Resumen de Sexual ambiguity and the identity of the narrator in Callimachus‘hymn to Athena
This paper re-examines the narratorial voice in Callimachus' ‘mimetic’ Hymn to Athena and argues that we should see it as complex and experimental (cf. the voices of his hymns to Zeus and Apollo). The portrayal of a narrator whose sex is ambiguous (with some elements pointing to a female celebrant as the narrator, others to a male scholar-poet) is in fact closely connected to the subject-matter of the myth which the narrator tells — the blinding of Teiresias for seeing Athena bathing naked, characters who are themselves sexually ambiguous. The nature and function of this myth, and its portrayal of Athena, raise important questions about the representation of the gods, for example in poetry, and about Hellenistic attitudes to the divine.
