven't noticed untill now, sorry for not providing the comments earlier like I promised! Just like with the GA, feel free to ask questions or discuss any suggestions that you don't agree with, and I'm sure we'll be through these in no time. The Morrison Man (talk) 23:04, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Just to note that I almost certainly won't be able to get to these for about a week, but thank you for them: I'll ping you when I do. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:47, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • “It is unclear how far the hymns were composed orally, as opposed to with the use of writing” - This sentence feels overly complicated to me. Maybe something like: “It is unclear whether the hymns were composed orally or through use of writing,” could work?
    • Just thought of a potential alternate version myself after reading over it again: "It is unclear whether the hymns were solely a product of oral composition or whether writing was also involved [in their creation]" The Morrison Man (talk) 23:07, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • Not sure either of these work. Everyone agrees that writing is involved somewhere in the process, if only because they all became written texts in order to be recorded in manuscripts, and that oral composition is somehow involved, if only because the poems at least reference and imitate works of oral poetry. It's not a binary, but a spectrum. The questions is where you mark the balance along that spectrum: both oral composition and writing are definitely involved, but how involved? UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:28, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        • Alright, I do still think that the current sentence could read better. How about changing "how far the hymns were" to "how much of the hymns was"? That would fix the sentence for me and I do believe it keeps the same meaning. The Morrison Man (talk) 23:45, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
          • That’s slightly different - it would imply that we are trying to look at individual hymns or sections of hymns and ascertain whether those sections were themselves composed orally or through the use of writing. In practice it is much fuzzier and these sharp binaries are generally to be avoided – for instance, it could be the case that a passage of narrative, iterated over for several generations as an oral poem, was later polished up by a poet using writing into the form we currently have. Trying to ascertain which parts of the result represented oral composition versus written would be impossible and indeed somewhat meaningless. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • “reciprocity” - Would just using reciprocation do the trick here too?
    • They're not quite the same thing (though are very similar): reciprocity is the practice/relationship rather than the action, and more about the general state of balance (that acts from one party are or should be reciprocated by the other). UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:28, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • “performance within that cult, though the latter did not necessarily follow from the former” - Shouldn’t “did” be present here? latter does not necessarily follow
  • “polities” - Could this be swapped out for “city-states”? Easier on the layman reader. If not, I would link it.
  • “but never performed.” - Change to something like “, though it was never performed.
    • I'm not sure I'm seeing the problem this is fixing, or how it makes an improvement -- to me, that reads as a slightly clunkier way of saying the same thing?

I believe all my comments have been addressed, and I have found no more. I will now support. The Morrison Man (talk) 12:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@The Morrison Man: Much obliged (and for your time in doing the review) -- thank you. UndercoverClassicist T·C 15:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Image review from Generalissima

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  • File:Exekias Dionysos Staatliche Antikensammlungen 2044.jpg Own work CC upload of a public domain art piece.
  • File:Homer British Museum.jpg Public domain upload of a public domain statue.
  • File:Hermes Stabia 1.jpg Public domain, although the license appears to be formatted incorrectly on commons.
  • File:Sandro Botticelli - La nascita di Venere - Google Art Project - edited.jpg Public domain.
  • File:Page from the first printed edition (editio princeps) of collected works by Homer.jpg Public domain.
  • File:Pinax con Ade che rapisce Kore-Persefone, da Locri - MARC.jpg CC-BY-SA-4.0
  • Complete side note, but I'd wikilink Demetrios Chalkokondyles in the caption for the book.

All imhave alt-text. All are laid out correctly, and are relevant to the texts. I do slightly question the infobox image; wouldn't it be better to put in the front cover of Demetrios Chalkokondyles' editio princeps, as the first published volume of the compiled hymns? That Dionysus Cup is very nice and would be fitting somewhere in the article, however. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 00:11, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for these, Generalissima. I've tweaked the formatting on the Stabiae image licence. On the infobox image: a matter of taste, maybe, but the folks at Penguin Classics thought that the Dionysus Cup would make a pretty good main image too. A chunk of Chalkokondyles' edition would also work, except that all the images I can find on Commons (and in the PD more widely) are from the Iliad part of that text, not the Homeric Hymns. There's also some value, I think, in having something broadly contemporary with the Hymns themselves, rather than two thousand years more recent. I've linked him in the caption. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:31, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's fair enough! I think the images are in a good state now - Support on image review. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 07:32, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Aza24

