Orphic Hymns

The Orphic Hymns are a collection of eighty-seven hymns addressed to various deities, and are among the few extant works of Orphic literature. They were most likely composed in Asia Minor, possibly in the second or third centuries AD. The poems, in dactylic hexameter, are relatively short in length, and the collection is prefaced by a dedication entitled "Orpheus to Musaeus"; each individual hymn comes alongside a prescribed libation. Among the deities praised in the Hymns, Dionysus is given the place of highest importance. The poems survive through a manuscript which also contained the Homeric Hymns, the Orphic Argonautica, and the hymns composed by Callimachus and Proclus. At the beginning of the 20th century, Otto Kern postulated that the poems belonged to a religious community in Pergamon, a view which some later scholars have accepted.

Date and composition

Estimates for the date of the Orphic Hymns' composition vary widely. While there are several Greek authors who mention hymns attributed to Orpheus, the earliest certain reference to the collection of 87 hymns comes from the 12th-century AD writer John Galenos. It is possible that they were composed at an early date without being mentioned, though it is more likely that they were produced somewhere from the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Christian Petersen, who saw the influence of Stoicism in the Hymns, posited that they must have been composed after the flourishing of Stoic thought, though others have instead seen Platonic or Neoplatonic influence in the collection. On the basis of the language and meter of the Hymns, Wilamowitz judged that they can not have been composed before the 2nd century AD, but were earlier than Nonnus, and van Liempt saw their language as the same used in 3rd and 4th-century AD poetry. More recently, most scholars have dated the collection to around the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, with Gabriella Ricciardelli pointing to the prominence of Dionysism at that time in Asia Minor.

A number of early scholars believed that the Hymns were produced in Egypt, primarily on the basis of stylistic similarities to Egyptian magical hymns, and the presence in the proem of deities which are found elsewhere in Egyptian literature. Modern scholarship, however, now essentially unanimously agrees upon Asia Minor as the place of composition; in particular, the names of deities such as Mise, Hipta, and Melinoe, otherwise known only through the Hymns, have been found in inscriptions in the region. In 1910, a number of such inscriptions were discovered in a temenos of Demeter in Pergamon, which led Otto Kern to postulate that the city was the location in which the collection was composed. While Christian Lobeck conceived of the collection as a "purely literary work", written by a scholar as an exercise, others such as Albrecht Dieterich argued that the Hymns were liturgical in function, designed for ritual performance by a small cult community, a perspective almost universally accepted by modern scholars. Kern argued that this group existed at the temenos in Pergamon itself, a view with which some have subsequently agreed. Scholars have at times stated that the collection was the product of a single author, though it has also been questioned whether or not the proem was composed separately.

The Orphic Hymns are one of the few extant works of Orphic literature. The collection is attributed to Orpheus in the manuscripts in which it survives, and opens with the dedication "Orpheus to Musaeus". In the Hymns themselves, there are a few traces of Orpheus as their composer: OH 76 to the Muses mentions "mother Calliope", and OH 24 to the Nereids refers to "mother Calliope and lord Apollo", alluding to the parentage of Orpheus (whose father was sometimes considered to be Apollo). The collection can be seen as an example of the broader genre of hymns in Orphic literature, which go back at least as far as the 5th century BC; though some scholars have brought into question how "Orphic" the collection can be considered, partly due to the apparent lack of Orphic narratives and eschatological ideas, there are several places in which the language bears similarity to other works of Orphic literature. W. K. C. Guthrie, who placed the Hymns at the temenos in Pergamon, went so far as to state that the group to whom they belonged was an "Orphic society"; Ivan Linforth, however, contests that it is equally likely that the name of Orpheus was simply stamped upon the work for its "prestige".

Editions and translations

• Hermann, G., Orphica, Leipzig, C. Fritsch, 1805. Internet Archive.
• Orphica, Leipzig, JAG Weigel, 1818, Google Books (including the Argonautica, Hymns, Lithica, and fragments)
• Taylor, Thomas, The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, London, Bertram Dobell, 1824. Internet Archive. Originally published in 1792; completely outdated.
• Quandt, Wilhelm, Orphei Hymni, Berlin, Weidmann, 1955.
• Athanassakis, Apostolos N., The Orphic Hymns: Text, Translation, and Notes, Scholars Press, 1977. ISBN 978-0-89130-119-6. Uses the Greek text of Quandt.
• Ricciardelli, Gabriella, Inni Orfici, Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, 2000. ISBN 978-8-804-47661-0.
• Athanassakis, Apostolos N., and Benjamin M. Wolkow, The Orphic Hymns, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4214-0882-8. Internet Archive. Google Books.
• Fayant, Marie-Christine, Hymnes Orphiques, Paris, Collection Budé, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2014. ISBN 978-2-251-00593-5.

References

• Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Antiquity, Volume 10, Obl-Phe, editors: Hubert Cancik, Helmuth Schneider, Brill, 2007. ISBN 978-90-04-14215-2. Online version at Brill.
• Herrero de Jáuregui, Miguel (2010), Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity, De Gruyter, 2010. ISBN 978-3-110-20633-3. Online version at De Gruyter.
• Herrero de Jáuregui, Miguel (2015), "The Poet and His Addressees in Orphic Hymns", in Hymnic Narrative and the Narratology of Greek Hymns, pp. 224–43, edited by Andrew Faulkner and Owen Hodkinson, Brill, 2015. ISBN 978-90-04-28813-3. Online version at Brill.
• Linforth, Ivan M., The Arts of Orpheus, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1941. ISBN 978-1-258-14946-8. Online version at HathiTrust.
• Meisner, Dwayne A., Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods, Oxford University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-190-66352-0. Online version at Oxford University Press. Google Books.
• Morand, Anne-France (2001), Études sur les Hymnes Orphiques, Brill, 2001. ISBN 978-900-4-12030-3. Online version at Brill.
• Morand, Anne-France (2015), "The Narrative Techniques of the Orphic Hymns", in Hymnic Narrative and the Narratology of Greek Hymns, pp. 224–43, edited by Andrew Faulkner and Owen Hodkinson, Brill, 2015. ISBN 978-90-04-28813-3. Online version at Brill.
• Otlewska-Jung, Marta, "Orpheus and Orphic Hymns in the Dionysiaca", in Nonnus of Panopolis in Context: Poetry and Cultural Milieu in Late Antiquity with a Section on Nonnus and the Modern World, pp. 77–96, edited by Konstantinos Spanoudakis, De Gruyter, 2014. ISBN 978-3-110-33937-6. Online version at De Gruyter.
• West, M. L. (1968), "Notes on the Orphic Hymns", in The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 288–96. JSTOR 638072.
• West, M. L. (1983), The Orphic Poems, Clarendon Press Oxford, 1983. ISBN 978-0-19-814854-8.