The Homeric Hymn to Apollo

Abstract This chapter examines the controversial question of narrative unity in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. A thorough review is undertaken of previous scholarship on the issue of whether the unified poem transmitted in the medieval manuscripts is composed of two originally separate hymns to Delian Apollo and Pythian Apollo or, as several scholars have argued in recent years, was composed as a single hymn. It is argued that the weight of the evidence suggests that the Hymn was in fact composed of two originally separate poems.