The Homeric Hymns (Ancient Greek: Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι, romanized: Homērikoì húmnoi) are a collection of thirty-three Ancient Greek hymns and one epigram.^{[lower-alpha 1]} The Hymns praise individual deities of the Greek pantheon and retell mythological stories, often involving the deity's birth, their acceptance among the gods on Mount Olympus, or the establishment of their cult. In antiquity, the Hymns were generally, though not universally, attributed to the poet Homer: modern scholarship has established that most date to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, though some are later in date and the latest, the Hymn to Ares, may have been composed as late as the fifth century CE.

The hymns share compositional similarities with the Iliad and the Odyssey, also traditionally attributed to Homer. They share the same artificial literary dialect of Greek, are composed in dactylic hexameter, and make use of short, repeated phrases known as formulae. It is unclear how far writing, as opposed to oral composition, was involved in their creation. They may originally have served as preludes to the recitation of longer poems, and have been performed, at least originally, by singers accompanying themselves on a lyre or other stringed instrument. Performances of the Hymns may have taken place at sympotic banquets, religious festivals and royal courts.

There are references to the Hymns in Greek poetry from around 600 BCE; they appear to have been used as educational texts by the early fifth century BCE, and to have been collected into a single corpus after the third century CE. Their influence on Greek literature and art was comparatively small until the third century BCE, when they were used extensively by Alexandrian poets including Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes. They were also an influence on Roman poets, such as Lucretius, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. In late antiquity, they influenced both pagan and Christian literature, and their collection as a corpus likely dates to this period. They were comparatively neglected during the Byzantine period, though they continued to be copied in manuscripts of Homeric poetry; all of the surviving manuscripts of the Hymns date to the fifteenth century. They were also read and emulated widely in fifteenth-century Italy, and indirectly influenced Sandro Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus.

The Hymns were first published in print by Demetrios Chalkokondyles in 1488–1489.^{[lower-alpha 2]} George Chapman made the first English translation of the Hymns in 1642. The rediscovery of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in 1777 led to a resurgence of European interest in the Hymns. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe used the Hymn to Demeter as an inspiration for his 1778 melodrama Proserpina. The Hymns were also influential on the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, particularly Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their influence has also been traced in the novels of James Joyce, the poetry of Ezra Pound, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the novel Coraline by Neil Gaiman.

The hymns mostly date to the archaic period of Greek history.^[2] The earliest date to the seventh century BCE;^[3] most were probably composed between that century and the sixth century BCE,^[2] though the Hymn to Ares is considerably later and may date from as late as the fifth century CE.^[4] Although the individual hymns can rarely be dated with certainty, the longer poems (that is, Hymns 2–5) are generally considered archaic in date.^[5] Scholars debate the degree to which the hymns were composed orally, as opposed to with the use of writing, and the degree of consistency or "fixity" likely to have existed between early versions of the hymns in performance.^[6]

The name "Homeric Hymns" derives from the attribution, in antiquity, of the hymns to Homer, then believed to be the poet of the Iliad and Odyssey.^[7] The Hymn to Apollo was attributed to Homer by Pindar and Thucydides, who wrote around the beginning and the end of the fifth century BCE respectively.^[8] This attribution may have reflected the high esteem in which the hymns were held, as well as their stylistic similarities with the Homeric poems.^[7] The dialect of the hymns, an artificial literary language (Kunstsprache) derived largely from the Aeolic and Ionic dialects of Greek, is similar to that used in the Iliad and Odyssey.^[9] Like the Iliad and Odyssey, the hymns are composed in dactylic hexameter and make use of formulae: short, set phrases with particular metrical characteristics that could be repeated as a compositional aid.^[10]

The attribution to Homer was sometimes questioned in antiquity, such as by the rhetorician Athenaeus, who expressed his doubts about it around 200 CE.^[11] Other hypotheses in ancient times included the belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynathios of Chios, one of the Homeridae, a circle of poets claiming descent from Homer.^[5] Some ancient biographies of Homer denied his authorship of the Homeric Hymns, and the hymns' comparative absence from the work of scholars based in Hellenistic (that is, post–323 BCE) Alexandria may suggest that they were no longer considered to be his work by this period.^[12] However, few direct statements denying Homer's authorship of the Hymns survive from antiquity: in the second century CE, the Greek geographer Pausanias maintained their attribution to Homer.^[13]

