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95-681: Mavronéri ( Greek: “Black Water” ) is a river identified with the River Styx of Greek mythology according to Hesiod ’s description in Theogony . It is located near Nonakris in the Aroania Mountains of Achaia on the Peloponnesian peninsula . Its waters contain a significant amount of Calicheamicin , a dangerous compound produced by bacteria. Stanford University scientists Antoinette Hayes and Adrienne Mayor speculate that

190-719: A certain Ptolemy Hephaestion (probably referring to Ptolemy Chennus ) knew of a story, "concerning the water of the Styx in Arcadia", which told how an angry Demeter had turned the Styx's water black. According to James George Frazer , this "fable" provided an explanation for the fact that, from a distance, the waterfall appears black. Water from this Styx was said to be poisonous and able to dissolve most substances. The first-century natural philosopher Pliny , wrote that drinking its water caused immediate death, and that

285-468: 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

380-540: A corpus probably dates to this period. They were comparatively neglected during the succeeding Byzantine period (that is, until 1453), but continued to be copied in manuscripts of Homeric poetry; all 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 Homeric Hymns were first published in print by Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. George Chapman made

475-403: A deity's iconography and responsibilities, or of aspects of human technology and culture. The hymns have been considered as agalmata , or gifts offered to deities on behalf of a community or social group. In this capacity, Claude Calame has referred to them as "contracts", by which the praise of the deity in the hymn invites reciprocity from that deity in the form of favour or protection for

570-479: A dotted antisigma (ↄ), evidence of which can be found in surviving manuscripts of the Hymn to Apollo . 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 today as "Homeric" dates to no earlier than

665-536: 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 Homeric Hymns : Canto I concludes with parts of the hymns to Aphrodite, in both Latin and English. In modern Greek poetry,

760-474: A lost one known by the siglum Ψ ( psi ), 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; Aurispa's manuscript has also been suggested as being Ω. As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns are known. Until the later twentieth century,

855-550: A poem composed around 350 CE (possibly by the poet and local politician Andronicus ) in commemoration of the mythical origins of the Egyptian city of Hermopolis Magna . The Homeric Hymns did influence 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

950-525: 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, while Catullus emulated

1045-631: A series of four articles in The Journal of Hellenic Studies on textual problems in the Homeric Hymns , which became the basis of the 1904 edition of the hymns he co-produced with Edward Ernest Sikes. In 1912, Allen published an edition of the hymns in the Oxford Classical Texts series. He published an updated version of his 1904 edition in 1936, co-edited with William Reginald Halliday ; Sikes refused to collaborate on it, but remained credited as an editor. The first commentary on

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1140-458: A sharp distinction between oral and written composition, seeing the poems as traditional texts originating in a strongly oral culture. 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

1235-425: A single drop from that holiest—and cruelest—of springs? Even the gods and Jupiter himself are frightened of these Stygian waters. You must know that, at least by hearsay, and that, as you swear by the powers of the gods, so the gods always swear by the majesty of the Styx. Styx, along with the underworld rivers Cocytus and Acheron , were associated with waterways in the upper world. For example, according to Homer,

1330-513: A staff. The Hymn to Apollo makes reference to a chorus of maidens on the island of Delos , the Deliades, who sang hymns to Apollo, Leto and Artemis . References to instruments of the lyre family (known interchangeably as phorminx ) occur throughout the Homeric Hymns and other archaic texts, such as the Iliad and Odyssey . These lyres generally had four strings in the early period of

1425-468: A tenth part of his water is allotted to her. In the Iliad the river Styx forms a boundary of Hades, the abode of the dead, in the Underworld. Athena mentions the "sheer-falling waters of Styx" needing to be crossed when Heracles returned from Hades after capturing Cerberus , and Patroclus 's shade begs Achilles to bury his corpse quickly so that he might "pass within the gates of Hades" and join

1520-473: A town (in what was then ancient Arcadia and now modern Achaea ) not far from Pheneus , and says that the Spartan king Cleomenes , would make men take oaths swearing by its water. Herodotus describes it as "a stream of small appearance, dropping from a cliff into a pool; a wall of stones runs round the pool". Pausanias reports visiting the "water of the Styx" near Nonacris (which at the time of his visit, in

