The Homeric Hymns

A song to a god before the story

A rhapsode, a professional reciter of poetry, stands before an audience. He first sings to a god, and only then turns to the longer story. The Greek name for that opening is prooimion. It means what comes before the oimē, the path or theme of an epic story, a word used in the Odyssey.

The poet Pindar treats this custom as familiar. He says that the Homeridai, “singers of stitched verses,” usually begin with a prelude to Zeus. The Homeric Hymns are what those openings became once they were no longer performed, and the preludes were copied and read on their own.

A collection of 33 hymns

The collection holds 33 of these songs. They are addressed to gods from Dionysus to Pan to Zeus himself, and they have almost nothing else in common. Some are long poems that tell a whole story. Others are a few lines of greeting.

There are two hymns to Demeter, the goddess of grain, one long and one short. The short one opens “I begin to sing of rich-haired Demeter”, asks her to keep a city safe, and stops after three lines. At the other end stands the hymn to Hermes, the longest in the collection at 580 lines.

Different poets in different places made them. Modern editors date them from the second half of the seventh century BC to at least the fifth, and possibly later still. No single poet produced them, and no ancient source claims one did.

Why the name is wrong twice

The historian Thucydides took the best known of the hymns, the Hymn to Apollo, as Homer’s own work. He 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 picture of Ionians gathering at Delos with their wives and children.

That claim of authorship did not survive later study. A scholion, a note written by an ancient scholar on Pindar’s text, explains the word Pindar uses for the old singers of Homer’s line. It records that a rhapsode named Cynaethus, from a family of Chios, really wrote the Hymn to Apollo and set it down as Homer’s.

The poem gives its own signature. Near the end of the part about Delos, the poet asks to be remembered. He answers for himself as a blind man who lives in rocky Chios, which is exactly where the Cynaethus of the note came from.

One hymn to Apollo, or two

The Hymn to Apollo reads as two poems, not one. The first part ends at line 178 with the god’s birth on Delos. A fresh address opens the second part. It turns at once to Lycia and Maeonia, and then to Apollo’s journey to found his oracle, a place where he answered questions, at Pytho.

The two parts differ in their geography and, to a lesser degree, in their language. Since the late eighteenth century, most editors have treated them as two poems, first composed separately, a hymn about Delos and a hymn about Pytho, and later joined into one. Some go further and think Cynaethus was the one who joined them.

The copy that almost was not there

No surviving manuscript, or handwritten copy, of the Hymns is older than the fifteenth century. The roughly two dozen that exist all come from one lost medieval copy.

One manuscript alone, known as M, broke from that line. It carried something none of the others had: the long hymn to Demeter, missing everywhere else. M would also have carried most of the hymn to Dionysus, but a set of its pages had fallen out and been lost before it was copied.

M itself then dropped out of view. It was found in Moscow in 1777. Only after that find did modern readers come to know the long hymn to Demeter at all.