Textual history ) family. This page contains the first 18 lines of the proem. There are no extant references to the
Orphic Hymns from antiquity; hymns attributed to Orpheus are mentioned in works such as the
Derveni papyrus (4th century BC) and
Pausanias's
Description of Greece (2nd century AD), though these almost certainly do not refer to the collection of eighty-seven hymns. The earliest definite reference to the
Hymns comes from the Byzantine writer
John Diaconus Galenus, who has been dated to the 12th century AD. Galenus mentions the collection thrice in his commentary on
Hesiod's
Theogony, referring to epithets from the hymns to
Helios and
Selene, and quoting lines from those to Helios and Hecate; he notes "Orpheus" as the source in all three citations, and at one point mentions fragrances in reference to the collection, indicating he possessed a manuscript which contained offerings. Although no extant references to the
Hymns exist before Galenus, the collection would have been known in literary circles in the centuries following its composition, and it may have influenced later works such as the
Orphic Argonautica (4th century AD) and the
Dionysiaca of Nonnus (5th century AD). At some point between the 5th to 13th century AD, the
Orphic Hymns were collected into a single
codex, which also contained the
Homeric Hymns, the
Orphic Argonautica, and the
Hymns of
Callimachus and
Proclus. The earliest known codex containing the
Orphic Hymns to arrive in Western Europe was brought to Venice from Constantinople by
Giovanni Aurispa in 1423, and shortly afterwards, in 1427,
Francesco Filelfo brought to Italy another codex containing the collection; both of these manuscripts are now lost. The surviving codices, of which there are around forty, all date between about 1450 and 1550, and often include the
Orphic Argonautica, the
Homeric Hymns, Hesiodic works, and the
Hymns of Callimachus and Proclus. Most (or perhaps all) of the extant codices descend from a single
archetype, denoted in scholarship by the
siglum Ψ (
psi), which probably dated to the 12th or 13th century, and was a paper manuscript with text written in
minuscule; it arrived in Italy in the first half of the 15th century, and may have been the manuscript transported by Aurispa to Venice. From this manuscript were derived four
apographs (or transcribed copies) – namely φ (
phi), θ (
theta), A, and B, in chronological order of transcription – which were produced as the archetype gradually suffered damage. Various further manuscripts are descended from the
subarchetypes φ and θ, with both manuscripts being recoverable only from these descendants, while A and B, which omit the
Homeric Hymns (and in the latter case the
Hymns of Callimachus also), are preserved in surviving editions. Another extant manuscript, h, is of less clear origin, and may not have derived its text from Ψ; West suggests that in one hymn it makes use of a separate source. In the latter part of the 15th century,
Marsilio Ficino, a
Neoplatonist, translated the
Orphic Hymns into Latin as a youth, seemingly producing the first translation of the collection, though it remained unpublished. The
editio princeps (or first printed edition) of the
Hymns was produced in
Florence in 1500 by Filippo Giunta; this codex, denoted in scholarship by the siglum Iunt, is descended from φ. This was followed by the publication of an edition by the
Aldine Press in 1517, and the first printing of a translation (into Latin) of the collection in 1519, written by
Marcus Musurus. By the end of the 16th century, a total of six editions had been published, including the 1566 edition by
Henri Estienne. Estienne's volume remained the standard edition of the text for the following two centuries, until the publication, in 1764, of
Johann Matthias Gesner's
Orphica, which included a number of corrections that had been put forward by 18th-century scholars. Editions of the
Hymns from prior centuries were surpassed by the version of the text in the voluminous 1805 collection of Orphic literature by
Gottfried Hermann. Hermann proposed over 170 corrections to the text of the
Hymns, and his edition was the first to contain a
critical apparatus. He was also the first scholar to split the hymn to Hecate from the proem, presenting it as the first hymn in the collection, a choice which almost all subsequent editions have followed. The first complete English translation of the collection was produced in 1787 by the Neoplatonist
Thomas Taylor, and the first complete German translation, by David Karl Philipp Dietsch, was published in 1822. Hermann's edition of Orphic literature was followed in 1885 by that of , whose edition of the
Hymns was pilloried by subsequent scholars, particularly for its lack of consideration of the manuscript tradition. The critical edition by Wilhelm Quandt (to which
Paul Maas contributed) was published in 1941, followed in 1955 by its second edition. Quandt sought to provide an accurate reconstruction of Ψ, with the exception of a number of what he perceived to be spelling errors in the archetype, which he corrects; his rendering of Ψ has served as the basis of subsequent editions. Recent versions of the
Hymns include the 1977 English translation by
Apostolos Athanassakis, the first since Taylor's, the 2000 edition, with Italian translation and commentary, by Gabriela Ricciardelli, and the 2014
Budé edition by Marie-Christine Fayant, with French translation and commentary.
Reception and scholarship In the mid 15th century, following the arrival of the codex brought by Aurispa to Venice, the
Orphic Hymns seem to have attained a level of popularity amongst the educated of Renaissance Italy. This attention to the work may have been due to the Greek scholar and Neoplatonist
Gemistos Plethon, who visited Florence around this time; Plethon is known to have been familiar with the
Orphic Hymns, having produced an autograph of a selection of the hymns (a codex which scholars have identified as the source of the h family of manuscripts). Ficino, whose work may have been influenced by Plethon, believed that the
Hymns were the genuine writings of Orpheus, and appears to have had a liking for singing their contents, believing that the collection was capable of "bringing the human soul into alignment with the harmonies of the heavens". Subsequent Renaissance writers, such as
Pico della Mirandola, viewed the
Hymns as having deep theological doctrines hidden within them, and saw the various gods they mention as merely aspects of a single, underlying god. In the 1540s,
Agostino Steuco and
Giglio Gregorio Giraldi put forward the idea that the collection was the work of another Orpheus, who supposedly lived long after the original Orpheus was believed to have existed.