1615-455: Is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils or their feasts, nine full years. But in the tenth year he comes again to join the assemblies of the deathless gods who live in the house of Olympus. The Roman poet Ovid has Jove (the Roman equivalent of Zeus) swear by the waters of Styx when he promises Semele : Whatever thy wish, it shall not be denied, and that thy heart shall suffer no distrust, I pledge me by that Deity,

1710-450: The Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories, often involving a 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 more recent and

1805-417: 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

1900-829: The Homeric Hymns generally place greater focus on single events than the Homeric epics, and cover a shorter span of time, resulting in what he calls a comparatively "slow" narration. Of Pallas Athena , guardian of the city, I begin to sing. Dread is she, and with Ares she loves deeds of war, the sack of cities and the shouting and the battle. It is she who saves the people as they go out to war and come back. Hail, goddess, and give us good fortune with happiness! —Hymn 11, "To Athena", translated by Hugh Evelyn-White The hymns vary considerably in length, between 3 and 580 surviving lines. They are generally considered to have originally functioned as preludes ( prooimia ) to recitations of longer works, such as epic poems . Many of

1995-511: The Homeric Hymns in his epyllion on the wedding of Peleus and Thetis . Virgil drew upon the Homeric Hymns in his Aeneid , composed between 29 and 19 BCE. The encounter in Book 1 of the Aeneid 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

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2090-505: The Homeric Hymns received relatively little attention from classical scholars or translators. No collation of the hymns' manuscripts was made between that of Chalkokondyles in 1488 and 1749. Joshua Barnes published an edition of the hymns in 1711, which was the first to attempt to explain textual issues by citing parallels in other texts considered to be Homeric. Friedrich August Wolf published two editions, as part of larger editions of Homer, in 1794 and 1807. The first modern edition of

2185-492: The Homeric Hymns , particularly the Hymn to Hermes . The 1889 poem "Demeter and Persephone" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson , reinterprets the narrative of the Hymn to Demeter as an allegory for the coming of Christ . 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

2280-521: 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 . In late antiquity (that is, from around the third to the sixth centuries CE), the direct influence of the Homeric Hymns

2375-502: 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

2470-486: The Hymn to Ares was composed 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 (Hymns 2–5) are generally considered archaic in date. The earliest of the Homeric Hymns were composed in a time period when oral poetry was common in Greek culture. It is unclear how far the hymns were composed orally, as opposed to with

2565-436: The Iliad and Odyssey , the hymns are composed in the rhythmic form known as 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

2660-468: The Iliad and Odyssey , the text of the Homeric Hymns was comparatively little edited by the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria. Franco Ferrari  [ it ] has suggested that, throughout antiquity, manuscripts of the text may have circulated which intentionally included two different versions ("doublets") of the same word: Alexandrian scholars developed the practice of marking these with

2755-465: The Potamoi , was also a river, in her case, a river of the Underworld. According to Hesiod, Styx was given one-tenth of her father's water, which flowed far underground, and came up to the surface to pour out from a high rock: the famous cold water ... trickles down from a high and beetling rock. Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night out of the holy stream, and

2850-658: The River Styx , is a goddess and one of the rivers of the Greek Underworld . Her parents were the Titans Oceanus and Tethys , and she was the wife of the Titan Pallas and the mother of Zelus , Nike , Kratos , and Bia . She sided with Zeus in his war against the Titans, and because of this, to honor her, Zeus decreed that the solemn oaths of the gods be sworn by the water of Styx. According to

2945-602: The Trojan War , and he has Calypso (in the Odyssey ) use the same words when she swears by Styx to Odysseus that she will cease to plot against him. Also Hypnos (in the Iliad ) makes Hera swear to him "by the inviolable water of Styx". Examples of oaths sworn by Styx also occur in the Homeric Hymns . Demeter asks the "implacable" water of Styx to be her witness, as she swears to Metaneira , Leto swears to

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3040-557: The 1901 "Interruption" by Constantine P. Cavafy references the myth of Demophon as told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter . 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

3135-502: The Byzantine period. The surviving medieval manuscripts of the poems date to the fifteenth century and are 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 ( omega ) and possibly written in minuscule . In fifteenth-century Italy, the hymns were copied widely. A manuscript known by

3230-571: The Great's death was caused by being poisoned with the water of this Styx. The Arcadian Styx may have been named so after its mythological counterpart, but it is also possible that this Arcadian stream was the model for the mythological Styx. The latter seems to be the case, at least, for the Styx in Apuleius 's Metamorphoses , which has Venus , addressing Psyche , give the following description: Do you see that steep mountain-peak standing above

