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— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Homeric Hymns

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  • The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek poems and one epigram, gathered under the name of the poet who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey. For centuries, audiences across the ancient world believed Homer himself had written them. What exactly are these poems, and how did they survive two and a half millennia to shape the work of Virgil, Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even Alfred Hitchcock? The answers reach from the island of Delos in the archaic Greek world all the way to a barn outside Moscow in 1777, where a lost manuscript surfaced and changed how the Western world understood ancient religion.

  • Many of the hymns close with a verse announcing that another song will follow. That closing formula reveals their original function: the hymns served as preludes, warm-up performances sung before the main event of a longer heroic epic. Performers accompanied themselves on a stringed instrument such as a lyre, known in the texts as a phorminx. In the early period of the hymns' composition, these lyres typically had four strings; seven-stringed versions became more common during the seventh century BCE.

    A paean probably written in 138 BCE mentions singers accompanying hymns with a kithara, a seven-stringed instrument of the lyre family, and contrasts it with the aulos, a reeded wind instrument. Early Greek music was not written down; compositions passed from performer to performer by ear and tradition. Until the fourth century BCE, few compositions appear to have been intended for repeat performance or long-term preservation.

    Over time, some hymns may have grown longer and been recited as standalone works. The hymns we have range from three surviving lines to five hundred and eighty. Those that survive as short poems may themselves be abridgements of longer originals, preserving only the opening and closing of a poem whose narrative middle has been lost.

  • Each hymn praises a specific deity of the Greek pantheon. The subjects include familiar figures such as Demeter, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite, and Zeus, as well as gods who receive only a handful of lines, such as Hestia and Rhea. The Hymn to Hermes, at five hundred and eighty lines, narrates the entire first three days of the god's life, including his theft of Apollo's cattle and his invention of a tortoiseshell lyre.

    The scholar Irene de Jong has noted a key difference from the Homeric epics: in the hymns, the gods themselves are the primary focus, with mortals appearing mainly to witness divine actions. In the Iliad and Odyssey, that relationship is reversed. The hymns also use what scholars call iterative narration, describing events that happen repeatedly or habitually, a technique rare in ancient Greek literature and absent from the epics.

    Claude Calame has described the hymns as "contracts": by praising a deity, the singer invited that deity's favour in return, whether for the performer personally or for the community gathered to hear the performance. Jenny Strauss Clay has argued that the hymns played a role in shaping a shared Greek conception of the Olympian pantheon, with Zeus at its head, helping to unify Greek communities from different city-states around a common religious imagining.

  • Pindar and Thucydides both attributed the Hymn to Apollo to Homer, writing at opposite ends of the fifth century BCE. Their attribution likely reflected the hymns' stylistic resemblances to the Iliad and Odyssey: the same artificial literary dialect derived from Aeolic and Ionic Greek, the same rhythmic form of dactylic hexameter, and the same use of formulae, short repeated phrases with fixed metrical shapes.

    Not everyone agreed. The rhetorician Athenaeus expressed doubts around 200 CE. An alternative ancient tradition held that the Hymn to Apollo was written by Kynaithos of Chios, one of the Homeridae, a group of poets claiming descent from Homer. Some ancient biographies of Homer denied his authorship of the hymns outright. The Greek geographer Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, nonetheless still attributed the hymns to Homer.

    Modern scholarship has since established that most hymns date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, placing their composition in the archaic period of Greek history. The one clear outlier is the Hymn to Ares, which may date as late as the fifth century CE, making it roughly a thousand years younger than the earliest hymns in the collection.

  • Callimachus, the third-century BCE Alexandrian poet, is the earliest poet known to have used the Homeric Hymns as an inspiration for multiple of his own works. His approximate contemporary Theocritus drew on them in his Idylls, and Apollonius of Rhodes used them in his Argonautica. Before this Alexandrian period, the hymns' direct influence on Greek literature had been relatively limited.

    Their move into Roman literature may trace partly to the philosopher Philodemus, who relocated from Greece to Italy between around 80 and 70 BCE. Lucretius's De rerum natura, written around the mid 50s BCE, echoes the Hymn to Aphrodite. Catullus emulated the hymns in his poem on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. Virgil, composing his Aeneid between 29 and 19 BCE, drew on the Hymn to Aphrodite for the encounter between Aeneas and his mother Venus, and on the Hymn to Hermes for the story of the cattle-thieving monster Cacus.

    Ovid proved the most prolific borrower. His Metamorphoses, published in 8 CE, references the hymns to Apollo, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Dionysus. His Fasti, written and revised between 2 and around 14 CE, returns to the Hymn to Demeter for his account of Persephone's abduction. In Heroides 16, Ovid has Paris quote from the Hymn to Aphrodite to persuade Helen of his worthiness.

