The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns

Greek divine and personal names are transliterated from the form Abel prints: Okeanos, Hestia, Phersephone, Mousai, Moirai, Charites, Horai, Gaia, Nyx, Ouranos, Hypnos, Thanatos. Seven names keep their settled English form, because transliterating them would obscure rather than reveal: Apollo, Musaeus, Delphi, Egypt, Thrace, Samothrace and Cyprus — though the goddess of that island stays Kypris. One name departs from the rule deliberately: Abel prints Ἵππα and this edition prints Hipta, the form the Lydian inscriptions give and the only one under which a reader will recognise her; the note at XLIX.1 says so. Divine abstractions are transliterated where the text treats them as named powers — Dike, Nomos, Tyche, Pronoia, Nike, Eirene, Eunomia, Hygieia, Dikaiosyne, Pistis, Thesmodoteira — and Englished where the same word is a common noun: peace, health, good order, providence, necessity. The proem's catalogue, where every item in the list is a god, takes the first treatment throughout. Where a Greek word is a term of art rather than a name it is left untranslated and glossed: δαίμων, ὄργια, rhombos, Ieios.

A fixed rendering, once settled, binds the whole volume. The full list is in the Glossary; the ones a reader will notice are the five words for holy, γνώμη = purpose against βουλή = counsel, and εὐδύνατος = greatly able, which is kept clear of mighty (κραταιός and the ὀβριμ- compounds).

What the translation does not do: it does not smooth out a difficulty in the Greek. LXXXVI.13–15 says, as printed, that the wicked get no warning dream so that they may find release, which is the opposite of what the clause should say; the English says it too, and the note explains why.

The eighty-eighth hymn

Abel prints a hymn to Ares in the last place and dissents from it in the same breath. His note, the only one of its kind in the book, reads: Hic hymnus inter Homero vulgo adscriptos octavo loco legitur. Transtulit eum huc Hermann, haud recte, cum hoc carmen diversi coloris sit ab Orphicis hymnis — “This hymn is usually read in the eighth place among those ascribed to Homer. Hermann transferred it here, not rightly, since this poem is of a different colouring from the Orphic hymns.” In his praefatio he says it again, more mildly: in editions before Hermann the hymn is absent, idque fortasse recte, “and perhaps rightly so.”

This edition prints the hymn where Abel prints it, and prints his protest with it, because a reader of Abel meets both. The position is his; the dissent is his; neither is ours to silently resolve. What Hermann moved is Homeric Hymn 8, itself no older than the Orphic collection and very probably by Proclus.

Three things do mark it off: it carries no fumigation rubric, the tenth and last hymn without one; its heading is ΕΙΣ ΑΡΕΑ, to with the accusative, and every hymn in the book whose heading departs from the bare genitive is also a hymn without a rubric; and at 6–8 it places Ares as a planet in the third sphere, the only astronomical placing in the collection — where the book's other two uses of third are the Homeric division of the world by lot (XVII.7, XVIII.6). Two arguments that look good and are not: that Ares already has a hymn at LXV (so do the Kouretes, twice under the same name; so does Zeus, three times; so does Dionysos, under eight titles), and that its diction is exceptionally strange. On the last, counting every word of five letters or more that occurs in one piece only, LXXXVIII has about 3.12 a line against a median of about 2.09 across the eighty-nine pieces. That puts it third or fourth — the exact rank moves with how elided forms are counted, and XXXVIII stands very close — but on every counting LXXX is above it at 3.50 and LXV at 3.25, and LXV is the Orphic hymn to Ares. The hymn Abel keeps and the hymn Abel doubts are as strange as one another.

This edition's own conventions

— Greek verso, English recto, facing. Every verse line has its counterpart directly opposite.

— Abel's marginal numerals are reproduced at the right of both columns, restarting with each hymn.

— The apparatus stands under the Greek; the notes stand under the English. Nothing is mixed.

— (no fumigation named) on the English side marks the ten hymns that carry no rubric, so that an absent rubric is not mistaken for an oversight.

— Where Abel records a lost verse, the loss is described in the note at that place and not marked in the text. There is one, at XLVIII.3.

— Where the manuscripts give a whole alternative passage it is printed after the hymn, under its own heading, not buried in the apparatus. There is one such: the Thryllitianus Poseidon, after XVII. The Thryllitianus close of Hymn XV is described in the note at that hymn and not printed — an inconsistency this edition records rather than repairs, since printing it would mean re-collating a passage that was never read from the page.