3325-426: 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. Phainomena , a didactic poem about the heavens by Aratus , drew on the same poem. Callimachus drew on

3420-642: The Joust'), written in the 1470s by Angelo Poliziano , paraphrase the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite , and were in turn an inspiration for Sandro Botticelli 's The Birth of Venus , painted in the 1480s. Georgius Dartona made the first translation of the Homeric Hymns into Latin, which was published in Paris by Chrétien Wechel  [ fr ] in 1538. Around 1570, the French humanist Jean Daurat gave lectures in which he advanced an allegorical reading of

3515-580: The Styx. In Dante 's Inferno , Phlegyas ferries Virgil and Dante across the foul waters of the river Styx which is portrayed as a marsh comprising the Hell 's Fifth Circle, where the angry and sullen are punished. By metonymy , the adjective stygian ( /ˈstɪdʒiən/ ) came to refer to anything unpleasantly dark, gloomy, or forbidding. In the Homeric Hymn 2 to Demeter Persephone names Styx as one of her "frolicking" Oceanid -companions when she

3610-537: The Waves of the deep Stygian Lake,—oath of the Gods. and was then obliged to follow through even though he realized to his horror that Semele's request would lead to her death. Similarly Phoebus (here identified with Sol , the Roman equivalent of the Greek Helios ) promised his son Phaethon whatever he desired, which also resulted in the boy's death. The goddess Styx, like her father Oceanus, and his sons

3705-408: The allusions in the novel's text are "subliminal" but become explicit in the film. Only a few ancient papyrus copies of the Homeric Hymns are known. 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

3800-639: The belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynaithos 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, relative to the Iliad and Odyssey , from the work of scholars based in Hellenistic (323–30 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

3895-410: The deathless gods that hold the peaks of snowy Olympus pours a libation of her water and is forsworn, must lie breathless until a full year is completed, and never come near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lie spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed: and a heavy trance overshadows him. But when he has spent a long year in his sickness, another penance more hard follows after the first. For nine years he

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3990-422: The deathless gods to great Olympus" and promised, to whosoever would join him against the Titans, that he would preserve whatever rights and offices each had, or if they had none under Cronus, they would be given both under his rule. Styx, upon the advice of her father Oceanus, was the first to side with Zeus, bringing her children by Pallas along with her. And so in return Zeus appointed Styx to be "the great oath of

4085-520: The debate as to 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

4180-593: 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 relatively 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 , Catullus , Virgil , Horace and Ovid . In late antiquity ( c.  200  – c.  600 CE ), they influenced both pagan and Christian literature, and their collection as

4275-456: 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

4370-464: 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 . Of Shelley's own poems, The Witch of Atlas , written in 1820, and With a Guitar, to Jane , written in 1822, were most closely influenced by

4465-483: The first English translation of them in 1624. Part of their text was incorporated, via a 1710 translation by William Congreve , into George Frideric Handel 's 1744 musical drama Semele . The rediscovery of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 led to a resurgence of European interest in the hymns. In the arts, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the Hymn to Demeter as an inspiration for his 1778 melodrama Proserpina . Their textual criticism progressed considerably over

4560-424: The first half of the eighteenth century, Jacques Philippe d’Orville  [ de ] wrote a book of notes on the text of the Homeric Hymns , in which he condemned Barnes's then-standard 1711 edition and the 1722 edition of Michel Maittaire . The first modern textual criticism of the hymns dates to 1749, when David Ruhnken published his readings of two medieval manuscripts, known as A and C. The hymns' text

4655-427: The fourth century BCE, few compositions appear to have been intended for repeat performance or long-term transmission. The Homeric 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. Some allude to the deity's cult at a specific place and may have been composed for performance within that cult, though

4750-569: The fourth-century Christian hymns known as the Poemata Arcana , written by Gregory of Nazianzus . In the fifth century, the Greek-speaking poet Nonnus quoted and adapted the hymns; from that time onwards, other poets, such as Musaeus Grammaticus and Coluthus , made use of them. Although the Homeric Hymns were known and transmitted in the Byzantine period, they were only rarely referenced, and never quoted, in Byzantine literature. The sixth-century poet Paul Silentiarius celebrated

