User:UndercoverClassicist/Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three Ancient Greek hymns and one epigram. The Hymns praise individual deities of the Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories, often involving the deity's birth, their acceptance among the gods on Mount Olympus, or the establishment of their cult. In antiquity, the Hymns were generally, though not universally, attributed to the poet Homer: modern scholarship has established that most date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though some are later in date and the latest, the Hymn to Ares, may have been composed as late as the fifth century CE.

The hymns share compositional similarities with the Iliad and the Odyssey, also traditionally attributed to Homer. They share the same artificial literary dialect of Greek, are composed in dactylic hexameter, and make use of short, repeated phrases known as formulae. It is unclear how far writing, as opposed to oral composition, was involved in their creation. They may originally have served as preludes to the recitation of longer poems, and have been performed, at least originally, by singers accompanying themselves on a lyre or other stringed instrument. Suggested contexts for their performance include sympotic banquets, religious festivals and royal courts.

There are references to the Hymns in Greek poetry from around 600 BCE; they appear to have been used as educational texts by the early fifth century BCE, and to have been collected into a single corpus after the third century CE. Their influence on Greek literature and art was comparatively small until the third century BCE, when they were used extensively by Alexandrian poets including Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes. They were also an influence on Roman poets, such as Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. In late antiquity, they influenced both pagan and Christian literature, and their collection as a corpus likely dates to this period. They were comparatively neglected during the Byzantine period, though they continued to be copied in manuscripts of Homeric poetry; all of the surviving manuscripts of the Hymns date to the fifteenth century. They were also read and emulated widely in fifteenth-century Italy, and indirectly influenced Sandro Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus.

The Hymns were first published in print by Dimitrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. George Chapman made the first English translation of the Hymns in 1642. The rediscovery of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 led to a resurgence of European interest in the Hymns. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the Hymn to Demeter as an inspiration for his 1778 melodrama Proserpina. The Hymns were also influential on the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, particularly Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their influence has also been traced in the novels of James Joyce, the poetry of Ezra Pound, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the novel Coraline by Neil Gaiman.

Composition
The hymns mostly date to the archaic period of Greek history. The earliest date to the seventh century BCE; most were probably composed between that century and the sixth century BCE, though the Hymn to Ares is considerably later and may date from as late as the fifth century CE. Although the individual hymns can rarely be dated with certainty, the longer poems (that is, Hymns 2–5) are generally considered archaic in date. Scholars debate the degree to which the hymns were composed orally, as opposed to with the use of writing, and the degree of consistency or "fixity" likely to have existed between early versions of the hymns in performance.

The name "Homeric Hymns" derives from the attribution, in antiquity, of the hymns to Homer, then believed to be the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Hymn to Apollo was attributed to Homer by Pindar and Thucydides, who wrote around the beginning and the end of the fifth century BCE respectively. This attribution may have reflected the high esteem in which the hymns were held, as well as their stylistic similarities with the Homeric poems. The dialect of the hymns, an artificial literary language (Kunstsprache) derived largely from the Aeolic and Ionic dialects of Greek, is similar to that used in the Iliad and Odyssey. Like the Iliad and Odyssey, the hymns are composed in dactylic hexameter and make use of formulae: short, set phrases with particular metrical characteristics that could be repeated as a compositional aid.

The attribution to Homer was sometimes questioned in antiquity, such as by the rhetorician Athenaeus, who expressed his doubts about it around 200 CE. Other hypotheses in ancient times included the belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynathios of Chios, one of the Homeridae, a circle of poets claiming descent from Homer. Some ancient biographies of Homer denied his authorship of the Homeric Hymns, and the hymns' comparative absence from the work of scholars based in Hellenistic (that is, post–323 BCE) Alexandria may suggest that they were no longer considered to be his work by this period. However, few direct statements denying Homer's authorship of the Hymns survive from antiquity: in the second century CE, the Greek geographer Pausanias maintained their attribution to Homer.

Collection and transmission
An Attic vase painted around 470 BCE shows a youth, seated, holding a scroll with the first two words of the second Homeric Hymn to Hermes: this has been used to suggest that the hymns were used as educational texts by this period. At least the longer hymns seem to have been collected into a single edition at some point during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE).

The grouping of the hymns into their current corpus may date to late antiquity. References to the shorter poems as being within the corpus begin to be found in sources dating from the second and third centuries CE. The assemblage of the thirty-three hymns listed as today "Homeric" dates to no earlier than the third century CE. Between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries CE, the Homeric Hymns were generally transcribed in an edition which also contained the Hymns of Callimachus, the Orphic Hymns, the hymns of Proclus and the Orphic Argonautica.

