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119-502: Stentor is mentioned briefly in Homer 's Iliad in which Hera , in the guise of Stentor, whose "voice was as powerful as fifty voices of other men", encourages the Greeks to fight. Elsewhere, Stentor is said to have died after losing a shouting contest with Hermes . Stentor's story is the origin of the term " stentorian ", meaning loud-voiced, for which he was famous. Aristotle uses

238-453: A canonical text. The first printed edition of Homer was produced in 1488 in Milan, Italy by Demetrios Chalkokondyles . Today scholars use medieval manuscripts, papyri and other sources; some argue for a "multi-text" view, rather than seeking a single definitive text. The nineteenth-century edition of Arthur Ludwich mainly follows Aristarchus's work, whereas van Thiel's (1991, 1996) follows

357-610: A clear overall design and that they are not merely strung together from unrelated songs. It is also generally agreed that each poem was composed mostly by a single author, who probably relied heavily on older oral traditions. Nearly all scholars agree that the Doloneia in Book X of the Iliad is not part of the original poem, but rather a later insertion by a different poet. Some ancient scholars believed Homer to have been an eyewitness to

476-468: 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

595-475: A collection of thirty-three ancient Greek hymns and one epigram . The hymns praise deities of 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

714-540: 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

833-403: 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

952-531: A discredited dead end. Starting in around 1928, Milman Parry and Albert Lord , after their studies of folk bards in the Balkans, developed the "Oral-Formulaic Theory" that the Homeric poems were originally composed through improvised oral performances, which relied on traditional epithets and poetic formulas. This theory found very wide scholarly acceptance and explained many previously puzzling features of

1071-479: 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

1190-536: 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,

1309-474: 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,

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1428-415: A phrase or idea is repeated at both the beginning and end of a story, or a series of such ideas first appears in the order A, B, C ... before being reversed as ... C, B, A) has been observed in the Homeric epics. Opinion differs as to whether these occurrences are a conscious artistic device, a mnemonic aid or a spontaneous feature of human storytelling. Both of the Homeric poems begin with an invocation to

1547-550: 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

1666-525: 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

1785-631: 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

1904-458: 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

2023-462: 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

2142-592: Is Eastern Ionic. Most researchers believe that the poems were originally transmitted orally . Despite being predominantly known for its tragic and serious themes, the Homeric poems also contain instances of comedy and laughter . Homer's epic poems shaped aspects of ancient Greek culture and education, fostering ideals of heroism, glory, and honor. To Plato , Homer was simply the one who "has taught Greece" ( τὴν Ἑλλάδα πεπαίδευκεν , tēn Helláda pepaídeuken ). In Dante Alighieri 's Divine Comedy , Virgil refers to Homer as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets; in

2261-566: Is called parataxis . The so-called ' type scenes ' ( typische Szenen ), were named by Walter Arend in 1933. He noted that Homer often, when describing frequently recurring activities such as eating, praying , fighting and dressing, used blocks of set phrases in sequence that were then elaborated by the poet. The 'Analyst' school had considered these repetitions as un-Homeric, whereas Arend interpreted them philosophically. Parry and Lord noted that these conventions are found in many other cultures. 'Ring composition' or chiastic structure (when

2380-658: Is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek , in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia. Linguistic analysis suggests that the Iliad was composed slightly before the Odyssey and that Homeric formulae preserve features older than other parts of the poems. The poems were composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter ; ancient Greek metre was quantity-based rather than stress-based. Homer frequently uses set phrases such as epithets ('crafty Odysseus ', 'rosy-fingered Dawn ', 'owl-eyed Athena ', etc.), Homeric formulae ('and then answered [him/her], Agamemnon, king of men', 'when

2499-431: Is unclear how far writing, as opposed to oral composition , 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

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2618-505: The Capture of Oechalia , and the Phocais . These claims are not considered authentic today and were not universally accepted in the ancient world. As with the multitude of legends surrounding Homer's life, they indicate little more than the centrality of Homer to ancient Greek culture. Some ancient accounts about Homer were established early and repeated often. They include that Homer

2737-417: 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

2856-774: 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

2975-460: 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

3094-761: The Homeric 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 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

