Brian McPhee - portrait

Brian McPhee

Arthur Ross Rome Prize
9 settembre 2019–3 aprile 2020
Professione
PhD Candidate, Department of Classics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Titolo del progetto
Blessed Heroes: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Homeric Hymns
Descrizione del progetto

The close engagement of Apollonius’s Argonautica with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has been much studied. My project extends the field by examining its allusions to another body of poetry attributed to Homer in antiquity, the Homeric Hymns. Through a series of close readings informed by theories of intertextuality and narratology, I argue that Apollonius’s poem blends the two branches of Homeric poetry, his epics and hymns, into a unique generic hybrid, a hymn that celebrates the deeds of epic heroes. This blurring of secular and religious categories has special relevance to Apollonius’s sociopolitical environment, in which the Ptolemies assumed the office of Pharaoh and began to be worshipped as gods. Because the closest Greek analogue for the concept of king as god-man was the mythic hero divinized after death and worshipped in cult, Apollonius’s blending of epic and hymn takes part in a larger political project that sought to translate Egyptian Pharaonic ideology into familiar Greek terms.