4845-462: The gods to support the portrayal of human affairs. The poems also make use of different narrative styles: the Homeric Hymns are unlike the Homeric epics in that they employ iterative narration (accounts of events which repeatedly or habitually occur), which is relatively rare in ancient Greek literature, within passages of singulative narration (accounts of specific events related in sequence). René Nünlist  [ de ] has also suggested that

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4940-420: The gods, and her children to live with him always." According to Hesiod, Styx lived at the entrance to Hades, in a cave "propped up to heaven all round with silver pillars". Hesiod also tells us that Zeus would send Iris , the messenger of the gods, to fetch the "famous cold water" of Styx for the gods to swear by, and describes the punishments which would follow the breaking of such an oath: For whoever of

5035-430: The hoof of a female mule was the only material not "rotted" by its water. According to Plutarch the poisonous water could only be held by an ass's hoof, since all other vessels would "be eaten through by it, owing to its coldness and pungency." While according to Pausanias, the only vessel that could hold the Styx's water (poisonous to both men and animals) was a horse's hoof. There were ancient suspicions that Alexander

5130-518: The hymns as a separate text, without the Homeric epics, was made in 1796 by Karl David Ilgen and followed by editions by August Mattiae in 1805 and Gottfried Hermann in 1806. In 1886, Albert Gemoll  [ de ] published a German edition of the hymns: this was both the first modern edition in a vernacular language (that is, not in Latin) and the only edition to date that has printed digammas in their text. The present conventional order of

5225-557: 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

5320-445: The hymns end 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

5415-434: The hymns survive from antiquity: in the second century CE, the Greek geographer Pausanias maintained their attribution to Homer. Irene de Jong has contrasted the narrative focus of the Homeric Hymns with that of the Homeric epics, writing that the gods are the primary focus of the hymns, with mortals serving primarily to witness the gods' actions, whereas the epics focus primarily on their mortal characters and use

5510-565: The hymns was established by the Oxford edition of Alfred Goodwin in 1893, following that employed by the manuscript M: previously, the Hymn to Apollo had been placed first. Reviewing Goodwin's work in 1894, Edward Ernest Sikes judged that most of the important work on the Homeric Hymns had previously been done by German scholars, and that "little of importance" had recently been written, apart from Goodwin's edition, on them in English. In

5605-500: The hymns' composition, though seven-stringed versions became more common during the seventh century BCE. A paean , probably written in 138 BCE, mentions the accompaniment of hymnic singing with a kithara (a seven-stringed instrument of the lyre family), and contrasts this style of music with that of the aulos , a reeded wind instrument. It is unlikely that early Greek music was written down; instead, compositions were transmitted aurally and passed on through tradition. Until

5700-593: The identity of the speaker. This made the hymns suitable for recitation by different speakers and for different audiences. Jenny Strauss Clay has suggested that the Homeric Hymns played a role in the establishment of a panhellenic conception of the Olympian pantheon, with Zeus as its head, and therefore in promoting the cultural unity of Greeks from different polities . The Homeric Hymns are quoted comparatively rarely in ancient literature. There are sporadic references to them in early Greek lyric poetry , such as

5795-504: The latest, the Hymn to Ares , may have been composed as late as the fifth century CE. The Homeric 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 ,

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5890-635: The latter did not necessarily follow from the former. They seem likely to have been performed frequently in various contexts throughout antiquity, such as at banquets or symposia . It has been suggested that the fifth hymn, to Aphrodite , could have been composed for performance at a royal or aristocratic court, perhaps of a family in the Troad claiming descent from Aphrodite via her son Aeneas . 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

5985-507: The libretto in 1710; in 1744, George Frideric Handel released a version of the opera with his own music and alterations to the libretto made by an unknown collaborator, including a newly-added passage 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

6080-426: The longer hymns seem to have been collected into a single edition at some point during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE). Alexander Hall has argued that Hymns 1–26, except 6 (the Hymn to Aphrodite ) and 8 (the Hymn to Ares ), were initially collected into what he calls a "proto-collection", probably no earlier than the Hellenistic period, with the remaining hymns later added as an appendix . Unlike those of

6175-410: The name of one of Pluto's moons . The other moons of Pluto ( Charon , Nix , Hydra , and Kerberos ) also have names from Greco-Roman mythology related to the underworld. Homeric Hymns The Homeric Hymns ( Ancient Greek : Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι , romanised :  Homērikoì húmnoi ) are a collection of thirty-three ancient Greek hymns and one epigram . The hymns praise deities of