3213-505: 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

3332-492: 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

3451-521: 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

3570-502: 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

3689-434: 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

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3808-521: The Iliad alone is massive, sprawling over nearly 4,000 oversized pages in a 21st-century printed version and his commentary on the Odyssey an additional nearly 2,000. In 1488, the Greek scholar Demetrios Chalkokondyles published in Florence the editio princeps of the Homeric poems. The earliest modern Homeric scholars started with the same basic approaches towards the Homeric poems as scholars in antiquity. The allegorical interpretation of

3927-436: 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

4046-468: 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

4165-897: The Iliad and the Odyssey are associated with the name "Homer". In antiquity, a large number of other works were sometimes attributed to him, including the Homeric Hymns , the Contest of Homer and Hesiod , several epigrams , the Little Iliad , the Nostoi , the Thebaid , the Cypria , the Epigoni , the comic mini-epic Batrachomyomachia ("The Frog–Mouse War"), the Margites ,

4284-443: The Iliad and the Odyssey in the sixth century BC by literate authors. After being written down, Wolf maintained that the two poems were extensively edited, modernized, and eventually shaped into their present state as artistic unities. Wolf and the "Analyst" school, which led the field in the nineteenth century, sought to recover the original, authentic poems which were thought to be concealed by later excrescences. Within

4403-462: The Muse . In the Iliad , the poet beseeches her to sing of "the anger of Achilles", and in the Odyssey , he asks her to tell of "the man of many ways". A similar opening was later employed by Virgil in his Aeneid . The orally transmitted Homeric poems were put into written form at some point between the eighth and sixth centuries BCE. Some scholars believe that they were dictated to a scribe by

4522-579: The Odyssey during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. As a result of the poems' prominence in classical Greek education, extensive commentaries on them developed to explain parts that were culturally or linguistically difficult. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many interpreters, especially the Stoics , who believed that Homeric poems conveyed Stoic doctrines, regarded them as allegories, containing hidden wisdom. Perhaps partially because of

4641-574: The Odyssey in which Telemachus went in search of news of his father not to Menelaus in Sparta but to Idomeneus in Crete, in which Telemachus met up with his father in Crete and conspired with him to return to Ithaca disguised as the soothsayer Theoclymenus, and in which Penelope recognized Odysseus much earlier in the narrative and conspired with him in the destruction of the suitors. Most contemporary scholars, although they disagree on other questions about

4760-485: The Trojan War ; others thought he had lived up to 500 years afterwards. Contemporary scholars continue to debate the date of the poems. A long history of oral transmission lies behind the composition of the poems, complicating the search for a precise date. At one extreme, Richard Janko has proposed a date for both poems to the eighth century BC based on linguistic analysis and statistics. Barry B. Powell dates

4879-557: 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

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4998-545: The Analyst school were two camps: proponents of the "lay theory", which held that the Iliad and the Odyssey were put together from a large number of short, independent songs, and proponents of the "nucleus theory", which held that Homer had originally composed shorter versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey , which later poets expanded and revised. A small group of scholars opposed to the Analysts, dubbed "Unitarians", saw

5117-800: The Bronze Age Aegean civilisation , which in many ways resembles the ancient Near East more than the society described by Homer. Some aspects of the Homeric world are simply made up; for instance, the Iliad 22.145–56 describes there being two springs that run near the city of Troy, one that runs steaming hot and the other that runs icy cold. It is here that Hector takes his final stand against Achilles. Archaeologists, however, have uncovered no evidence that springs of this description ever actually existed. The Homeric epics are written in an artificial literary language or 'Kunstsprache' only used in epic hexameter poetry. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but

5236-502: 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

5355-500: The Form of an epic Poem till Pisistratus ' time, about 500 Years after." Friedrich August Wolf 's Prolegomena ad Homerum , published in 1795, argued that much of the material later incorporated into the Iliad and the Odyssey was originally composed in the tenth century BC in the form of short, separate oral songs, which passed through oral tradition for roughly four hundred years before being assembled into prototypical versions of

5474-426: 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

5593-476: The Homeric poems that had been so prevalent in antiquity returned to become the prevailing view of the Renaissance . Renaissance humanists praised Homer as the archetypically wise poet, whose writings contain hidden wisdom, disguised through allegory. In western Europe during the Renaissance , Virgil was more widely read than Homer and Homer was often seen through a Virgilian lens. In 1664, contradicting

