The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite by Andrew Faulkner

For example, it is believed that the second part of the third hymn, to Apollo, called the Pythic part because it tells the tale of the Pythic oracle’s foundation, is to be dated after the 580 b.c.e.: in the hymn, Apollo warns the priests that they would lose the control on Delphi if they misbehaved, so the scholars interpreted this as a reference to the caption of Delphi by the Amphictyonic League in that time. It’s possible to date the single hymn on the basis of the language and of events mentioned in it.

It’s curious that the most ancient of these hymns is instead the fifth, dedicated to Aphrodite, Ares’ companion in mythology. According to some scholars its inclusion in the collection could be the result of a mistake in passing on. The hymn to Ares, the eighth one, is very different from the others: it’s a list of epithets, like a Orphic hymn, and reveals a conception of the God that could be a Neo-Platonist’s one, so it’s probably the last hymn to be added to the collection in ancient times and it can be dated even to the third century of current era. Probably these hymns were to be recited during public religious festivals, poetry agons or private feasts: in the Odyssey, the poet Demodocus at the court of the Phaeacians sings the myth about Ares and Aphrodite, in a way very similar to the Homeric hymns. Each hymn celebrates a god or goddess and there are hymns of various lengths: in the first ones significant myths about the deity are told, like his/her birth or the foundation of a particular worship, while the last ones, much shorter, are just a list of attributes and features. (before current era, a neutral way to say b.C.), little after the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the third century c.e.

The collection we call today Homeric hymns consists in a series of 33 hymns, attributed to Homer as a convention, but actually composed at the beginning as oral composition and lately fixed in a written form, between the seventh century b.c.e.

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite by Andrew Faulkner