I canti di Ermes tra citarodia e rapsodia

The kitharodic performances of Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (ll. 30-51 and 418-33) reflect the evolution of the proemial genre: the god passes from a self-contained song of erotic content to a theogonic proem on the birth of the gods, similar to the Homeric Hymns. The poet of the Hymn thus seems to delineate the history of the proemial genre and reveals that the rhapsodic long hymn was born as an independent genre in imitation of kitharodic erotic nomoi on the gods’ deed. In the sixth century the Homeric Hymns were regarded as a new poetical genre, invented by the rhapsodes in order to imitate the success of the kitharodes; they were modeled on the kitharodic nomoi but occasionally served as proems for long epic recitations.