Five-minute digest
The Homeric Hymns
Summary
The Homeric Hymns are a collection of thirty-three anonymous Greek poems addressed to the gods, composed in the same dactylic hexameter and formulaic language as the Iliad and Odyssey. Ancient audiences treated many of them as Homer's own; most scholars now see them as the work of different singers over a long period, with the four great narrative hymns usually dated to the archaic age and some short pieces much later. Many were probably sung as preludes before a rhapsode's recitation of epic, which is why several end with a promise to remember the god and pass on to another song. The Hymn to Demeter tells how Hades carries off Persephone while she gathers flowers in the plain of Nysa. Demeter wanders, disguised as an old woman, to Eleusis, where she nurses the baby Demophoon in the house of Celeus and tries to make him immortal by hiding him in the fire at night until his mother Metaneira screams. Revealing herself, she demands a temple and withholds the grain until Zeus sends Hermes to bring Persephone back; because the girl has eaten a pomegranate seed she must spend a third of each year below. The goddess then teaches her mysteries to the Eleusinian lords. The Hymn to Apollo has a Delian part, closing with the singer's portrait of himself as the blind man of Chios, and a Pythian part telling how Apollo founded Delphi, killed the she-dragon there and recruited Cretan sailors as his priests. The Hymn to Hermes is a comedy: born at dawn, the infant god invents the lyre from a tortoise by noon and steals Apollo's cattle by evening, then lies his way through a trial before Zeus and wins his brother's friendship with the gift of the lyre. The Hymn to Aphrodite shows Zeus turning the goddess's power on herself, so that she loves the Trojan herdsman Anchises and conceives Aeneas; her story of Tithonus, granted immortality without youth, is its sombre centre. The seventh hymn tells how Dionysus turned the pirates who seized him into dolphins. The short hymns greet Ares, Artemis, Athena, Hera, Heracles, Asclepius, the Dioscuri, Pan, Hephaestus, Poseidon, Hestia, Earth, Helios, Selene and others in a few lines of praise and prayer. Hugh G. Evelyn-White's prose version comes from the 1914 Loeb volume Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica; the library file keeps his line-number markers and also carries the short Epigrams of Homer that follow the hymns in that volume.
Top Lessons
A mother's grief and the seasons
The Hymn to Demeter ties the yearly cycle of growth and barrenness to a mother's loss and partial recovery of her child. Even the gods must accept a compromise: Persephone returns, but the pomegranate seed binds her to the underworld for a third of the year.
Immortality is not enough
Aphrodite's story of Tithonus, who was granted endless life but not endless youth, teaches that a gift without wisdom can be a curse. Demeter's failed attempt to make Demophoon deathless makes a similar point about the boundary between gods and mortals.
Wit and reconciliation
The Hymn to Hermes shows a newborn god who wins his place on Olympus by invention, cunning and finally generosity. The quarrel between brothers ends not with punishment but with an exchange of gifts that gives each god his proper honours.
The singer and his song
Several hymns reflect on poetry itself: the blind man of Chios asks the Delian maidens to remember him, Hermes' first song is about the gods' origins, and Hymn XXV says that singers come from the Muses and Apollo. Greek religion here is inseparable from performance and memory.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Happy is he among men upon earth who has seen these mysteries; but he who is uninitiate and who has no part in them, never has lot of like good things once he is dead, down in the darkness and gloom.”
Frequently cited
“He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.”
“For it was Hermes who first made the tortoise a singer.”
“There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.”
“I begin to sing of Asclepius, son of Apollo and healer of sicknesses.”
“Happy is he whom the Muses love: sweet flows speech from his lips.”
“I will sing of well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings. She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land, and all that are in the paths of the seas, and all that fly: all these are fed of her store.”
Medical Lens
Three passages matter for the history of medicine. The Tithonus story in the Hymn to Aphrodite is the classical image of extreme old age: endless life without youth, grey hair, immobility and endless babbling behind closed doors. Modern readers sometimes connect it with dementia and with the ethics of prolonging life, which is an interpretation rather than the poem's own frame. In the Hymn to Demeter the goddess, taking service as a nurse at Eleusis, promises to protect the infant Demophoon from the Undercutter and the Woodcutter, which commentators usually explain as folk names for teething or for a childhood ailment and its remedy, along with charms against witchcraft; this is an early glimpse of household medicine and the role of the nurse. Demeter's grief, her refusal of ambrosia and nectar, and the famine she sends on the earth join bereavement with starvation. The brief Hymn XVI greets Asclepius as healer of sicknesses and soother of cruel pangs, early evidence of the cult that later framed Greek temple healing.
- Hymn V, To Aphrodite, ll. 218-246
Aphrodite tells how Eos asked immortality but not youth for Tithonus, and how he withered and was shut in a room.
- Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 224-230
Demeter, disguised as an old nurse, promises Metaneira to guard the baby from the Undercutter and from witchcraft.
- Hymn II, To Demeter, ll. 40-53 and 301-320
Demeter's mourning and fasting, then the year of barren fields that nearly destroys mankind.
- Hymn XVI, To Asclepius
Five-line hymn to Asclepius, born of Coronis, as healer and soother of pain.