5712-433: The Homeric poems' extensive use in education, many authors believed that Homer's original purpose had been to educate. Homer's wisdom became so widely praised that he began to acquire the image of almost a prototypical philosopher. Byzantine scholars such as Eustathius of Thessalonica and John Tzetzes produced commentaries, extensions and scholia to Homer, especially in the twelfth century. Eustathius's commentary on

5831-563: The Homeric poems, including their unusually archaic language, their extensive use of stock epithets, and their other "repetitive" features. Many scholars concluded that the "Homeric Question" had finally been answered. Meanwhile, the 'Neoanalysts' sought to bridge the gap between the 'Analysts' and 'Unitarians'. The Neoanalysts sought to trace the relationships between the Homeric poems and other epic poems, which have now been lost, but of which modern scholars do possess some patchy knowledge. Neoanalysts hold that knowledge of earlier versions of

5950-642: 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

6069-408: 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

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6188-580: 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

6307-482: The composition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to sometime between 800 and 750 BC, based on the statement from Herodotus , who lived in the late fifth century BC, that Homer lived four hundred years before his own time "and not more" ( καὶ οὐ πλέοσι ) and on the fact that the poems do not mention hoplite battle tactics, inhumation , or literacy. Martin Litchfield West has argued that the Iliad echoes

6426-479: The concept in his Politics Book 7, Chapter IV saying, "For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, or who the herald, unless he have the voice of a Stentor?" This article relating to Greek mythology is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Homer This is an accepted version of this page Homer ( / ˈ h oʊ m ər / ; Ancient Greek : Ὅμηρος [hómɛːros] , Hómēros ; born c.  8th century BCE )

6545-544: The days of the Roman emperor Hadrian says Epicaste (daughter of Nestor ) and Telemachus (son of Odysseus ) were the parents of Homer. The two best known ancient biographies of Homer are the Life of Homer by the Pseudo-Herodotus and the Contest of Homer and Hesiod . In the early fourth century BC Alcidamas composed a fictional account of a poetry contest at Chalcis with both Homer and Hesiod . Homer

6664-520: 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

6783-545: The divisions back further to the Classical period. Very few credit Homer himself with the divisions. In antiquity, it was widely held that the Homeric poems were collected and organised in Athens in the late sixth century BCE by Pisistratus (died 528/7 BCE), in what subsequent scholars have dubbed the "Peisistratean recension". The idea that the Homeric poems were originally transmitted orally and first written down during

6902-479: The early-born rose-fingered Dawn came to light', 'thus he/she spoke'), simile , type scenes, ring composition and repetition. These habits aid the extemporizing bard, and are characteristic of oral poetry. For instance, the main words of a Homeric sentence are generally placed towards the beginning, whereas literate poets like Virgil or Milton use longer and more complicated syntactical structures. Homer then expands on these ideas in subsequent clauses; this technique

7021-456: 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

7140-511: The epics can be derived from anomalies of structure and detail in the surviving versions of the Iliad and Odyssey . These anomalies point to earlier versions of the Iliad in which Ajax played a more prominent role, in which the Achaean embassy to Achilles comprised different characters, and in which Patroclus was actually mistaken for Achilles by the Trojans. They point to earlier versions of

7259-464: 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

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7378-483: 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

7497-424: 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

7616-427: 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

7735-569: 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

7854-432: The genesis of the poems, agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey were not produced by the same author, based on "the many differences of narrative manner, theology, ethics, vocabulary, and geographical perspective, and by the apparently imitative character of certain passages of the Odyssey in relation to the Iliad ." Nearly all scholars agree that the Iliad and the Odyssey are unified poems, in that each poem shows

7973-462: 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

8092-518: 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

8211-557: 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

8330-445: 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

8449-434: 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

8568-565: 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

8687-500: 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

8806-593: 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

8925-434: The judge awarded Hesiod the prize; the poet who praised husbandry , he said, was greater than the one who told tales of battles and slaughter. The study of Homer is one of the oldest topics in scholarship, dating back to antiquity. Nonetheless, the aims of Homeric studies have changed over the course of the millennia. The earliest preserved comments on Homer concern his treatment of the gods, which hostile critics such as