Only a few papyrus copies of the Homeric Hymns are known. The surviving medieval manuscripts of the poems are fifteenth-century in date and drawn primarily from the late-antique compilation of the Homeric Hymns along with Orphic and other hymnic poetry. They all descend from a single, now-lost manuscript, known in scholarship by the siglum Ω. By the eighteenth century, twenty-five Byzantine manuscripts were known. One, known as Μ or the Codex Mosquensis, was written by the priest and polymath Ioannes Eugenikos in Constantinople in the first half of the fifteenth century; this manuscript preserved both the first Hymn to Dionysus and the Hymn to Demeter, but both were lost at some point after its creation and remained unknown until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei discovered Μ in a barn outside Moscow. Μ has among its sources a lost manuscript, known by the siglum Ψ, which probably dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century. This may be a manuscript mentioned in a letter by the humanist Giovanni Aurispa in 1424, which he stated he had acquired in Constantinople; that manuscript has also been suggested as being Ω. As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns are known.

Function
The hymns vary considerably in length, between 3 and 580 surviving lines. They seem originally to have functioned as preludes (prooimia) to recitations of longer works, such as epic poems. Many of the hymns with a verse indicating that another song will follow, sometimes specifically a work of heroic epic. Over time, however, at least some may have lengthened and been recited independently of other works. The hymns which currently survive as shorter works may equally be abridgements of longer works, retaining the introduction and conclusion of a poem whose central narrative has been lost.

The first known sources referring to the poems as "hymns" (ὕμνοι) date from the first century BCE. In concept, an ancient hymn was an invocation of a deity, often connected with a specific cult or sanctuary associated with that deity. The hymns often cover the deity's birth, arrival on Olympus, and dealings with human beings. Several discuss the origins of the god's cult or the founding of a major sanctuary dedicated to them. The hymns have been considered as agalmata, or gifts offered to deities on behalf of a community or social group. Some are aetiological accounts of religious cults, specific rituals, aspects of a deity's iconography and responsibilities, or of aspects of human technology and culture.

The hymns may have been composed to be recited at religious festivals, perhaps at singing contests: several directly or indirectly ask the god's support in competition. Originally, they appear to have been performed by singers accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument; later, they may have been recited by an orator holding a staff. They seem likely to have been performed frequently in various contexts throughout antiquity, such as at banquets or symposia. Nicholas Richardson has suggested that the fifth hymn, to Aphrodite, could have been composed for performance at the court of a ruler. The hymns' narrative voice has been described by Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter as "communal", usually making only generalised reference to their place of composition or the identity of the speaker, making them suitable for recitation by different speakers and for different audiences.

Antiquity
The Homeric Hymns are quoted comparatively rarely in ancient literature. There are sporadic references to them in early Greek lyric poetry, such as the works of Pindar and Sappho. The lyric poet Alcaeus composed hymns around 600 BCE to Dionysus and to the Dioscuri, which were influenced by the equivalent Homeric hymns, as possibly was Alcaeus's hymn to Hermes. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes also inspired the Ichneutae, a satyr play composed in the fifth century BCE by the Athenian playwright Sophocles. Few secure references to the Hymns can be dated to the fourth century BCE, though the Thebaid of Antimachus may contain allusions to the hymns to Aphrodite, Dionysus and Hermes. A few fifth-century painted vases show myths depicted in the Homeric Hymns and may have been inspired by the poems, but it is difficult to be certain whether the correspondences reflect direct contact with the Hymns or simply the commonplace nature of their underlying mythic narratives.

The hymns do not appear to have been studied by the Hellenistic scholiasts of Alexandria, though they were used and adapted by Alexandrian poets, particularly of the third century BCE. Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at Alexandria, adapted the Homeric Hymn to Hermes for his own Hermes, an account of the god's birth and invention of the lyre, while the didactic poem Phainomena by Aratus drew on the same poem. Callimachus drew on the Homeric Hymns for his own hymns, and is the earliest known poet to use them as inspiration for multiple works. The hymns were also used by Theocritus, Callimachus's approximate contemporary, in his Idylls 17, 22 and 24, and by the similarly contemporary Apollonius of Rhodes in his Argonautica. The mythographer Apollodorus, who wrote in the second century BCE, may have had access to a collection of the hymns and considered them Homeric in origin. The first century BCE historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus also quoted from the hymns and referred to them as "Homeric". Diodorus Siculus, another historian writing in the first century BCE, quoted verses of the first Hymn to Dionysus.

The Greek philosopher Philodemus, who moved to Italy between around 80 and 70 BCE and died around 40 to 35 BCE, has been suggested as a possible originator for the movement of manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns into the Roman world, and consequently for their reception into Latin literature. His own works quoted from the hymns to Demeter and Apollo. In Roman poetry, the opening of Lucretius's De rerum natura, written around the mid 50s BCE, has correspondences with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Virgil drew upon the Homeric Hymns in the Aeneid, composed between 29 and 19 BCE. The encounter between Aeneas and his mother Venus references the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in which Venus's Greek counterpart seduces Aeneas's father, Anchises. Later in the Aeneid, the account of the theft of Hercules's cattle by the monster Cacus is based upon that of the theft of Apollo's cattle by Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

Ovid made extensive use of the Homeric Hymns: his account of Apollo and Daphne in the Metamorphoses, published in 8 CE, references the Hymn to Apollo, while other parts of the Metamorphoses make reference to the Hymn to Demeter, the Hymn to Aphrodite and the second Hymn to Dionysus. Ovid's account of the abduction of Persephone in his Fasti, written and revised between 2 and around 14 CE, likewise references the Hymn to Demeter. Ovid further makes use of the Hymn to Aphrodite in Heroides 16, in which Paris adapts a section of the hymn to convince Helen of his worthiness for her. The Odes of Ovid's contemporary Horace also make use of the Homeric Hymns, particularly the five longer poems. In the second century CE, the Greek-speaking authors Lucian and Aelius Aristides drew on the hymns: Aristides used them in his orations, while Lucian parodied them in his satirical Dialogues of the Gods.

