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 HymnsLXXXIII. To Okeanos · Lines 1–8

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LXXXIII. To Okeanos · Lines 1–8

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Ancient Greek

p. 266

LXXXIII. ΩΚΕΑΝΟΥ

θυμίαμα ἀρώματα

Ὠκεανὸν καλέω, πατέρ’ ἄφθιτον, αἰὲν ἐόντα,

ἀθανάτων τε θεῶν γένεσιν θνητῶν τ’ ἀνθρώπων,

ὃς περικυμαίνει γαίης περιτέρμονα κύκλον·

ἐξ οὗπερ πάντες ποταμοὶ καὶ πᾶσα θάλασσα

καὶ χθόνιοι γαίης πηγόρρυτοι ἰκμάδες ἁγναί.

κλῦθι, μάκαρ, πολύολβε, θεῶν ἅγνισμα μέγιστον,

τέρμα φίλον γαίης, ἀρχὴ πόλου, ὑγροκέλευθε,

ἔλθοις εὐμενέων μύσταις κεχαρισμένος αἰεί.

The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns: LXXXIII. To Okeanos

p. 267

LXXXIII. To Okeanos

fumigation from aromatics

Okeanos I call, imperishable father, who is for ever,

the begetting of the immortal gods and of mortal men,

who breaks in waves about the bounding circle of the earth;

from whom indeed come all rivers and the whole sea

and the earth's holy moistures below, that flow from springs.

Hear, blessed one, rich in blessing, greatest purification of the gods,

dear limit of earth, beginning of the pole, watery-pathed,

may you come with favour to the initiates, ever well pleased.

LXXXIII.The only hymn in the collection with no apparatus entry of any kind. Eight lines, and Abel has nothing to report: no conjecture, no manuscript variant, no orthographic preference of his own. Every one of the other eighty-seven hymns, and the proem, carries at least one entry — LXXXVIII's being Abel's Latin note rather than a reading. His apparatus is dense (two hundred and sixty readings of Hermann's across the book, a hundred and thirty-two of his own, thirty-six of Wiel's), so the silence is striking. It does not, however, mean the manuscripts agree. Abel closes his praefatio by saying that he has reserved a complete critical apparatus for a larger edition of the Orphic poems — `Integrum apparatum criticum maiori Orphicorum carminum editioni reservavi` — so what this edition prints is by his own account a selection. A hymn that draws nothing is a hymn he chose to report nothing about, which is weaker than a hymn nobody has emended, and the difference matters.

1–2.Okeanos is named five times before he is hymned — proem 27, XI.15, XXII.1, XXXVIII.8, LI.1 — and at XXII.1 his wife Tethys receives a hymn of her own, sixty-one places ahead of his. The collection is not ordered by theogonic rank.

2.γένεσιν, the “begetting” or origin. The line is close to XLI.2, “of the immortal gods and of mortal men”, but not identical, and the Homeric tag it recalls (Iliad 14.201, Okeanos θεῶν γένεσις) is the source of both.

6.ἅγνισμα, “means of purification”, occurs nowhere else in the collection. Sea water is the ordinary purifying agent of Greek cult, and the hymn makes the whole of Okeanos the greatest instance of it — a claim about ritual, put as a claim about cosmology.

7.Limit of the earth and beginning of the pole in one line: the encircling river is the boundary of the flat earth and the point at which the turning heaven begins. The hymn holds both pictures at once without reconciling them.

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.