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| The Homeric hymns are a collection of 33 epic poems, written in the Greek dactylic hexameter.
In antiquity, they were called prooimia, that is songs preceding an oime (a narrative poem).
It is not known when exactly and by whom the collection was composed. As they are not quoted by the
Alexandrian scholars of the Hellenistic times, it is likely to have been the work
of the Pergamene scholars, who competed with the former in collecting older works and creating
a library. |
| These hymns owe their name to Homer, to whom Thucydides attributed the Hymn
to Apollo. In fact they are works of various periods with a strong
lack of uniformity as far as language and poetry are concerned. They also differ consiberably in
their length. The longer of these -the Hymns to Apollo and Hermes- exceed
500 verses and could hardly be classed as prooimia. They appear to be
complete compositions of a narrative character -in contrast to others, of which
less than 10 verses survive- and are simple invocations of the gods, or may merely have survived
as fragments. |
 The
oldest among them is probably the Hymn to Demeter and is considered as dating to the end of the 7th century BC.
The Hymn to Hermes is sometimes dated to the 7th, and sometimes to the 6th, century.
It is considered likely that these hymns are the definitive form of those
that circulated in various local versions already from the 8th century BC. Influences from
Hesiod
and the Orphic poetry can be traced by experts in the Hymns to Aphrodite and Ares respectively.
Finally, the Hymn to Dionysus seems to belong to the Early Hellenistic period. |