The Homeric Hymns
Thirty-three hymns to the Greek gods, composed in Homer’s style between about 700 and 300 BC and handed down under his name. The long ones tell a whole story about a god. Hymn 2, To Demeter, is the first one finished here, word by word in the Greek.
Not yet pressed
Hymn 3, To Apollo. The god’s birth on the island of Delos, then his founding of the oracle at Delphi. Not yet.
Hymn 4, To Hermes. A baby born at dawn invents the lyre from a tortoise shell by noon and steals Apollo’s cattle by night, then talks his way out of it. Not yet.
Hymn 5, To Aphrodite. Zeus makes the goddess of love fall for a mortal, the Trojan herdsman Anchises. Not yet.
Hymn 7, To Dionysus. Pirates seize a young man on the shore, a vine grows up the mast, and the sailors leap overboard and become dolphins. Not yet.
The rest are short, some only a few lines: greetings to the Muses, Hestia, Pan, Helios, Selene, the Dioscuri and others, sung to open a performance. Not yet.
The text
H. G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Loeb, 1914), public domain, as digitized by the Perseus Digital Library (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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