Along with bibliographic references, the book also includes a helpful list of citations to ancient texts as well as a general index. The book is organized into five parts, with each part, except for the first, dedicated to a literary time-period: Narrative and Art (Part 1), Latin Literature (Part II), Imperial and Late Antique Literature (Part III), Byzantine Literature (Part IV), and Renaissance and Modern Literature (Part V). 1 With its publication, it brings the account of the reception of the Hymns to the cusp of the 20 th century. The book grew out of a Heidelberg workshop of 2012 and joins the recent increase of scholarship on the Hymns in the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic eras. The book provides the most wide-ranging account of the reception of the hymns to date, from 1 st century BCE Rome to 19 th century England and Germany. Although the above instance is not featured, it lies only slightly outside the volume’s capacious purview. The Reception of the Homeric Hymns (Oxford 2016), edited by Andrew Faulkner, Athanassios Vergados, and Andreas Schwab, identifies and interprets instances of the reception of the Homeric Hymns.

After a heroic encounter with an alien people who speak only in allegorical myth, Picard turns to the Hymns as “one of the root metaphors of our own culture,” with the hope that “more familiarity with our own mythology help us to relate to theirs.” For the scholar interested in the reception of the Homeric Hymns, a problem of interpretation presents itself: what do we do with such a Classical name-drop? Is it a reference, citation, allusion-a ‘tag’? How deep should we go in the intertext, if it is an intertext at all? What should we make of this bit of hymnic reception? On the evening of September 30 th, 1991, roughly 11 million viewers of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation heard Captain Jean-Luc Picard respond to his first officer that he was reading not only Greek, but, more specifically, the Homeric Hymns.

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