The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns

Name: The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns
Author: Attributed to Orpheus

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The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The HymnsLIX. To the Moirai · Lines 11–20

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LIX. To the Moirai · Lines 11–20

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Ancient Greek

p. 198

LIX. ΜΟΙΡΩΝ

θυμίαμα ἀρώματα

Μοῖρα γὰρ ἐν βιότῳ καθορᾷ μόνη, οὐδέ τις ἄλλος

ἀθανάτων, οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου,

καὶ Διὸς ὄμμα τέλειον· ἐπεί γ’ ὅσα γίγνεται ἡμῖν,

Μοῖρά τε καὶ Διὸς οἶδε νόος διὰ παντὸς ἅπαντα.

ἀλλά μοι, ἠέριαι, μαλακόφρονες, ἠπιόθυμοι,

Ἄτροπε καὶ Λάχεσι, Κλωθώ, μόλετ’, εὐπατέρειαι,

νυκτέριαι, ἀφανεῖς, ἀμετάτροποι, αἰὲν ἀτειρεῖς,

παντοδότειραι, ἀφαιρέτιδες θνητοῖσιν ἀνάγκης·

Μοῖραι, ἀκούσατ’ ἐμῶν ὁσίων λοιβῶν τε καὶ εὐχῶν,

ἐρχόμεναι μύσταις λαθικηδέες εὔφρονι βουλῇ.

The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns: LIX. To the Moirai

p. 199

LIX. To the Moirai

fumigation from aromatics

for Moira alone looks down upon life, and no other

of the immortals who hold the snowy head of Olympos,

and the all-accomplishing eye of Zeus; since whatever comes to us,

Moira and the mind of Zeus know all of it, always.

But to me, airy ones, soft of mind, gentle of heart —

Atropos and Lachesis, Klotho, come, daughters of a noble father,

of the night, unseen, not to be turned aside, ever unwearied,

givers of all, takers of necessity from mortals;

Moirai, hear my pure libations and my prayers,

coming to the initiates, care-forgetting, with kindly counsel.

12.Abel's sheet prints Ὀλίμπου, with an iota. Checked at 2.8× against the upsilon of οὐδέ on the line above and the υ of Ὄλυμπον at LVI.11, both at the same magnification: the letter after the lambda is a single narrow stroke carrying the acute. It is a wrong sort, and on the standing rule it is recorded here and not carried into the text, which prints Ὀλύμπου.

15, 17.Abel reports both readings with (sic) and Ruhnken's name, and the two entries are mirror images: at 15 the codices have νυκτέριοι and Ruhnken put ἀέριοι, at 17 the codices have ἀέριοι and Ruhnken put νυκτέριοι. The conjecture is a single exchange of two epithets between two lines, and Abel adopts it while flagging each half. Note that his lemmas print Ruhnken's masculine ἀέριοι and νυκτέριοι while his text prints the feminines that agree with the Moirai, ἠέριαι and νυκτέριαι — the same divergence between lemma and text recorded at LVI.2.

20.The codices carry one more verse here, and Abel does not print it in the text. He relegates it to the apparatus, entire: Μοιράων τέλος ἔλλαβ’ ἀοιδή, ἣν ὕφαν’ Ὀρφεύς — “the song of the Moirai has reached its end, the song Orpheus wove.” It is a colophon in verse, in which the collection's attributed author names himself. The exclusion is intelligible — a subscription that migrated into the text is a common enough accident — but the line is evidence about how the collection was transmitted and read, and it belongs in the record. The closing epithet of the printed line is Abel's own: he sets λαθικηδέες, care-forgetting, for the codices' λυσιπήμονες, grief-loosing.

About This Reading Edition

The eighty-eight Orphic Hymns and the Prayer to Musaeus, in Ancient Greek and English, with the supplied critical apparatus, explanatory notes, introduction, glossary and editorial matter.

Historical Text and Translation

Orphic Hymns, attributed to Orpheus. Greek text after Eugenius Abel, Orphica (Leipzig and Prague, 1885), pages 57–102.

About Diotimos Editions

This historical edition credits Diotimos Editions as its English translator.

Rights

The ancient Greek source and the 1885 Abel edition are public-domain material. The supplied new English translation and editorial matter are published with the site owner’s authorization. Both supplied original files remain unchanged.