User:Carchasm/sandbox/Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns (Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι) are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek hymns written in dactylic hexameter, each of which is dedicated to an individual god in the Ancient Greek pantheon. The hymns are all formally anonymous, although they were occasionally attributed to Homer in antiquity.

Authorship and Dating
While early references to the Hymns, such as Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, attributes the Hymn to Apollo to Homer, doubts began to form even in antiquity, beginning with the grammarians at the Library of Alexandria, and the modern scholarly consensus is that they were not written during the lifetime of Homer himself.

Although it may not be possible to assign an exact or absolute date the composition of the Hymns, the general assumption is that they were all composed later than the works of Homer and Hesiod, which are typically dated to the late 8th or early 7th century BC. This assumption has been validated by subsequent linguistic analysis. The oldest of the hymns, Hymn 5, to Aphrodite, was probably written in the seventh century BCE. The majority of the poems have been dated to between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE. The main exception is Hymn 8, to Ares, which contains Neoplatonic characteristics such as identification of Ares with Mars, and has been often attributed to Proclus, but generally cannot have been written before the 3rd century AD.

Style
The thirty-three hymns praise most of the major gods of Greek religion; The hymns are all composed in dactylic hexameter, the same meter used in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with which they share many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect.

The hymns vary widely in length, some being as brief as three or four lines, while others are in excess of five hundred lines. The long and medium-length narrative hymns, Hymns 1-5, 7, and 19, comprise an invocation, praise, and narrative, sometimes quite extended. Robert Parker characterizes the short hymns as "husks, introductions and conclusions from which the narrative core has been removed" noting that, for instance, Hymn 18 preserves a version of the beginning and end of the Hymn to Hermes. The short hymns may have served as preludes to the recitation of epic verse at festivals by professional rhapsodes.

First Hymn to Dionysus
The first hymn of the collection, dedicated to Dionysus, is only extant in a very fragmentary form - approximately 63 lines or parts of lines survive out of an estimated 400 original lines..

Themes
From the remaining fragments, the plot of the narrative portion of the hymn can be identified as the birth of Dionysus.



Themes
Faulkner characterizes this hymn as the "most Hesiodic" of the Homeric Hymns.

Themes
The hymn to Apollo is divided into two sections, a Delian section (lines 1-181) and a Pythian section (lines 182-546). There is generally no consensus among scholars over whether or not this means that the poem was originally two separate poems.

The Delian section contains the birth of Apollo on Delos

The first part is generally dated to the early 7th century BC, and scholars who do not consider the second part to have been composed at the same time consider it to have been composed some time after 580's BCE, based on potential references in that part to the First Sacred War in 595-585 BCE. Walter Burkert has suggested that the Hymn to Apollo reached it's final combined form in 522 BCE, for performance at the unusual double festival held by Polycrates of Samos to honor Apollo of Delos and of Delphi, based on an attribution in scholia to Cynaethus of Chios, a member of the Homeridae.

The Pythian section contains the

Legacy and Influence
The hymns are not widely cited in surviving works from antiquity. The earliest surviving quotation is from Thucydides. Plato, however, does not mention them in any of his quotations from Homer.

Most surviving Byzantine manuscripts begin with the third Hymn, which was reflected in the the first printed edition of the hymns, by Demetrius Chalcondyles, in 1488. The remaining two hymns that begin the collection were not recovered until 1777, when a chance discovery in Moscow by C.F. Matthei recovered the the final 12 lines of the first hymn, along with the nearly complete second hymn, in a single fifteenth-century manuscript that is now kept in Leiden.

Critical Greek Editions

 * Ruhnken 1782 - First Edition with all 33 hymns.
 * Baumeister 1860
 * E. Abel 1886
 * A. Gemoll 1886
 * A. Gemoll 1886