9044-535: The later Iron Age during which they were composed; yet the same heroes are cremated (an Iron Age practice) rather than buried (as they were in the Bronze Age). In some parts of the Homeric poems, heroes are described as carrying large shields like those used by warriors during the Mycenaean period , but, in other places, they are instead described carrying the smaller shields that were commonly used during

9163-603: The later additions as superior, the work of a single inspired poet. By around 1830, the central preoccupations of Homeric scholars, dealing with whether or not "Homer" actually existed, when and how the Homeric poems originated, how they were transmitted, when and how they were finally written down, and their overall unity, had been dubbed "the Homeric Question". Following World War I , the Analyst school began to fall out of favor among Homeric scholars. It did not die out entirely, but it came to be increasingly seen as

9282-635: 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

9401-507: 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

9520-426: 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

9639-533: The medieval vulgate. Others, such as Martin West (1998–2000) or T. W. Allen , fall somewhere between these two extremes. Him with that falchion in his hand behold, ⁠Who comes before the three, even as their lord. That one is Homer, Poet sovereign; This is a partial list of translations into English of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . Homeric Hymns The Homeric Hymns ( Ancient Greek : Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι , romanised :  Homērikoì húmnoi ) are

9758-535: The myth of the Trojan War, others that the poem was inspired by multiple similar sieges that took place over the centuries. Most scholars now agree that the Homeric poems depict customs and elements of the material world that are derived from different periods of Greek history. For instance, the heroes in the poems use bronze weapons, characteristic of the Bronze Age in which the poems are set, rather than

9877-579: 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

9996-568: 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

10115-416: The other extreme, a few American scholars such as Gregory Nagy see "Homer" as a continually evolving tradition, which grew much more stable as the tradition progressed, but which did not fully cease to continue changing and evolving until as late as the middle of the second century BC. "'Homer" is a name of unknown etymological origin, around which many theories were erected in antiquity. One such linkage

10234-490: 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

10353-476: The poems were created in the eighth century, they continued to be orally transmitted with considerable revision until they were written down in the sixth century. After textualisation, the poems were each divided into 24 rhapsodes, today referred to as books, and labelled by the letters of the Greek alphabet . Most scholars attribute the book divisions to the Hellenistic scholars of Alexandria , in Egypt. Some trace

10472-429: The poet Xenophanes of Colophon denounced as immoral. The allegorist Theagenes of Rhegium is said to have defended Homer by arguing that the Homeric poems are allegories . The Iliad and the Odyssey were widely used as school texts in ancient Greek and Hellenistic cultures. They were the first literary works taught to all students. The Iliad , particularly its first few books, was far more intently studied than

10591-457: The poet and that our inherited versions of the Iliad and Odyssey were in origin orally dictated texts. Albert Lord noted that the Balkan bards that he was studying revised and expanded their songs in their process of dictating. Some scholars hypothesize that a similar process of revision and expansion occurred when the Homeric poems were first written down. Other scholars hold that, after

10710-486: The poetry of Hesiod and that it must have been composed around 660–650 BC at the earliest, with the Odyssey up to a generation later. He also interprets passages in the Iliad as showing knowledge of historical events that occurred in the ancient Near East during the middle of the seventh century BC, including the destruction of Babylon by Sennacherib in 689 BC and the Sack of Thebes by Ashurbanipal in 663/4 BC. At

10829-511: 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

10948-420: The preface to his translation of the Iliad , Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets". From antiquity to the present day, Homeric epics have inspired many famous works of literature, music, art, and film. The question of by whom, when, where and under what circumstances the Iliad and Odyssey were composed continues to be debated. Scholars generally regard

11067-600: The reign of Pisistratus is referenced by the first-century BCE Roman orator Cicero and is also referenced in a number of other surviving sources, including two ancient Lives of Homer . From around 150 BCE, the texts of the Homeric poems found in papyrus fragments exhibit much less variation, and the text seems to have become relatively stable. After the establishment of the Library of Alexandria , Homeric scholars such as Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and in particular Aristarchus of Samothrace helped establish

