INTRODUCTION
preludes and show to what disproportionate lengths a simple literary form can be developed. The Hymns to Pan (xix), to Dionysus (xxvi), to Hestia and Hermes (xxix), seem to have been designed for use at definite religious festivals, apart from recitations. With the exception perhaps of the Hymn to Ares (viii), no item in the collection can be regarded as either devotional or liturgical.
The Hymn is doubtless a very ancient form; but if no examples of extreme antiquity survive this must be put down to the fact that until the age of literary consciousness, such things are not preserved.
First, apparently, in the collection stood the Hymn to Dionysus, of which only two fragments now survive. While it appears to have been a hymn of the longer type,[1] we have no evidence to show either its scope or date.
The Hymn to Demeter, extant only in the MS. discovered by Matthiae at Moscow, describes the seizure of Persephone by Hades, the grief of Demeter, her stay at Eleusis, and her vengeance on gods and men by causing famine. In the end Zeus is forced to bring Persephone back from the lower world; but the goddess, by the contriving of Hades, still remains partly a deity of the lower world. In memory of her sorrows Demeter establishes the Eleusinian mysteries (which, however, were purely agrarian in origin).
This hymn, as a literary work, is one of the finest
- ↑ Cp. Allen and Sikes, Homeric Hymns p. xv. In the text I have followed the arrangement of these scholars, numbering the Hymns to Dionysus and to Demeter, I and II respectively: to place Demeter after Hermes, and the Hymn to Dionysus at the end of the collection seems to be merely perverse.
