Recent work on Callimachus has tended to concentrate on the technicalities of his poetry. Commentaries on the Hymns have dealt exhaustively with vocabulary, metrics, Homeric allusion, historical background. What remains to be done is to use these detailed pieces of work in readings of the individual poems, showing how the commentator's minutiae can be assimilated into an overall view of each hymn. In Hellenistische Dichtung Wilamowitz attempted such an appreciation; but since his time literary approaches have changed considerably. With the (...) thorough commentary of G. R. McLennan as foundation, it may be worth while to make a re-assessment of the Hymn to Zeus in less technical terms. In the reading which I offer here I hope to escape the tyranny of the individual word; but I hope, too, that what I have to say will not appear too loosely founded on the text. (shrink)

Euthymos was a real person, an Olympic victor from Locri Epizephyrii in the first half of the fifth century bc. Various sources attribute to him extraordinary achievements: he received cult in his own lifetime; he fought with and overcame the ¿Hero of Temesa¿, a daimon who in ritual deflowered a virgin in the Italian city of Temesa every year; and he vanished into a local river instead of dying (extant iconography from Locri shows him as a river god receiving cult (...) a century after his death). By taking an integrative approach to Euthymos¿ legend and cult iconography, this article proposes a new interpretation of the complex. It is argued that Euthymos received cult already in his lifetime in consequence of his victory over the Hero and that he took over, in a modified form, the Hero¿s cult. Various considerations, including the role of river gods as the recipients of brides¿ virginity in prenuptial rites, point to an identification of the Hero as a river deity. In this light it is suggested that the contest between Euthymos and the Hero was conceived as a deliberate emulation of Herakles¿ fight with Acheloos. The case of Euthymos at Locri, for all its peculiarities, draws our attention to some important aspects of the heroization of historical persons in the Classical period. First, the earliest attested cult of a living person in Greece is to be placed around the middle of the fifth century. Second, heroized persons in the Classical period were not always passive in the process of their heroization, but could actively promote it. And third, a common pattern in the heroization of contemporaries in the Classical period was to accommodate them into existing cults. (shrink)