11186-404: 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

11305-412: The sack of Troy was dated to 1184 BC. By the nineteenth century, there was widespread scholarly skepticism that the Trojan War had ever happened and that Troy had even existed, but in 1873 Heinrich Schliemann announced to the world that he had discovered the ruins of Homer's Troy at Hisarlik in modern Turkey. Some contemporary scholars think the destruction of Troy VIIa c. 1220 BC was the origin of

11424-463: The seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though some are more recent and 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

11543-520: 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

11662-457: 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

11781-516: The society depicted by Homer is based on his own or one which was, even at the time of the poems' composition, known only as legends. The Homeric epics are largely set in the east and center of the Mediterranean , with some scattered references to Egypt , Ethiopia and other distant lands, in a warlike society that resembles that of the Greek world slightly before the hypothesized date of the poems' composition. In ancient Greek chronology,

11900-529: The ten-year journey of Odysseus , king of Ithaca , back to his home after the fall of Troy. The epics depict man's struggle, the Odyssey especially so as Odysseus perseveres through punishment of the gods. The poems are in Homeric Greek , also known as Epic Greek, a literary language which shows a mixture of features of the Ionic and Aeolic dialects from different centuries; the predominant influence

12019-541: 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 ,

12138-588: 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

12257-484: The time when the poems were written in the early Iron Age. In the Iliad 10.260–265, Odysseus is described as wearing a helmet made of boar's tusks . Such helmets were not worn in Homer's time, but were commonly worn by aristocratic warriors between 1600 and 1150 BC. The decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s by Michael Ventris and continued archaeological investigation has increased modern scholars' understanding of

12376-425: 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

12495-419: The two poems as the works of separate authors. It is thought that the poems were composed at some point around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Many accounts of Homer's life circulated in classical antiquity , the most widespread that he was a blind bard from Ionia , a region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey. Modern scholars consider these accounts legendary . Today, only

12614-415: 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

12733-440: The widespread praise of Homer as the epitome of wisdom, François Hédelin, abbé d'Aubignac wrote a scathing attack on the Homeric poems, declaring that they were incoherent, immoral, tasteless, and without style, that Homer never existed, and that the poems were hastily cobbled together by incompetent editors from unrelated oral songs. Fifty years later, the English scholar Richard Bentley concluded that Homer did exist but that he

12852-399: 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

12971-535: 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

13090-580: 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

13209-449: 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

13328-399: 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

13447-412: Was an Ancient Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey , two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature . Homer is considered one of the most revered and influential authors in history. Homer's Iliad centers on a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles during the last year of the Trojan War . The Odyssey chronicles

13566-532: Was an obscure, prehistoric oral poet whose compositions bear little relation to the Iliad and the Odyssey as they have been passed down. According to Bentley, Homer "wrote a Sequel of Songs and Rhapsodies, to be sung by himself for small Earnings and good Cheer at Festivals and other Days of Merriment; the Ilias he wrote for men, and the Odysseis for the other Sex. These loose songs were not collected together in

13685-509: Was blind (taking as self-referential a passage describing the blind bard Demodocus ), that he resided at Chios , that he was the son of the river Meles and the nymph Critheïs , that he was a wandering bard, that he composed a varying list of other works (the "Homerica"), that he died either in Ios or after failing to solve a riddle set by fishermen, and various explanations for the name "Homer" ( Ὅμηρος , Hómēros ). Another tradition from

13804-406: 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",

13923-477: Was expected to win, and answered all of Hesiod's questions and puzzles with ease. Then, each of the poets was invited to recite the best passage from their work. Hesiod selected the beginning of Works and Days : "When the Pleiades born of Atlas  ... all in due season". Homer chose a description of Greek warriors in formation, facing the foe, taken from the Iliad . Though the crowd acclaimed Homer victor,

14042-560: 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

14161-449: Was to the Greek ὅμηρος ( hómēros ' hostage ' or ' surety ' ). The explanations suggested by modern scholars tend to mirror their position on the overall Homeric Question. Nagy interprets it as "he who fits (the song) together". West has advanced both possible Greek and Phoenician etymologies. Scholars continue to debate questions such as whether the Trojan War actually took place – and if so when and where – and to what extent

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