User:UndercoverClassicist/Homeric Hymn to Heracles the Lion-Hearted

The Homeric Hymn to Heracles the Lion-Hearted

Form and function
Johannes Haubolt has argued, based on the hymn's similar conclusion to that of the Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus (generally regarded as an epilogue), that the Hymn to Heracles was similarly an epilogue in origin.

Reception
The third-century BCE poet Theocritus wrote Idyll XXIV, or Herakliskos ('Little Hercules'), in which he uses allusion to the Homeric Hymn to create what Barbara Hughes Fowler has called "a mixture of the burlesque and archaising". Theocritus echoes the opening of the Homeric Hymn by beginning the poem with "Heracles, a ten-month-old child". The poem goes on to humorously retell the story of the infant Heracles's strangling of the snakes sent by Hera to kill him, including a twin brother of Heracles who kicks away his blanket and tries to flee from the snakes in terror.