6270-579: The nineteenth century, particularly in German scholarship, though the text continued to present substantial difficulties into the twentieth. The Homeric Hymns were also influential on the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, particularly Leigh Hunt , Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley . Later poets to adapt the hymns included Alfred, Lord Tennyson , and Constantine P. Cavafy . Their influence has also been traced in

6365-568: The opening of the first Hymn to Aphrodite . The first English translation of the hymns was made by George Chapman in 1624, as part of his complete translation of Homer's works. Although they received relatively little attention in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the playwright and poet William Congreve published a version of the first Hymn to Aphrodite , written in heroic couplets , in 1710. Congreve also wrote an operatic libretto , Semele , set to music by John Eccles in 1707 but never performed. Congreve published

6460-513: The other dead "beyond the River". So too in Virgil 's Aeneid , where the Styx winds nine times around the borders of Hades, and the boatman Charon is in charge of ferrying the dead across it. More usually, however, Acheron is the river (or lake) which separates the world of the living from the world of the dead. In the Odyssey , Circe says that the Underworld river Cocytus is a branch of

6555-549: The personified Delos by the water of Styx, calling it the "most powerful and dreadful oath that the blessed gods can swear", while Apollo asks Hermes to swear to him on the "dread" water of Styx. Hesiod , in the Theogony , gives an account of how this role for Styx came about. He says that, during the Titanomachy , the great war of Zeus and his fellow Olympians against Cronus and his fellow Titans, Zeus summoned "all

6650-490: The poems as "hymns" ( hymnoi ) 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. Some are aetiological accounts of religious cults, specific rituals, aspects of

6745-511: The polymath Ioannes Eugenikos in the first half of the fifteenth century, possibly in Constantinople or Italy. 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. All surviving manuscripts, apart from Μ, have among their sources

6840-404: The restoration of Hagia Sophia by the emperor Justinian I in a poem which borrowed from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes . 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 Homeric Hymns or from other works narrating the same myths. The hymns have also been cited as an inspiration for

6935-652: The river Titaressus , a tributary of the river Peneius in Thessaly , was a branch of the Styx. However Styx has been most commonly associated with an Arcadian stream and waterfall (the Mavronéri ) that runs through a ravine on the North face of mount Chelmos and flows into the Krathis river. The fifth-century BC historian Herodotus , locates this stream—calling it "the water of Styx"—as being near Nonacris

7030-453: The search. Styx was the oath of the gods. Homer calls Styx the "dread river of oath". In both the Iliad and the Odyssey , it is said that swearing by the water of Styx, is "the greatest and most dread oath for the blessed gods". Homer has Hera (in the Iliad ) say this when she swears by Styx to Zeus, that she is not to blame for Poseidon's intervention on the side of the Greeks in

7125-460: The second century AD, was already a partially-buried ruins), saying that: Not far from the ruins is a high cliff; I know of none other that rises to so great a height. A water trickles down the cliff, called by the Greeks the water of the Styx. According to Aelian , Demeter caused the water of this Arcadian Styx "to well up in the neighbourhood of Pheneus". An ancient legend apparently also connected Demeter with this Styx. According to Photius ,

7220-479: The second-century Metamorphoses of Apuleius , one of the impossible trials which Venus imposed on Psyche was to fetch water from the Styx. Apuleius has the water guarded by fierce dragons ( dracones ), and from the water itself came fearsome cries of deadly warning. The sheer impossibility of her task caused Psyche to become senseless, as if turned into stone. Jupiter's eagle admonishes Psyche saying: Do you ... really expect to be able to steal, or even touch,

7315-520: The siglum V, commissioned by the Byzantine-born 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 first printed edition ( editio princeps ) of

7410-457: The singer or their community. Little is known about the musical settings of the Homeric Hymns . The earliest surviving ancient Greek musical compositions date to the end of the fifth century BCE, after the composition of nearly all of the hymns. Originally, the hymns appear to have been performed by singers accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument, such as a lyre ; later, they may have been recited, rather than sung, by an orator holding

7505-541: 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 . The Roman poet 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 ,

7600-588: 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 . Manuscripts of the Homeric Hymns , often bundling them with other works such as the hymns of Callimachus, continued to be made during

