Sceptred King of manliness, who whirl your fiery sphereĪmong the planets in their sevenfold courses through the aether Stern governor of the rebellious, leader of righteous men, Strong of arm, unwearying, mighty with the spear, O defence of Olympus,įather of warlike Victory, ally of Themis, 8 is dedicated to Ares, and it presents us with a different take on the supposedly most bloodthirsty of all the Olympians than you might expect.Īs this hymn is quite short, let’s read it together, using the (somewhat archaic) translation available on the Perseus website:Īres, exceeding in strength, chariot-rider, golden-helmed,ĭoughty in heart, shield-bearer, saviour of cities, harnessed in bronze, He is usually regarded as a bloodthirsty god, the embodiment of strife and slaughter, and quite different from his more collected Roman counterpart, Mars. Of all the ancient Greek gods, Ares, the god of battle and strife, usually receives short shrift, as I’ve discussed before. Each of these hymns is dedicated to a particular deity, though a couple are dedicated to more than one: Hymn 25 is dedicated to the Muses and Apollo, while Hymn 33 deals with the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces (Pollux). The Homeric Hymns use the same meter as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the dactylic hexameter. They are first referenced by Thucydides (3.104), who wrote an incomplete history of the Peloponnesian War. These ancient Greek hymns (songs of praise), thirty-three in total (some manuscripts add a thirty-fourth: a very short hymn to xenoi or “foreigners”), were attributed to Homer in antiquity, but the dates for the individual poems vary most of them date to the seventh and sixth centuries BC. But the ancient Greeks attributed a number of other poems also to Homer, including the so-called “Homeric Hymns”.

We don’t know whether this was his actual name, and academic opinion is divided on whether or not the two poems are even the work of a single individual. In ancient times, the author of the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey was thought to have been a man called “Homer”.

This article was originally published on the defunct Ancient World Magazine website and is now re-published here.

Homeric hymn to artemis