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  • Just a quick comment. I feel that the lead and body are missing clarity as to the musical content of these hymns. Presumably, no music notation survives (and perhaps it never existed?). Do we know if the melodies were improvised, or performed in accordance with tradition? These feel like things which should be addressed more explicitly. Otherwise, the reader may be left wondering. Mathiesen's Apollo’s Lyre (1999), the standard modern survey of ancient Greek music, probably discusses this. I see that Grove has an article ([2]) but it seems largely redudant to the article's current content. – Aza24 (talk) 18:15, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Hm: I don't think we know very much about this at all, to be honest. There's a little bit in Mathiesen (thank you for the nudge towards that; I hadn't come across it), which I'll work into the article (essentially: no, the notation wasn't written down, but it may well have been fixed by tradition, like the lyrics -- equally, from Henderson, it may well have totally shifted over time). Thank you also for the Grove article, though I agree there doesn't seem to be much I can pull out of there that isn't already in the article. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:55, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    I've added a chunk to the "Content and function" section on music -- trying to say what we can, which isn't a lot, especially as basically none of the sources directly talk about the performance of the Hymns (they do talk in general about early Greek music or "Homer", though). UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:06, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Good choice and a definite improvement. I find that Wikipedia articles often forgo important information entirely when its limited, but its inclusion here seems worthwhile. Sometimes its necessary to state the obvious (e.g. "we don't know much about the music"), just so readers don't walk away thinking "what about the music?". Aza24 (talk) 21:08, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Pardon my stalking, but maybe these articles about the hymns' performance will be useful: Homeric Epic in Performance, "Homeric Hymn to Apollo": Prototype and Paradigm of Choral Performance, The performance of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, The Homeric Hymns as Poetic Offerings: Musical and Ritual Relationships with the Gods, Choreia and Aesthetics in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo: The Performance of the Delian Maidens, and this modern project Hymns: Visual Album. Artem.G (talk) 06:14, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you: I'll have a look here and see what I can pull out. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:25, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    OK, I think I've got what I can here: there's a lot which would be of interest in a specific article on e.g. the Hymn to Aphrodite or the Hymn to Apollo, but doesn't really fit into an overview article on the whole corpus. I can't find any secondary references to the Getty Center/Four Larks project, and I'm reluctant to include it on primary testimony only per MOS:POPCULT: have you got anything here? UndercoverClassicist T·C 07:43, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    most sources are about individual hymns, I didn't find any general "theory" of their perfomance, probably because they differ in purpose, or just because of lack of evidence; I think you're right here. For Four Larks I have no sources and don't propose to include it, it was just an interesting finding. There is also this Homeric Singing page that might be interesting. It's not about the hymns, but about all Homeric epics. Artem.G (talk) 08:23, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, it's an interesting field, and it's quite amazing to hear people play reconstructed Greek music on modern replicas of the instruments. Most of it's pretty conjectural, to be honest -- lots of people (for instance, West cited in the article) trying to use the "natural" rhythm of the words to talk about the likely rhythm of the songs, and the pitch accent as a guide to the melodies. It's not a silly idea, but you end up with reconstructed music that doesn't really hang on any real evidence, and of course the possibility of having different musical settings for the same lyrics, as we find throughout just about every period of history, pours a great deal of cold water on the whole thing. Good territory for Music of ancient Greece to cover, but I think there's too much distance and too little certainty to put it in here, really. UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:00, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Matarisvan