Daniel Heinsius, writing in 1627, attributed the collection to the Athenian
Onomacritus (6th to 5th century BC), to whom Orphic poetry had sometimes been ascribed in antiquity, and this idea of the Onomacritan authorship of the
Hymns became the dominant view in the 17th century. By 1689, Henri Estienne had expressed scepticism towards this attribution, while in the mid-18th century wrote that Onomacritus had simply modified the dialect of the
Orphic Hymns to
Ionic Greek, but that they were genuinely written by Orpheus, having been produced earlier than the 5th century BC. In the late 18th century, the
Göttingen school of history lambasted the idea that Orphic literature was a product of early antiquity;
Johann Gottlob Schneider argued, on the basis of their lack of mention among ancient authors, that the
Orphic Hymns were produced in late antiquity (probably in the 3rd century AD) for use in the debate over Orphism and Orpheus at that time between
Christian and Neoplatonic apologists. Schneider decried the
Hymns as a "hogwash of mystical sayings and allegorical prattlings", while his contemporary,
Christoph Meiners, described their style as , and supported a late dating, viewing the collection as containing a kind of confused
Stoicism. Around the same time, in 1780,
Dietrich Tiedemann argued that the individual hymns in the collection were of highly diverse origins and dates, with the surviving collection of
Orphic Hymns simply being a compilation. In contrast to this sceptical approach, Taylor, writing in his translation of the
Hymns, adopted a mystical view of the collection, and claimed they had belonged to the
Eleusinian Mysteries (a Greek mystery cult from
Eleusis). At the start of the 19th century, scholars such as
Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Friedrich Sickler believed that the
Hymns, while composed in (or possibly after) the
Hellenistic period, were a later rendering of a much earlier collection.
Christian Lobeck, writing in his 1829 work
Aglaophamus, held that the collection was composed by an individual from the
Byzantine era, and rejected the idea of them belonging to a cult community, believing that their author produced them as a scholarly exercise. Several decades later,
Christian Petersen posed a challenge to Lobeck's view, arguing that the collection showed a strong influence of Stoic thought, as indicated by the appearance of certain Stoic personifications, and the tendency to treat deities as though they are aspects of nature. On the basis of this perceived Stoic influence, he dated the collection to around the 1st or 2nd centuries AD. In the late 19th century, excavations in western Asia Minor brought to light epigraphic evidence which led to the establishment of the idea that the
Orphic Hymns had been liturgical in function. The discovery, around the time of Petersen's work, of inscriptions containing the word () (a religious title which appears in the
Hymns), led
Rudolf Schöll to postulate in 1879 that the
Hymns had belonged to a Bacchic mystery group. Around a decade later,
Albrecht Dieterich, in a study of the
Hymns recognised by scholars as definitively establishing their ritual nature, concluded that the collection belonged to a cult community which engaged in mysteries, and judged that this group possessed an internal hierarchy. He dated the collection to around the 1st or 2nd centuries BC, and locates its origins to a coastal region of either Asia Minor or Egypt (with him favouring the city of Alexandria as its location).
Ernst Maass, writing in 1895, claimed that the term referred to Orpheus himself, while, ten years later, Zdenko Baudnik studied the Stoic characteristics of the
Hymns in detail, and supported the idea of an Alexandrian origin. Around the beginning of the 20th century, the discovery of inscriptions in western Asia Minor to deities featured in the
Hymns, such as Hipta,
Erikepaios, and Melinoe, led
Otto Kern to conclude in 1910 that the collection was composed in Asia Minor, for use by a Dionysian cult; a year later, he argued that the
Hymns originated specifically from Pergamon, and that the cult community which used them existed at the sanctuary of Demeter in the city, where inscriptions to a number of deities addressed in the collection had been discovered. His view that the
Hymns originated in Asia Minor received widespread acceptance, though his argument that their location could be narrowed down to Pergamon was treated with greater scepticism. Kern later argued, in 1940, that the surviving collection is the product of an originally Dionysian work having been edited by a Stoic interpolator, who attached the proem and further hymns. Following the publication of Kern's papers on the location of the
Hymns composition, scholars such as
Felix Jacoby and
W. K. C. Guthrie argued that the collection belonged to an Orphic society, though the latter considered it improbable that the group was "Orphic in the strict sense of accepting the whole body of Orphic dogma". In 1930, Leonard van Liempt studied the collection's vocabulary, concluding that it was similar to that used in 3rd- and 4th-century AD poetry. Several years later,
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff judged that the
Hymns lacked all poetic merit, and half a century afterwards, in 1983,
Martin Litchfield West dismissed them as evidence merely of "cheerful and inexpensive dabbling in religion by a literary-minded
burgher and his friends". After the publication of Quandt's edition, the
Hymns received little attention until towards the end of the 20th century, when scholarly interest in the collection was rekindled, driven mainly by the work of . In the wake of Rudhardt's writings, the 21st-century scholarship of the
Hymns has, according to Daniel Malamis, moved beyond the view held by scholars such as Wilamowitz and West that they were "trivial or low-brow", with recent scholars focusing in particular on the "ritual and performative aspect" of the collection. == List of the
Orphic Hymns ==