Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/96

74 74 HISTORY OP THE the Theogony as he himself says, began and ended his strains*. One short hymn however, formed of verses borrowed from the Theogony, has found its way into this miscellaneous collection-}-. By a similar argu- ment we may refute the opinion that these hymns were exclusively the work of the Homerids, that is, the house of Chios : these, as we know from the testimony of Pindar, were accustomed to commence with an invocation to Zeus ; while our collection only contains one very small and unimportant procemium to this god J. Whether any of the preludes which Terpander, the Lesbian poet and musician, employed in his musical recitation of Homer § have been preserved in the present collection, must remain a doubtful question : it seems however probable that those hymns, composed for an accom- paniment of the cithara, must have had a different tone and character. Moreover, these hymns exhibit such a diversity of language and poetical tone, that in all probability they contain fragments from every century between the time of Homer and the Persian war. Several, as for instance that to the Dioscuri, show the transition to the Orphic poetry, and several refer to local worships, which are entirely un- known to us, as the one to Selene, which celebrates her daughter by Zeus, the goddess Pandia, shining forth amongst the immortals ; of whom we can now only conjecture that the Athenian festival of Pandia was dedicated to her. § 3. We will now endeavour to illustrate these general remarks by some special explanations of the five longer hymns. The hymn to the Delian Apollo is (as has been already stated) || ascribed by Thucydides to Homer himself ; and is, doubtless, the production of a Homerid of Chios, who, at the end of the poem, calls himself the blind poet who lived on the rocky Chios. But the notion that this poet was Cinaethus, who did not live till the 69th Olympiad^], appears only to have originated from the circumstance that he was the most celebrated of the Homerids. If any one of these hymns comes near to the age of Homer, it is this one ; and it is much to be lamented that a large portion of it has been lost**, which contained the beginning of the narration, the true ground of the wanderings of Latona. We can only conjecture that this was the announcement, probably made by Here, that Latona would produce a terrible and mighty son : of which a contradiction is meant to be implied in Apollo's first words, where he calls the cithara his favourite instrument, as well as the bow, and also mentioned in the Homeric hymns, xxi. 4, and xxxiv. 18, and the short song, Hymn xxi. is probably one of them. Comp. Theognis, v. i. (925), Apollon. Rhod, Arg. iv. 1774. f See Hymn xxv. and Theog. 94 — 7. J Hymn xxiii. § Plutarch de Musica, c. 4, 6 ; and above, chap. iv. § 3 (p. 34). «U Schol Find. Nem. ii. 1. ** Hymn i. 30.
 * Theogon. 48. Endings of this kind, called by the grammarians iQuftvia, are
 * Above, chap. v. § 1 (p. 42).