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Hi UndercoverClassicist, marking a spot, will add comments soon. Matarisvan (talk) 20:19, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for all of these: you have done a great deal of work for me in finding all of these articles for such a huge pile of scholars! I've seen the Biard comments: I need to take another run at that article, partly in light of the help and advice received there, and am keeping the ACR feedback to hand for when I do -- it will be very useful. As for this one, replies below. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Consider linking to the German language wiki for René Nünlist?
  • Link to Claude Calame in body and biblio?
  • Link to Delos?
  • Have any scholars speculated on whether the hymns were only intended to be invoked at singing competitions? We know Ancient Greece had sports, sparring, chariot racing competitions; the hyms might have been sung there too.
    • I wouldn't draw such a sharp distinction: in most cases, athletic and musical competitions were tied up as part of the same thing. The Olympic Games, Panathenaic Games and so on had musical and poetic competitions as part of the programme; early in Greek history, Hesiod writes of winning a tripod for poetic singing at the funeral games of a local ruler. It's better to think of singing contests as being part of bigger events (i.e. religious festivals, which athletic competitions generally more-or-less were) than as a stand-alone thing. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Link to Jenny Strauss Class in the body as done in the lead? Also, why use Jenny in the biblio and Jennifer in the lead?
  • Link to Callimachus in body as done in the lead?
  • Translate gymasiarch per NOFORCELINK?
    • It isn't really a translatable term: it's its own thing, with quite specific but also quite hard-to-pin-down details. Compare words like Taoiseach, daimyo or consul: we treat those as items of vocabulary in their own right, explain them if it's useful and practical (here, I don't think it's really either), and link in any case. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Was the negligible influence of the Hymns in the Byzantine era due to a negative Christian view of pagan literature? Do any authors speak about this?
    • It wasn't: after all, they didn't generally imitate them, but they did keep copying them (and therefore reading them), which is a tremendous pain in the neck to do with a text you don't really like. The Homeric epics were ubiquitous in Byzantine literature, so it's more a matter of shifting literary fashions than any grand religious-ideological statement. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Translate and link editio princeps in the image caption?
  • Reword "an operatic libretto, Semele" to "Semele, an operatic libretto" to avoid SEAOFBLUE? There's only a comma as a separator.
    • Normally a good idea, but I think that would create the implication or ambiguity that he wrote Semele in 1707: we don't know the date for sure, only that it was before 1710. Given the comma, we don't have a true SEAOFBLUE to be worried about. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • What was the influence of the Hymns in France, Spain, other parts of Europe? I'm sure they must have had an impact, do any authors write about this? One big paragraph might suffice for this, wdyt?
    • Not much, as far as I can find: there's a little on the reception of the Persephone myth in German literature, such as Schiller, but here we have the problem of telling the myth apart from the Hymn: nobody is willing to come out and say that Schiller was directly using the Homeric Hymn as opposed to the underlying myth (which was certainly popularised by the 1777 discovery of the Hymn, but equally was already known through Ovid). We do have a mention of a French translation, but I can't find much evidence of their involvement in French literature (they aren't mentioned once in The Cambridge History of French Literature), or indeed in Spanish. In the C15th at least, I wouldn't expect there to be: Greek literature in general had huge penetration in Italy, where many exiles from Constantinople ended up, but it took a while for it to really catch on in the rest of Europe. Gilbert Highet's well-known book on the classical tradition has quite a lot on French and other imitations of other classical poets (particularly Pindar), but only Chapman on the Hymns. There's a tiny bit in Richardson's introduction to Cashford, which I've added. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Translate ottava rima?
    • A translation wouldn't help much, as it's a poetic form: equally, I don't think a full explanation is possible here within the constraints of readability, or (honestly) particularly clarifying in an article that's about the Hymns, not the translation. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Link to Coraline (film)?
  • We have the textual history of the 33 hymns, what about the 1 epigram?
    • It's in a few manuscripts, but doesn't really have a distinct textual history to speak of: it's only a couple of lines long. The first sentence of the article makes clear that we mean to include it when we speak of "the Hymns" as a whole. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Shouldn't the textual history section be placed before the reception section? I'm not sure about this though.
    • The thinking behind the current arrangement is that the two cover the same chronological ground, so there's no a priori reason why one should go ahead of the other, but that Reception is likely to be of more interest to more readers, so we shouldn't force them to go through what is, for most people, a pretty dry chunk of editors and manuscripts to get to the juicy stuff about Joyce and Botticelli. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why is Dionysus linked twice in the List of Hymns?
    • I've generally thought of the list as being like a bibliography or list of footnotes: we expect, more than for the body text, that readers might read it out of sequence (for instance, if they choose to sort by surviving lines), and so duplinking is more forgivable/useful here. UndercoverClassicist T·C 13:32, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not quite sure about this, but transliterate the Greek letters theta, phi, sigma used here?
  • In the biblio, to be consistent, you will have to link to Apostolos Athanassakis, Alessandro Barchiesi, Glen Bowersock, Luciano Canfora, Han Lamers, James J. Clauss, John Miles Foley, Sebastiano Tusa, Alison Keith, Anne Draffkorn Kilmer, Edwin Seroussi, Shirley Strum Kenny, Robert Parker, Irene Peirano, David Piper, Simon Price, Nicholas Richardson, Øivind Andersen
  • Why do Strauss 2006 amd van der Berg 2001 use ISBN 10? Google Books provides ISBN 13, consider adding? Pearcy 1989 and Sowa 1984 can be excused on account of their year of publication.