An Attic vase painted around 470 BCE shows a youth, seated, holding a scroll with the first two words of the second Homeric Hymn to Hermes: this has been used to suggest that the hymns were used as educational texts by this period.^[16] At least the longer hymns seem to have been collected into a single edition at some point during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE).^[17]

The grouping of the hymns into their current corpus may date to late antiquity.^[3] References to the shorter poems as being within the corpus begin to be found in sources dating from the second and third centuries CE.^[17] The assemblage of the thirty-three hymns listed as today "Homeric" dates to no earlier than the third century CE.^[18] Between the fourth and the thirteenth centuries CE, the Homeric Hymns were generally transcribed in an edition which also contained the Hymns of Callimachus, the Orphic Hymns, the hymns of Proclus and the Orphic Argonautica.^[19]

Only a few papyrus copies of the Homeric Hymns are known.^[20] The surviving medieval manuscripts of the poems are fifteenth-century in date and drawn primarily from the late-antique compilation of the Homeric Hymns along with Orphic and other hymnic poetry.^[21] They all descend from a single, now-lost manuscript, known in scholarship by the siglum Ω.^[20] By the eighteenth century, twenty-five Byzantine manuscripts were known.^[22] One, known as Μ or the Codex Mosquensis, was written by the priest and polymath Ioannes Eugenikos in Constantinople in the first half of the fifteenth century;^[24] this manuscript preserved both the first Hymn to Dionysus and the Hymn to Demeter, but both were lost at some point after its creation and remained unknown until 1777, when the philologist Christian Frederick Matthaei discovered Μ in a barn outside Moscow.^[25] Μ has among its sources a lost manuscript, known by the siglum Ψ, which probably dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century. This may be a manuscript mentioned in a letter by the humanist Giovanni Aurispa in 1424, which he stated he had acquired in Constantinople;^[20] that manuscript has also been suggested as being Ω.^[26] As of 2016, a total of twenty-nine manuscripts of the hymns are known.^[27]

The hymns vary considerably in length, between 3 and 580 surviving lines.^[28] They seem originally to have functioned as preludes (prooimia) to recitations of longer works, such as epic poems.^[29] Many of the hymns with a verse indicating that another song will follow, sometimes specifically a work of heroic epic.^[28] Over time, however, at least some may have lengthened and been recited independently of other works.^[3] The hymns which currently survive as shorter works may equally be abridgements of longer works, retaining the introduction and conclusion of a poem whose central narrative has been lost.^[30]

The first known sources referring to the poems as "hymns" (Ancient Greek: ὕμνοι, romanized: hymnoi) date from the first century BCE.^[17] In concept, an ancient hymn was an invocation of a deity, often connected with a specific cult or sanctuary associated with that deity.^[3] The hymns often cover the deity's birth, arrival on Olympus, and dealings with human beings. Several discuss the origins of the god's cult or the founding of a major sanctuary dedicated to them.^[31] The hymns have been considered as agalmata, or gifts offered to deities on behalf of a community or social group.^[32] Some are aetiological accounts of religious cults, specific rituals, aspects of a deity's iconography and responsibilities, or of aspects of human technology and culture.^[33]

The hymns may have been composed to be recited at religious festivals, perhaps at singing contests: several directly or indirectly ask the god's support in competition.^[34] Originally, they appear to have been performed by singers accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument; later, they may have been recited by an orator holding a staff.^[11] They seem likely to have been performed frequently in various contexts throughout antiquity, such as at banquets or symposia.^[35] Nicholas Richardson has suggested that the fifth hymn, to Aphrodite, could have been composed for performance at the court of a ruler.^[17] The hymns' narrative voice has been described by Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter as "communal", usually making only generalised reference to their place of composition or the identity of the speaker, making them suitable for recitation by different speakers and for different audiences.^[36]