Leto alone remains beside Zeus whose sport is the thunderbolt she unstrings his bow and closes his quiver, and taking. They all spring up from their seats as he approaches, when he draws his shining bow. The Hymn to Apollo portrays the birth of the god as a crucial cosmic. My aim with this paper is to ascertain the extent to which network theory can be useful to us in understanding the role texts play in constructing a shared sense of place and identity. Let me call to mind and not neglect Apollo the far-shooter, at whose coming the gods tremble in Zeus’ house. In the Hymn to Aphrodite, personal experience is a necessary instrument of change. Adopting an approach that combines traditional close reading with a more novel network perspective, I explore how the poem manipulates its audience’s conception of Aegean space – particularly via its positioning of Crete – so as to situate Delphi at the virtual centre of an imagined ‘panhellenic’ world. I aim in particular to establish whether the concept of the ‘virtual centre’, adopted from the study of networks, can shed light on how a poem may shift audience members’ perceptions of centrality and unite them around a poetic-performative centre of its own construction. This paper attempts such scrutiny by putting to the test a methodological tool – network theory – using a specific poem – the Homeric Hymn to Apollo – as a case study. These lively narrative poems, attributed in antiquity to Homer, are works of great charm. Given this, the means by which Homeric epic is able to address such an audience is worth scrutinising more closely. Three Homeric Hymns: To Apollo, Hermes, and Aphrodite. However, whether or not a truly ‘panhellenic’ identity existed during the archaic period remains subject to debate. Nagy 1990, Marks 2008, Fantuzzi and Tsagalis 2015). The Introduction begins by examining the nature, purpose, and origins of the whole corpus of Homeric Hymns (pp. Similarly in the Homeric Hymn, Delos employs slight manipulation to obtain greater honors, while Telphousa outright deceives Apollo to glorify herself (Miller).

It is, by now, a scholarly commonplace that Homeric epic addresses a ‘panhellenic’ audience (e.g. Let me call to mind and not neglect Apollo the far-shooter, at whose coming the gods tremble in Zeus’ house.

Homeric hymn to apollo