That's all from me, cheers Matarisvan (talk) 10:45, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, @UndercoverClassicist, if you have some free time, I have posted my comments on the A Class Review of the Henry Biard article. I understand that you must have been busy with this FACR and weren't able to check those out. Matarisvan (talk) 11:19, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Matarisvan, I was wondering if you felt in a position to either support or oppose this nomination? Obviously, neither is obligatory. Thanks. Gog the Mild (talk) 18:50, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Gog, I would like to support for promotion to FA class. Matarisvan (talk) 02:40, 1 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Source review

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There seem to be quite a few people on prose already, so I will try to look at sources. —Kusma (talk) 14:54, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Source formatting looks fairly uniform already.
  • Many JSTOR items have DOIs, others do not. You could consider making this consistent.
    • In theory, they've got a DOI only if that links to a page that isn't JSTOR -- for example, a lot of the CUP journals have a DOI that points to Cambridge Core and a JSTOR link to, well, JSTOR. It's not out of the question that a reader will have access to one but not the other. When the only DOI I can find is JSTOR itself, I haven't duplicated it. If I've messed that system up, please do tell me! UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:09, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Pfeiffer 1976/1968 has ISBN 0198143427 or 9780198143420 (reeditions are new enough to have ISBN, better than OCLC in my view if we have both).
  • Piper 1982: David Piper is a disambiguation page.
  • Richardson 2003: should this use |chapter=Introduction?
  • Cambridge Scholars Publishing is a bit questionable. (It is on Beall's List). Can you comment on the reliability of Bodley 2016, Clark 2015, Rice 2020?
    • Interesting: I hadn't come across that list before, and Beall doesn't give any specific rationale for including CSP. Looking around online (e.g. here on reddit, they seem to have a reputation for being somewhat low-tier, and not a particularly good place for academics to submit manuscripts to, but generally legitimate (one comment somewhere-or-other called them "the bottom end of reputable"). I can't find much footprint for Musical Receptions of Greek Antiquity in the usual classical review sources, but Bodley herself is a grown-up musicologist with plenty of publications in serious academic presses on the same topic area. Likewise, Paul Rice: his book also has a few cites in (inter alia) a Brill volume here. I am less convinced by Clark: I can find little trace of her or her book anywhere scholarly, and it's only really included as further reading/supporting plot summaries, so I've swapped it out for better sources that can do the same job. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:09, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • The talk page leads to a discussion about CSP publishing recycled Wikipedia articles., so they certainly must be used only with great care. I agree that Bodley and Rice look relatively decent, so I think they can stay. —Kusma (talk) 20:27, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
        Yes, I'll definitely be checking their individual works much more closely in future. They've published some quite robust stuff by fairly big-name people, but also, it seems, some works that don't measure up to that standard. UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:37, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Cassola 1975 probably has an ISBN
  • Taida 2015: the linked ISSN does not find anything. The whole issue of the journal (published by Vilnius University) is here: [3]. Worth using |trans-journal=? (I don't read Lithuanian, unfortunately).

Sources look great: scholarly journals and books from reputable publishers (with very few question marks as above). Only very small formatting issues. Happy to do spot checks on request. —Kusma (talk) 16:01, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comments from Choliamb

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Hello, I see you've been busy. I'm butting in again uninvited. I haven't read the whole article, just the section on the history of the text and the early editions, which is the only area I feel competent to comment on. There are a couple of areas of confusion here:

