"The existing collection of the Hymns is of unknown editorship, unknown
date, and unknown purpose," says Baumeister. Why any man should have
collected the little preludes of five or six lines in length, and of
purely conventional character, while he did not copy out the longer poems
to which they probably served as preludes, is a mystery. The celebrated
Wolf, who opened the path which leads modern Homerologists to such an
extraordinary number of divergent theories, thought rightly that the
great Alexandrian critics before the Christian Era, did not recognise the
Hymns as "Homeric." They did not employ the Hymns as illustrations of
Homeric problems; though it is certain that they knew the Hymns, for one
collection did exist in the third century B.C. {4} Diodorus and
Pausanias, later, also cite "the poet in the Hymns," "Homer in the
Hymns"; and the pseudo-Herodotus ascribes the Hymns to Homer in his Life
of that author. Thucydides, in the Periclean age, regards Homer as the
blind Chian minstrel who composed the Hymn to the Delian Apollo: a good
proof of the relative antiquity of that piece, but not evidence, of
course, that our whole collection was then regarded as Homeric.
Baumeister agrees with Wolf that the brief Hymns were recited by
rhapsodists as preludes to the recitation of Homeric or other cantos.
Thus, in Hymn xxxi. 18, the poet says that he is going on to chant "the
renowns of men half divine." Other preludes end with a prayer to the God
for luck in the competition of reciters.
This, then, is the plausible explanation of most of the brief Hymns--they
were preludes to epic recitations--but the question as to the long
narrative Hymns with which the collection opens is different. These were
themselves rhapsodies recited at Delphi, at Delos, perhaps in Cyprus (the
long Hymn to Aphrodite), in Athens (as the Hymn to Pan, who was friendly
in the Persian invasion), and so forth. That the Pisistratidae organised
Homeric recitations at Athens is certain enough, and Baumeister suspects,
in xiv., xxiii., xxx., xxxi., xxxii., the hand of Onomacritus, the forger
of Oracles, that strange accomplice of the Pisistratidae. The Hymn to
Aphrodite is just such a lay as the Phaeacian minstrel sang at the feast
of Alcinous, in the hearing of Odysseus. Finally Baumeister supposes our
collection not to have been made by learned editors, like Aristarchus and
Zenodotus, but committed confusedly from memory to papyrus by some
amateur. The conventional attribution of the Hymns to Homer, in spite of
linguistic objections, and of many allusions to things unknown or
unfamiliar in the Epics, is merely the result of the tendency to set down
"masterless" compositions to a well-known name. Anything of epic
characteristics was allotted to the master of Epic. In the same way an
unfathered joke of Lockhart's was attributed to Sydney Smith, and the
process is constantly illustrated in daily conversation. The word [Greek
text], hymn, had not originally a religious sense: it merely meant a lay.
Nobody calls the Theocritean idylls on Heracles and the Dioscuri "hymns,"
but they are quite as much "hymns" (in our sense) as the "hymn" on
Aphrodite, or on Hermes.
To the English reader familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey the Hymns must
appear disappointing, if he come to them with an expectation of
discovering merits like those of the immortal epics. He will not find
that they stand to the Iliad as Milton's "Ode to the Nativity" stands to
"Paradise Lost." There is in the Hymns, in fact, no scope for the epic
knowledge of human nature in every mood and aspect. We are not so much
interested in the Homeric Gods as in the Homeric mortals, yet the Hymns
are chiefly concerned not with men, but with Gods and their mythical
adventures. However, the interest of the Hymn to Demeter is perfectly
human, for the Goddess is in sorrow, and is mingling with men. The Hymn
to Aphrodite, too, is Homeric in its grace, and charm, and divine sense
of human limitations, of old age that comes on the fairest, as Tithonus
and Anchises; of death and disease that wait for all. The life of the
Gods is one long holiday; the end of our holiday is always near at hand.
The Hymn to Dionysus, representing him as a youth in the fulness of
beauty, is of a charm which was not attainable, while early art
represented the God as a mature man; but literary art, in the Homeric
age, was in advance of sculpture and painting. The chief merit of the
Delian Hymn is in the concluding description of the assembled Ionians,
happy seafarers like the Phaeacians in the morning of the world. The
confusions of the Pythian Hymn to Apollo make it less agreeable; and the
humour of the Hymn to Hermes is archaic. All those pieces, however, have
delightfully fresh descriptions of sea and land, of shadowy dells,
flowering meadows, dusky, fragrant caves; of the mountain glades where
the wild beasts fawn in the train of the winsome Goddess; and the high
still peaks where Pan wanders among the nymphs, and the glens where
Artemis drives the deer, and the spacious halls and airy palaces of the
Immortals. The Hymns are fragments of the work of a school which had a
great Master and great traditions: they also illustrate many aspects of
Greek religion.
In the essays which follow, the religious aspect of the Hymns is chiefly
dwelt upon: I endeavour to bring out what Greek religion had of human and
sacred, while I try to explain its less majestic features as no less
human: as derived from the earliest attempts at speculation and at
mastering the secrets of the world. In these chapters regions are
visited which scholars have usually neglected or ignored. It may seem
strange to seek the origins of Apollo, and of the renowned Eleusinian
Mysteries, in the tales and rites of the Bora and the Nanga; in the
beliefs and practices of Pawnees and Larrakeah, Yao and Khond. But these
tribes, too, are human, and what they now or lately were, the remote
ancestors of the Greeks must once have been. All races have sought
explanations of their own ritual in the adventures of the Dream Time, the
_Alcheringa_, when beings of a more potent race, Gods or Heroes, were on
earth, and achieved and endured such things as the rites commemorate. And
the things thus endured and achieved, as I try to show, are everywhere of
much the same nature; whether they are now commemorated by painted
savages in the Bora or the Medicine Dance, or whether they were exhibited
and proclaimed by the Eumolpidae in a splendid hall, to the pious of
Hellas and of Rome. My attempt may seem audacious, and to many scholars
may even be repugnant; but it is on these lines, I venture to think, that
the darker problems of Greek religion and rite must be approached. They
are all survivals, however fairly draped and adorned by the unique genius
of the most divinely gifted race of mankind.
The method of translation is that adopted by Professor Butcher and myself
in the Odyssey, and by me in a version of Theocritus, as well as by Mr.
Ernest Myers, who preceded us, in his Pindar. That method has lately
been censured and, like all methods, is open to objection. But I confess
that neither criticism nor example has converted me to the use of modern
colloquial English, and I trust that my persistence in using poetical
English words in the translation of Greek poetry will not greatly offend.
I cannot render a speech of Anchises thus:--
"If you really are merely a mortal, and if a woman of the normal kind
was your mother, while your father (as you lay it down) was the well-
known Otreus, and if you come here all through an undying person,
Hermes; and if you are to be known henceforward as my wife,--why, then
nobody, mortal or immortal, shall interfere with my intention to take
instant advantage of the situation."
That kind of speech, though certainly long-winded, may be the manner in
which a contemporary pastoralist would address a Goddess "in a coming on
humour." But the situation does not occur in the prose of our existence,
and I must prefer to translate the poet in a manner more congenial, if
less up to date. For one rare word "Etin" ([Greek text]) I must
apologise: it seems to me to express the vagueness of the unfamiliar
monster, and is old Scots, as in the tale of "The Red Etin of Ireland."