Late antiquity to Renaissance
In late antiquity, the direct influence of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively limited until the fifth century CE, during which they were quoted and adapted by the Greek-speaking poet Nonnus. Other poets of the fifth century onwards, such as Musaeus Grammaticus and Coluthus, made use of them. The Hymn to Hermes was a partial exception, as it was frequently taught in schools. It is possibly alluded to in an anonymous third-century poem praising a gymnasiarch named Theon, preserved by a papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and probably written by a student for a local festival. It also influenced the "Strasbourg Cosmogony", a poem composed around 350 BCE (possibly by the poet and local politician Andronicus) in commemoration of the mythical origins of the Egyptian city of Hermopolis Magna. The hymns also influenced the fourth-century Christian poem The Vision of Dorotheus, and a third-century hymn to Jesus transmitted among the Sibylline Oracles. They may also have been a model, alongside the hymns of Callimachus, for the fourth-century Christian hymns known as the Poemata Arcana, written by Gregory of Nazianzus.

Manuscript copies of the Homeric Hymns, often bundling them with other works such as the hymns of Callimachus, continued to be made during the Byzantine period. The poems were, however, only only rarely referenced, and never quoted, in Byzantine literature. The sixth-century poet Paul Silentiarius wrote a hexameter poem, celebrating the restoration of Hagia Sophia by the emperor Justinian I, which borrowed from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. Other, later authors, such as the eleventh-century Michael Psellos, may have drawn upon them, but it is often unclear whether their allusions are drawn directly from the Hymns or from other works narrating the same myths. The Hymns have also been cited as an inspiration for the twelfth-century poetry of Theodore Prodromos. The hymns were copied and adapted widely in fifteenth-century Italy, for example by the poets Michael Marullus and Francesco Filelfo. A manuscript, known by the siglum V, commissioned by the Catholic cardinal Bessarion probably in the 1460s, published the Hymns at the end of a collection of the other works then considered Homeric. This arrangement became standard in subsequent editions of Homer's works, and played an important role in establishing the perceived relationship between the Hymns, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The it ('Stanzas for the Joust'), written in the 1470s by Angelo Poliziano, paraphrase the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and was in turn an inspiration for Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted in the 1480s. The first printed edition (editio princeps) of the works of Homer, which included the Homeric Hymns, was made by the Florence-based Greek scholar Dimitrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489.

Early modern period onwards
The first English translation of the Hymns was made by George Chapman, as part of his complete translation of Homer, in 1624. Although they received comparatively little attention in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Restoration playwright and poet William Congreve published a version of the first Hymn to Aphrodite, written in heroic couplets, in 1710. In 1744, he released a revised version of his 1710 Semele: An Opera, with music by George Frideric Handel and a newly-added passage of the libretto quoting Congreve's translation of the "Hymn to Aphrodite". The rediscovery of the Hymn to Demeter in 1777 sparked a series of scholarly editions of the poem in Germany, and its first translations into German (in 1780) and Latin (in 1782). It was also an influence on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's melodrama Proserpina, first published as a prose work in 1778.

The Hymns were frequently read, praised and adapted by the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. In 1814, the essayist and poet Leigh Hunt published a translation of the second Hymn to Dionysus. Thomas Love Peacock adapted part of the same hymn in the fifth canto of his Rhododaphne, published posthumously in 1818. In January 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley made a translation of some of the shorter "Homeric Hymns" into heroic couplets; in July 1820, he translated the Hymn to Hermes into ottava rima.

The Hymn to Demeter was particularly influential as one of the few sources, and the earliest source, for the religious rituals known as the Eleusinian Mysteries. It became an important nexus of the debate into the nature of early Greek religion in early-nineteenth-century German scholarship. The anthropologist James George Frazer discussed the Hymn at length in The Golden Bough, his influential 1890 work of comparative mythology and religion. James Joyce made use of the same hymn, and possibly Frazer's work, in his 1922 novel Ulysses, in which the character Stephen Dedalus references "an old hymn to Demeter" while undergoing a journey reminiscent of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Joyce also drew upon the Hymn to Hermes in the characterisation of both Dedalus and his companion Buck Mulligan. The Cantos by Joyce's friend and mentor Ezra Pound, written between 1915 and 1960, also draw on the Hymns: Canto I concludes with parts of the hymns to Aphrodite, in both Latin and English.

The first Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite has also been cited as an influence on Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, particularly for the character of Lisa Freemont, played by Grace Kelly. Judith Fletcher has traced allusions to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in Neil Gaiman's 2002 children's novel Coraline and its 2009 film adaptation, arguing that the allusions in the novel's text are "subliminal" but become explicit in the film.