Orphic Hymns Research Articles

Notes on the Orphic Hymns

Each of the Orphic Hymns is headed in the manuscripts by the name of the deity to which it is addressed, and in most cases a specification of the kind of incense to be used: thus 2 Only the first hymn lacks a heading. It is preceded in the manuscripts by a poem in which Orpheus addresses Musaeus and teaches him a prayer to a multitude of gods

Epithets in the Orphic Hymns

Epithets in the Orphic Hymns

Science and the Classics1

IT has been the rule from time immemorial, not the exception, for science and the humanities to go hand in hand. Aristotle the naturalist wrote of poetry; Plato was a lover of astronomy; Theo-phrastus the botanist was a master of rhetoric, whom even Cicero admired; Celsus the physician was an encyclopaedic scholar after the taste and fashion of his age. When the humanistic tradition was at its height in the ‘revival of learning,’ Galen and Hippocrates were read by all. Linacre the physician helped to bring Greek into England, and was one of the great scholars of his time. Moreover our physicians have never lost but have richly inherited and enjoyed the classical tradition; Payne and Greenhill, Osier and Clifford Allbutt in our own time, were scholars after the manner of Haller and Boerhaave and Richard Mead and Sir Thomas Browne. Cuvier, busiest of men, wrote a commentary on the natural-history books of Pliny. Linnaeus himself could write of Nature with a scholar's pen and look upon her with a poet's eyes: the severe “Systema Naturae” was the work of one who fell on his knees when he beheld the sunlit gorse at Hampstead, and apostrophised mother Nature in words which sound like the echo of an Orphic hymn: “Natura, Filia Dei, rerum omnium Magistra, autodidactos, indesinenter laborans, nunquam festinans,” etc.

The Horse of Sardis

THIS invocation by the singer of the Orphic hymns, addressed to Hippa, the mare, as the nurse of the infant Dionysus on Mt. Tmolus, reflects an early tradition of the importance of the horse in Lydia. This inference is confirmed by the chroniclers who relate the acts of the ancient semi-mythical kings of the Lydian people, for we are told that Ardys, predecessor of Gyges by two generations, when he returned from exile to be king at Sardis, held a review of the army and found among his troops thirty thousand cavalry.2

A Traditional Form in Religious Language

Eduard Norden, in the second half of his Agnostos Theos, has maintained with great learning and ingenuity the thesis that predications in the style ‘Thou art (Isis),’ ‘I am (the supreme god),’ are due to Oriental influence; purely Greek religious language does not go beyond ‘Thou dost (illuminate the earth),’ ‘We are indebted to thee for (the fruits of the earth).’ This view appears to be substantially correct. To Oriental influence we may, I think, trace also the custom of stringing together a series of brief predications in or of the second person, for the most part not connected by conjunctions, and producing the effect of a rapid fire of assertions. The earlier Greek examples are not, as a rule, asyndetic. In the Hellenistic age and later we see the other style, as in Catullus 34. 13: ‘tu Lucina dolentibus Iuno dicta puerperis, tu potens Triuia et notho es dicta lumine luna, tu cursu dea menstruo … exples’ 61. 51: ‘te suis tremulus parens inuocat, tibi uirgines zonula soluunt sinus, te timens cupida nouus captat aure maritus’; in Lucretius' proem; in Ovid, Met. IV. 17: ‘tibi enim inconsumpta iuuenta est, tu puer aeternus, tu formosissimus alto conspiceris caelo, tibi cum sine cornibus adstas, uirgineum caput est’; in the invocation of Apollo (identified with Osiris and Mithras) at the end of the first book of Statius' Thebaid; in Capaneus' prayer to his strong right arm (ib. IX. 548-): (‘ades o mihi, dextera, tantum; tu praesens bellis et ineuitabile numen, te uoco, te solum superum contemptor adoro’); in the Orphic hymns, II. 10-, though they consist mostly of accumulations of epithets; in Menander Rhetor περ πιδειкν (IX., p. 330, ed. Walz, an address to Apollo): περ [al. Θο⋯ραι], περ σ Θνδες, παρ σο⋯ кα σελνη τν ετῖνα λαμβνει; in Valerius Maximus VI.