  • All surviving manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns date to the fifteenth century. They descend from a single lost ancestor, identified in scholarship by the Greek letter omega, and probably written in minuscule script. Most surviving manuscripts ultimately trace back to a second lost manuscript, known by the Greek letter psi, probably written in the twelfth or thirteenth century. This may be the very manuscript described in a 1424 letter by the humanist Giovanni Aurispa, who wrote that he had acquired it in Constantinople.

    One manuscript broke from this line. Known by the siglum M, or the Codex Mosquensis, it was written by the polymath Ioannes Eugenikos in the first half of the fifteenth century, possibly in Constantinople or Italy. This manuscript preserved two texts no other known manuscript contained: the first Hymn to Dionysus and the Hymn to Demeter. Both were lost at some point after its creation. They remained unknown to European scholarship until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei found the Codex Mosquensis in a barn outside Moscow.

    The rediscovery set off a wave of scholarly activity in Germany. The first German translation of the Hymn to Demeter appeared in 1780, and the first Latin translation in 1782. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, drawing on the newly recovered poem, published his melodrama Proserpina as a prose work in 1778. The Hymn to Demeter also became a central text in debates about the nature of early Greek religion, because it is the earliest surviving source for the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret religious rituals of ancient Athens.

  • The first printed edition of the hymns was produced by the Florence-based Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488-1489. No collation of their manuscripts was attempted again until 1749. Joshua Barnes published an edition in 1711, the first to explain textual problems by citing parallels in other Homeric texts. The present conventional order of the hymns was fixed by Alfred Goodwin's Oxford edition of 1893, which followed the sequence found in the Codex Mosquensis; before that edition, the Hymn to Apollo had been placed first.

    The English Romantic poets took up the hymns with particular energy. Leigh Hunt published a translation of the second Hymn to Dionysus in 1814. Thomas Love Peacock adapted part of the same hymn in his Rhododaphne, published posthumously in 1818. Percy Bysshe Shelley translated several of the shorter hymns into heroic couplets in January 1818, then turned the Hymn to Hermes into ottava rima in July 1820. Shelley's own poems The Witch of Atlas and With a Guitar, to Jane drew most heavily on the Hymn to Hermes.

    The influence persisted well into the twentieth century. James Joyce wove the Hymn to Demeter into his 1922 novel Ulysses, and drew on the Hymn to Hermes for the characters of Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan. Ezra Pound's Cantos, composed between 1915 and 1960, include passages from the hymns to Aphrodite in both Latin and English at the close of Canto I. The first Hymn to Aphrodite has been cited as an influence on Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, particularly for Grace Kelly's character Lisa Freemont. Judith Fletcher has traced allusions to the Hymn to Demeter in Neil Gaiman's 2002 children's novel Coraline, arguing that the allusions become explicit in the 2009 film adaptation.

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Orphic Hymns

Common questions

What are the Homeric Hymns and how many are there?

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek poems and one epigram that praise deities of the Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories. They were composed mostly between the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though the Hymn to Ares may date as late as the fifth century CE.

Did Homer write the Homeric Hymns?

Modern scholarship has established that Homer did not write the Homeric Hymns. Although they were generally attributed to Homer in antiquity, and share the same dialect and dactylic hexameter as the Iliad and Odyssey, most date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. Ancient doubters included the rhetorician Athenaeus, writing around 200 CE.

When were the Homeric Hymns first published in print?

The Homeric Hymns were first published in print by the Florence-based Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488-1489. The first English translation was made by George Chapman in 1624.

What is the longest Homeric Hymn?

The Hymn to Hermes is the longest, with five hundred and eighty surviving lines. It narrates the first three days of Hermes's life, including his theft of Apollo's cattle and his invention of a tortoiseshell lyre.

How were the Homeric Hymns rediscovered after being lost?

The Hymn to Demeter and the first Hymn to Dionysus were preserved in a single manuscript, the Codex Mosquensis, written by Ioannes Eugenikos in the first half of the fifteenth century. Both were lost after its creation and remained unknown until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei discovered the manuscript in a barn outside Moscow.

Which Roman poets were influenced by the Homeric Hymns?

Lucretius, Catullus, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid all drew on the Homeric Hymns. Virgil used the Hymn to Aphrodite and the Hymn to Hermes in his Aeneid, composed between 29 and 19 BCE. Ovid made the most extensive use, referencing several hymns in his Metamorphoses, published in 8 CE, and in his Fasti.

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All sources

127 references cited across the entry

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