7695-594: The towering cliff? Dark waves flow down from a black spring on that peak and are enclosed by the reservoir formed by the valley nearby, to water the swamps of Styx and feed the rasping currents of Cocytus. That Apuleius has his "black spring" being guarded by dragons, also suggests a connection between his Styx and two modern local names for the waterfall: the Black Water ( Mavro Nero ) and the Dragon Water ( Drako Nero ). On 2 July 2013, "Styx" officially became

7790-425: The twelfth-century poetry of Theodore Prodromos . The Homeric Hymns were copied and adapted widely in fifteenth-century Italy, for example by the poets Michael Marullus and Francesco Filelfo . Marsilio Ficino made a translation of them around 1462; Giovanni Tortelli used them for examples in his 1478 grammatical treatise De Orthographia . The Stanze per la giostra  [ it ] ('Stanzas for

7885-415: The use of writing, and scholars debate the degree of consistency or "fixity" likely to have existed between early versions of the hymns in performance. The debate is clouded by the impossibility of determining for certain whether a poem with characteristic features of oral poetry was in fact composed orally, or composed using writing but in imitation of an oral-poetic style. Modern scholarship tends to avoid

7980-784: The usual account, Styx was the eldest of the Oceanids , the many daughters of the Titan Oceanus , the great world-encircling river, and his sister-wife, the Titaness Tethys . However, according to the Roman mythographer Hyginus , she was the daughter of Nox ("Night", the Roman equivalent of Nyx ) and Erebus (Darkness). She married the Titan Pallas and by him gave birth to the personifications Zelus (Glory, Emulation), Nike (Victory), Kratos (Strength, Dominion), and Bia (Force, Violence). The geographer Pausanias tells us that, according to Epimenides of Crete , Styx

8075-564: The waters of the Mavronéri were used to poison Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. This article about a location in ancient Arcadia is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article related to a river in Greece is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . River Styx In Greek mythology , Styx ( / ˈ s t ɪ k s / ; Ancient Greek : Στύξ [stýks] ; lit. "Shuddering" ), also called

8170-399: The works of James Joyce , the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock , and the novel Coraline by Neil Gaiman . The Homeric Hymns mostly date to the archaic period of Greek history, though they often retell much older stories. The earliest of the hymns date to the seventh century BCE; most were probably composed between that century and the sixth century BCE, though

8265-535: The works of Homer, which included the Homeric Hymns , was made by the Florence-based Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489. The 1566 edition, made by Henri Estienne , was the first to include line numbers and a Latin translation. By the end of the eighteenth century, twenty-five Byzantine manuscripts were known. One, known as M or the Codex Mosquensis , was written by

8360-580: 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 definite references to

8455-449: Was a matter of considerable scholarly attention in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. August Baumeister published an edition of the hymns in 1860, which was the first to integrate readings based on the Θ ( theta ) family of manuscripts (a sub-family of those descended from Ψ). Robert Yelverton Tyrrell wrote in 1894 that the text of the Homeric Hymns had been in a "state of chaos" before Baumeister's edition, though their text

8550-481: Was abducted by Hades . According to the Achilleid , written by the Roman poet Statius in the 1st century AD, when Achilles was born his mother Thetis tried to make him immortal by dipping him in the river Styx; however, he was left vulnerable at the part of the body by which she held him: his left heel. And so Paris was able to kill Achilles during the Trojan War by shooting an arrow into his heel. In

8645-399: 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

8740-458: Was comparatively limited until the fifth century. 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",

8835-485: Was involved in their creation. They may initially 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 another stringed instrument. Performances of the hymns may have taken place at sympotic banquets, religious festivals and royal courts. There are references to the Homeric Hymns in Greek poetry from around 600 BCE; they appear to have been used as educational texts by

8930-560: Was still considered problematic at the turn of the 20th century: Thomas Leyden Agar wrote in 1916 of the "manifold and manifest" errors of tradition in the hymns. In 1984, Bruno Gentili  [ it ] suggested that variations found in the manuscript tradition as to the reading of particular passages may have been considered equally-correct alternations ( adiaphoroi ) available to a rhapsode, and therefore that attempts to discriminate between them in modern editions were misguided. Between 1894 and 1897, Thomas William Allen published

9025-401: Was the mother of the monster Echidna , by an otherwise unknown Perias. Although usually Demeter was the mother, by Zeus, of the underworld-goddess Persephone, according to the mythographer Apollodorus , it was Styx. However, when Apollodorus relates the famous story of the abduction of Persephone, and the search for her by her angry and distraught mother, as usual, it is Demeter who conducts

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