A. Manuscripts

  • First, and most important, the discussion of the manuscript tradition, and especially the relationship of M and Ψ, is incorrect. The article currently describes Ψ as one of the sources of M, but that is not true. The manuscripts of the Homeric hymns fall into two groups: one group consists of M alone (the only ms. to preserve the hymn to Demeter and portions of the first hymn to Dionysos); the other group consists of all of the remaining manuscripts (which lack those hymns). Ψ is not one of the sources of M, but rather the source of all of the manuscripts except M. It is the hypothetical ancestor of the defective branch of the tradition, the branch that lacks the first two hymns. The discussions of the manuscripts in Richardson 2010 and Olson 2011 are clear about this (see Olson's stemma on p. 49 for a nice graphical representation of the relationship, which shows M and Ψ as cousins, independently descended from the ultimate archetype Ω).
  • But I'd suggest citing the introduction to West's Loeb edition, p. 22, instead, since that is widely available and has the simplest and most easily understandable description of the tradition, aimed at general readers rather than editors of classical texts.
  • The article describes John Eugenikos as a "priest and polymath", but was he really a priest? The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium describes him as a deacon (not the same thing), as well as a notary and a nomophylax. Are there other sources that identify him as a priest?
  • The suggestion that Eugenikos copied M after his return to Constantinople in 1439 was made not by West, as stated in one of the footnotes, but by Thomas Gelzer, "Zum Codex Mosquensis und zur Sammlung der Homerischen Hymnen", Hyperboreus 1.1 (1994), pp. 113–137, at p. 124. I haven't read West's article on the hymn to Dionysos (= West 2011), which is what you cite here, but in the intro to the Loeb edition (p. 22, n. 23) West rightly attributes this view to Gelzer. See also Simelidis 2011, pp. 259–260, who disagrees with Gelzer and suggests a date earlier in the 1430s. All of these specific dates are pure speculation unsupported by any evidence at all, so it might be better to omit this note entirely and leave it at "first half of the 15th century," which is what we know for certain. Gelzer's article, by the way, is an important one for anyone interested in the textual tradition of the HH, although in this case there's enough English bibliography that I can understand if you'd rather not cite a German article.
    • Corrected. I'd added Simelidis to the note: at the moment, I'd like to leave it in. I do recognise that the dates are speculative, but my (very uninformed) impression is that there's a general view that we can at least tentatively be more precise than "any year between 1401 and 1450 is an equally good guess". However, if someone has put it in print that the guesses are baloney, that would be another matter -- do you know if they have? UndercoverClassicist T·C 12:15, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      • Fair enough. Speculation ≠ baloney, and not all dates between 1401 and 1450 are equally probable. Certainly if the attribution to Eugenikos is correct, and he was born "after 1394", then the first quarter of the 15th century seems unlikely, and the first decade is probably out of the question. I think the way you currently handle this, with a more general date (based on the watermarks of the paper and the general characteristics of the hand) stated in the text, and the more specific suggested dates (based on historical context and what is known of Eugenikos's life) in the footnote, is good.
  • The notion that Ω, the original archetype behind both the M and the Ψ branches of the tradition, was a minuscule manuscript is not original to Olson; much of the evidence was collected already by Allen in his 1895 article in JHS, pp. 142–143 (summarized in the editions of Allen and Sikes and Halliday: 1st ed., p. xv; 2nd ed., pp. xx–xxi).
  • This article is probably not the place to discuss the circumstances of the discovery of M in "a stable where for many years ... it had been hidden among the chickens and the pigs", and Matthaei's efforts to purchase it from its proprietor, "a cunning and greedy old man"; but it's a wonderful story, told with copious quotations from the Latin correspondence between Matthaei and Ruhnken, by O. von Gebhardt, "Christian Friedrich Matthaei und seine Sammlung griechischer Handscriften", Centralblatt für Bibliothekswesen 15 (1898), pp. 441–458. (The quotations translated above are from a letter of 1783, printed by Gebhardt on p. 450.) It's great recreational reading if your German and Latin are up to it.

