What are the Homeric Hymns?

The Homeric Hymns

The Homeric Hymns are thirty-three hexameter poems addressed to individual gods, composed by different hands from the seventh century BC onward and credited to Homer without being his own work. Each is a rhapsodic prooimion, the prelude a reciter sang before turning to a longer recitation, and the lengths in the collection run from three lines to five hundred and eighty. The longest and best known, the Hymn to Apollo, is itself two poems joined into one, and the whole collection survives only because a single manuscript, lost until 1777, carried what no other copy had kept.

In short

The collection holds thirty-three hymns, with lengths ranging from three lines, in the hymn to Demeter, to five hundred and eighty, in the hymn to Hermes.
Martin West dates their composition from the second half of the seventh century BC to at least the fifth century, and possibly later, the work of many different poets rather than one.
A prooimion was the prelude a rhapsode sang to a god before turning to a longer recitation; Pindar has the Homeridai begin that way, with a prelude to Zeus.
The Hymn to Apollo divides into a Delian portion, ending at line 178, and a Pythian portion, a division scholars have treated as two originally separate poems since the edition of Ruhnkenius in 1782.
A scholion on Pindar names Cynaethus, a rhapsode of Chios, as the hymn's actual author, who set his own verses down under Homer's name.
No surviving manuscript of the Hymns predates the fifteenth century, and the hymn to Demeter was unknown to modern readers until Christian Friedrich Matthaei found the one manuscript that carried it, in Moscow in 1777.

A rhapsode addresses a god before beginning the tale

A rhapsode stands before an audience, addresses a god and only then turns to the longer tale. The Greek name for that opening is prooimion: what comes before the oimē, the path or theme of an epic narrative named in the Odyssey. Pindar treats the convention as familiar, saying that the Homeridai, “singers of stitched verses,” generally begin with a prelude to Zeus. The Hymns are what those openings became once performance ended and the preludes were copied and read by themselves.

Thirty-three hymns, three lines to five hundred and eighty

The collection holds thirty-three of them, addressed to gods from Dionysus to Pan to Zeus himself, and almost nothing else unites them. The hymn to Demeter that opens “I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter” and asks her to keep a city safe runs to three lines and stops. The hymn to Hermes runs to five hundred and eighty. Martin West, editing the collection for the Loeb Classical Library, places their composition across roughly three centuries, by poets in different places, from the second half of the seventh century BC to at least the fifth, and possibly later still. No single hand produced them, and no ancient source claims one did.

Why the name is wrong twice

Thucydides took the largest hymn in the collection, the Hymn to Apollo, as Homer’s own work, and used it as historical evidence: writing that the point was “principally declared by Homer in these verses of his hymn to Apollo,” he quoted the poem’s own picture of Ionians gathering at Delos with their wives and children. The ascription did not survive later scrutiny. A scholiast on Pindar, explaining the same word Pindar uses for the old singers of Homer’s line, records that a rhapsode named Cynaethus, of a Chian family, was the one who actually wrote the Hymn to Apollo and set it down to Homer’s credit. The poem supplies its own signature for this: near the end of its Delian portion, the poet asks to be remembered and answers on his own behalf as a blind man who lives in rocky Chios, exactly where the scholiast’s Cynaethus was from.

One hymn to Apollo, or two

The Hymn to Apollo reads as two poems rather than one. The first part ends at line 178 with the god’s birth on Delos; a fresh address opens the second, turning at once to Lycia and Maeonia and then to Apollo’s journey to found his oracle at Pytho. The two parts differ in their geography and, to a lesser degree, in their language, and the case for treating them as originally separate compositions, a Delian hymn and a Pythian hymn later joined into one, has been accepted by most scholars since the edition of the Dutch philologist David Ruhnken (Ruhnkenius) in 1782. West’s own view goes further: that Cynaethus was the one who joined them.

The copy that almost wasn’t there

No manuscript of the Hymns now surviving is older than the fifteenth century, and the roughly two dozen that exist all descend from one lost medieval copy. One manuscript alone, known to scholars as M, broke from that line and carried something none of the others had: the hymn to Demeter, absent everywhere else. M would have carried most of the hymn to Dionysus too, but a gathering of its pages had already fallen out and been lost before it was copied. M itself then dropped out of view. It was the German philologist Christian Friedrich Matthaei who found it in Moscow in 1777, and only after his find, and the editions of the Dutch scholar David Ruhnken that followed in 1780 and 1782, did the hymn to Demeter become known to modern readers at all.

Where to stand

Delos

Cyclades

The Hymn to Apollo turns to its own audience on Delos, asking the island's girls to remember the singer, and answers on the poem's own behalf as a blind man who lives in rocky Chios. Thucydides, writing two centuries later, took the lines as Homer's own and quoted them as proof that Ionian cities had long sailed to Delos with their wives and children for the god's festival.
Delos