Aoidoi - Three Homeric Hymns: Artemis, Hephestus, Demeter

There are three new poems available today, Homeric Hymns.

I worked up the smaller two, to Artemis and to Hephestus, to provide a contrast to the very much larger Hymn to Demeter which Nicholas Swift (aka. swiftnicholas here) did.

A lot of work went into the Hymn to Demeter — all ~495 lines of it — but I hope the results will help more people to read this poem. Because it’s so large, one thing we did to reduce the document size a bit (it’s still 59 pages long) is to pull out some of the very most common words, and put them into a separate list near the beginning. We did the same with proper names. Apart from that difference, it is just like other Aoidoi.org commentaries.

While I did the editing, and added notes for the metrical obsessive, the bulk of the work was done by swiftnicholas, who I think deserves plenty of kudos for this work.

awesome i’ve been looking forward to this, great work :slight_smile: what next nick?

I think there are four hymns that are of that scale (Demetra, Apollon, Hermes, Aphrodite). All the other are rather small.

I had a great time studying this poem, and I hope that this will encourage other people to read it too. If the ease of an Aoidoi commentary isn’t reason enough to dive in, then consider that this poem came to the very brink of vanishing, and yet, unlike so much other Grk literature, managed to survive in just one single manuscript that was virtually unknown until 1777. No one can say that the classics isn’t exciting!

I’m sure all you textkittens can easily imagine how much less helpful this would be without the time and effort of William Annis.

I don’t know what’s next, chad. I’ve been reading Herodotus, and I’m trying to work through Prometheus Bound, but I should probably stick to epic verse for while yet if I do some more commenting. There are more hymns of course, and I have a few short sections of Homer that are just waiting for some attention. I also thought it might be fun to read the Hymn to Demeter of Callimachus, and that might be a fun project someday. What are you reading these days?

~N

hi nick, i’ve been reading your demeter and it’s great, i hope you do more commenting. my aristophanes notes are growing at the moment. good luck with your next work :slight_smile:

I find the list practical, because one can begin by learning the most common words. On the whole it is very well done. Congratulations!

Hi Nick and/or Will,

I note that in the hymn to Demeter, line 7, you indicate that λειμων’ is accusative. May I ask why? not as criticism, but this comes across to me as if, in the list of flowers, the meadow is itself being plucked/gathered. Couldn’t it be that the word is dative, to indicate that the flowers and persephone are in the meadow, or would that require a preposition 'ἐν’? Or would such an elision not be possible because it is followed by ἂμα?

The iota as the ending of a noun in the dative case is never elided, according to Smyth’s grammar.

Ah well, that does it GGG! many thanks indeed!