The eleventh ode of Bacchylides: Hera, Artemis, and the absence of Dionysos

Abstract

The eleventh ode of Bacchylides begins and ends at Metapontum. But most of it is devoted to two myths about Tiryns. The first of these is the insult to Hera by the daughters of King Proitos and their consequent madness: they leave Tiryns to roam in the wild, until with the permission of Hera they are cured by Artemis, to whom they then build, with their father, an altar. The second is the earlier quarrel at Argos between the brothers Proitos and Akrisios which led to the foundation by Proitos of Tiryns. The latter myth is framed by the former, and the correspondences between the two are carefully implied: the story of the Proitids begins and ends with the foundation of the altar and cult of Artemis at Lousoi in the Arcadian mountains (41, 110), while the inner story begins and ends with the foundation of Tiryns (60-1, 80-1). Just as the girls’ departure from Tiryns led to the establishment of the altar, so the men left Argos and founded Tiryns. Both the joins between the stories are cemented by the idea of departure from a town (55-61, 80-4). Both stories move from a strange piece of folly to consequent suffering, prayers, divine ‘stopping’ of the suffering (76, 108), and finally the building of walls or altar. Similarly Alexidamos, deprived of an earlier Olympic victory by the ‘wandering wits’ of the judges, is now having his Pythian victory celebrated at Metapontum.

Cite this work

Stored copy: licence not recorded · source https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E5C2E0DC37E377C16D32EB472450EEB9/S0075426900011617a.pdf/div-class-title-the-eleventh-ode-of-bacchylides-hera-artemis-and-the-absence-of-dionysos-div.pdf. Open access only — a takedown request can remove the copy without touching this record.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.