B. Allen's editions

  • Contrary to the statement in the article, the 1904 edition with commentary by Allen and Sikes was not in the Oxford Classical Texts series (which never included commentaries). The 1904 edition was not even published in Oxford; it was published in London by Macmillan, as you correctly report in the bibliography. Allen's Oxford Classical Text of the hymns was published in 1912, as the fifth volume in the OCT Homer (see here); Sikes had no part in it.
  • The second edition of Allen and Sikes was published by Oxford in 1936 (but still not in the OCT series). By this time, Sikes was out of the picture (Allen, in his preface to the 2nd ed., writes that Sikes "has long betaken himself to other provinces, and resisted entreaties to assist in a revision"), and Allen found a new coauthor in W. R. Halliday. Sikes is still credited on the title page, but after Halliday, and his name does not appear on the spine. Officially this is Allen, Halliday, and Sikes 1936, but most people refer to it informally as Allen and Halliday. It is superior to the first edition, and anyone citing Allen's scholarship, which is still valuable in spite of its many flaws, should cite this one instead. Since this edition, unlike the first, remains under copyright, I will not give a link to an online version here, but if you were to go to a popular online archive, and search for the names Allen and Halliday together, it's not impossible that you might stumble upon one.
  • But wait, there's more! In fact, if not in name, Allen's first edition of the Homeric hymns was actually Goodwin's posthumous Oxford edition of 1893. Goodwin had done a lot of preliminary work for his edition, but he died leaving only some notes and drafts for the first few hymns; the material was entrusted by the press to Allen, who was Goodwin's student, and he was the one responsible for turning it into a publishable edition, although out of respect for his teacher his name does not appear on the title page. See the preface to the 1893 edition for Allen's description of what Goodwin left behind (not much); and see also the WP article on Allen, which correctly credits him with the preparation of this edition, and cites two reviews that accurately describe his contribution. (Taida, the source you cite for much of the section on early editions, is not always the most reliable guide, and seems unaware of the circumstances of publication.)
    • This point is now integrated into the article. Must admit I struggled to find good summary sources on the history of textual criticism, though it seems that combing through the various prefaces is probably the way to go. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:14, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

C. A few other small points

  • The article currently says that "most modern editions of the text are based on that made by Filippo Càssola in 1975". This statement, which is also taken from Taida, is misleading, I think. What subsequent editors like Richardson (in his Cambridge green-and-yellow volume; not in his Oxford edition of the hymn to Demeter, which was independent of Càssola) and West (in the Loeb edition) rely on is not Càssola's text per se, but his collation of the manuscripts and his apparatus, which are better than Allen's. The texts themselves naturally differ from Càssola at a number of points. And Olson in his edition of the hymn to Aphrodite does not rely on Càssola at all: he writes (p. viii) that he prepared fresh collations the manuscripts and that he has corrected Càssola's readings where necessary. My advice is to cut this sentence about Càssola entirely, but if you want to keep it, it should simply say that he provided fresh collations and a fresh discussion of the manuscript tradition (the first since Allen), without implying that subsequent editions are derived from his.
    • Cut: I think that fact on Càssola is worthy, but it won't be supported by the cited material: I might dig around and see if I can find a review that gives a sense of why it's an important work (to the effect that you outline) and reinstate mutandis mutatis. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:19, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Finally, in the text you mention Richardson's 1974 Oxford edition of the hymn to Demeter and West's 2003 Loeb edition of the entire corpus, but you don't provide citations for them and they don't appear in the bibliography. Both are essential works of scholarship that really do belong in any serious bibliography of the Homeric hymns.

Cheers, Choliamb (talk) 16:42, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Much indebted to you as always, Choliamb. I've made small fixes where I can: I'm away from home at the moment, and will get to the more substantive stuff when I'm more able to do so. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:19, 24 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Choliamb: I think everything is addressed here now. Thank you as ever: it is rare to be able to get an expert review on content as well as style, and it certainly does the article a huge amount of good. UndercoverClassicist T·C 17:14, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      Hardly expert: I taught a course on the Homeric Hymns only once, thirty years ago, and I haven't kept up on the critical literature since then, which is why I declined to comment on the rest of the article. Fortunately, the manuscripts and their relationships haven't changed since then!
      One final note: I skimmed the earlier comments about the illustrations, including the image of the edition of Chalkokondyles, which as you noted is not ideal because the page shown is from the Iliad rather than one of the hymns. I can't remedy that, but I can offer an alternative. The Leiden University library has a good scan of M, licensed for free use, so I have uploaded to the Commons an image of one of the pages of the hymn to Demeter: File:Leiden BPG 33 H fol 33r - Homeric Hymn to Demeter 187-236.jpg. Do with it as you will. I'm not sure it's a better lead image than Exekias's Dionysos cup, which most readers would probably find more engaging, but at least it can replace Chalkokondyles. Choliamb (talk) 20:36, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
      I concur: replaced the manuscript image with this one, but kept it where it is. Not quite as pretty as the old one, but far more relevant. UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:07, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comments

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Thanks, Gog -- all done or replied. UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:19, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]


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