On the Homeric Hymn to Artemis

The Words

Artemis (the Roman Diana) is best known as the goddess of the hunt, whose statue adorns the lawns of innumerable European stately homes. Her hymn attracted me for its many layers of paradox — some that needed to be peeled away, some which were essential, saying contradictory things that are both true.

The theme is difficult, since hunting in England has now degenerated to a cruel farce in which the elite, surrounded by symbols of their power, torture animals as relief from the boredom of their consumer lifestyles. We need to penetrate behind this image, to earlier times that were a past memory even when the hymn was composed (perhaps in the 5th century BCE). We get a feel for this memory in the Arthurian legends, where the hunt was the medium for an encounter between the civilisation of the court and the ancient primeval forest that still swathed most of Europe. In the hunt, the knights left the security of cultivation and ventured into a darker realm where there was both peril and purification. At the moment when Arthur inaugurated the round table and the knights were about to take their seats, it was a hunt that swept in from the forest and threw their plans into turmoil. The hunt was an encounter between rationality and the place of the unknown, the place of spiritual power. Artemis uniquely moves between the two worlds, at home both in the “mountains of shadow and peaks of wind” and in “the fertile grasslands of Delphi”. She is the bridge across the boundary between light and dark.

A literal, face-value reading describes Artemis as a fighter from the realm of rationality against the natural world. Yet the mythic feelings of the poem deny such a simple interpretation; she does not defeat the world of beasts, but immerses herself in it. Rather than being an emissary of rationality, her characteristics are all opposed to the masculine world of rationality: she is a virgin (parthenon), containing within herself all generative power, who dooms any male who invades her privacy; she is a lunar goddess, expressive of the ancient cycles of the body. So we are led to reinterpret the picture of her hostility to nature as an instance of that transformation of myths in which, as in dreams, the essential symbols are overlaid by a rationalising story that sometimes contradicts them. Here the symbols are of primal nature and of terror, but is the terror that felt by nature, under attack, or is it the terror that humanity feels in the face of primal power? Artemis carries in her image both symbols of primal nature, and symbols of humanity’s ambivalent relation to it.

The language of the hymn moves us from the geographical to the cosmic. Her domain is that of the forest, hule, the word that in the next century will become the standard philosophical term for matter. Her destructive hunt shakes the earth itself (gaia), and she then moves into the organising position (kosmon) of the dance of the gods. We have here the dance of Shiva (Shiva Nataraja) who moves between the dissolving of the cosmos, releasing matter into primordial chaos, and its recreation in the dance.

The hymn closely identifies Artemis with her beloved brother the god of light, Apollo. He too is the bringer of order into chaos through the dance (he is the choreographer of the Muses) so that Artemis is in part the feminine aspect of Apollo. She, however, embraces both darkness and light, destruction and creation.  She is the dual aspect of the cosmos, both terrible and beautiful, and the dual aspect of humanity’s relation with it, both ordering and destroying. She embodies duality as the offspring of the sky-god Zeus and the Earth-nymph Leto. The reconciliation of these opposites is found in the restful cadences of the coda, where it is the physical beauty of the Earth-nymph Leo which binds the cosmic dance into a constantly remembered song of praise.

The music

My setting, which you will probably find rather strange, originated as an attempt to reconstruct the sound of the Homeric hymn—but the process of writing acquired a momentum of its own. The following notes try to explain how the final result came about. As I do not know Greek I have been dependent on the translation by Cashford and reference works.

Melody. Homeric Greek poetry differed in two ways from our own: the language at that time was tonal, with each word having its own internal melody of rising, falling or level pitch; and poetry was build on a rigid structure of long and short syllables, unlike our poetry which is based on stressed and unstressed syllables. Contemporary accounts suggest that the melody of a song was often constructed out of the tones of the words in the first stanza (a practice that was not uncontroversial, some theorists objecting to the resulting conflict in subsequent stanzas between the tones and the melody). This offers the possibility of performing a reconstruction, which I based on a division of the text into four stanzas and a coda.

Being unfamiliar with any classical verse, what first struck me was the “monolithic” shape of the poetry, each line sustaining a single rhythmic sweep over eighteen syllables. I have emphasised this in giving the melody the same long phrases.

Language. There is some doubt about the interpretation of the accents which record the original tones; I have adopted a plausible interpretation. Fortunately there is consensus among almost all scholars as to the sounds of Homeric Greek. This was markedly different from both Classical and Byzantine Greek, being characterised by hard aspirated consonants like those in Indian languages. (The exceptions to this consensus seem to be speakers of modern Greek who cannot quite bring themselves to pronounce anything so totally unlike their native tongue.) This, combined with the harder vowel sounds that seem to have been used, gives an archaic feel to the sound of the text.

Structure and harmony. Following up the archaic sound of the language, I looked for harmonic ideas to Byzantine chant, twelfth century organa and church music deriving from it, and modern Balkan singing. These are all based on drones, with a melody that rises away from the tonic and, with a frison of reunion, slides back into the drone at the end. Later developments in church music used ornament on top of a “cantus firmus” which was a kind of mobile drone. My basic structure throughout is that of a cantus firmus based on the first line of music, stretched to the whole stanza, with the melody on top of it.

Setting. To avoid monotony in a long poem, I suggest adding a drone only in verse 2 and perhaps 4. Verse 3 has a descant which adds some harmonic variation. The rise to E-flat is based on the feel of the Indian Alap; the F-sharp is inspired by some of Plato's comments on music. I envisage the piece performed largely vocally, since the words are very important in both the melody and the cantus firmus, with wind and plucked string ad lib.

 Chris Clarke, 13.8.97