Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/95

73 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 73 18th of the Homeric hymns, the short one to Hermes, which has been abridged from the long one for this purpose. With the actual ceremonies of the divine worship these hymns had evidently no immediate connexion. Unlike the lyric and choral songs, they were sung neither on the procession to the temple (rrofiTrii), nor at the sacrifice (Qvaia), nor at the libation ((nrovh)), with which the public prayers for the people were usually connected ; they had only a general reference to the god as patron of a festival, to which a contest of rhapsodists or poets had been appended. One hymn alone, the eighth to Ares, is not a procemium, but a prayer to the god : in this, however, the entire tone, the numerous invocations and epithets, are so different from the Homeric, that this hymn has been with reason re- ferred to a much later period, and has been classed with the Orphic compositions*. § 2. But although these prooemia were not immediately connected with the service of the gods, and although a poet might have prefixed an invocation of this kind to an epic composition recited by him alone, without a rival, in any meeting of idle persons f, yet we may perceive from them how many and different sacred festivals in Greece were at- tended by rhapsodists. Thus it is quite clear that the two hymns to Apollo were sung, the one at the festival of the nativity of the god in the island of Delos, the other at that of the slaying of the dragon at Pytho ; that the hymn to Demeter was recited at theEleusinia, where musical con- tests were also customary ; and that contests of rhapsodists were connected with the festivals of Aphrodite J, particularly at Salamis in Cyprus§, from which island we have also seen a considerable epic poem proceed. The short hymn to Artemis, which describes her wanderings from the river Meles at Smyrna to the island of Claros (where her brother Apollo awaits her) ||, appears also to have been recited at a musical contest, which was connected with the festival of these two deities in the re- nowned sanctuary of Claros, near Colophon. Festivals in honour of the Magna Mater of Phrygia may have likewise been celebrated in the towns of Asia Minor, also accompanied with contests of rhapsodists. That these prooemia were composed by rhapsodists of Asia Minor, nearly the same as those who were concerned in the Homeric cycle, and not by minstrels of the school of Hesiod, is proved by the fact that we find among them no hymn to the Muses, with whom the poet of name : the hymn, therefore, belongs to a time when Chaldocan astrology had been diffused in Greece. The contest for which the aid of Ares is implored is a purely mental one, with the passions, and the hymn is in fact philosophical rather than Orphic. For example, in a x'i<r%*i, a house of public resort, where strangers found an abode. Homer, according to Pseudo-Herodotus, sang many poetical pieces in places of this description. J Hymn vi. 19. Hymn -. J. Comp. ch. 6. § I. |] Hymn i%. 3, seq.
 * Ares is in this hymn, viii. 7, 10, also considered as the planet of the same