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 HymnsXLVIII. To Sabazios · Lines 1–6

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XLVIII. To Sabazios · Lines 1–6

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Ancient Greek

p. 162

XLVIII. ΣΑΒΑΖΙΟΥ

θυμίαμα ἀρώματα

Κλῦθι, πάτερ, Κρόνου υἱέ, Σαβάζιε, κύδιμε δαῖμον,

ὃς Βάκχον Διόνυσον, ἐρίβρομον, εἰραφιώτην,

μηρῷ ἐγκατέραψας, ὅπως τετελεσμένος ἔλθοι

Τμῶλον ἐς ἠγάθεον παρά θ’ Ἵππαν καλλιπάρῃον.

ἀλλά, μάκαρ, Φρυγίης μεδέων, βασιλεύτατε πάντων,

εὐμενέων ἐπαρωγὸς ἐπέλθοις μυστιπόλοισιν.

The Orphic Collection, Volume I: The Hymns: XLVIII. To Sabazios

p. 163

XLVIII. To Sabazios

fumigation from aromatics

Hear, father, son of Kronos, Sabazios, glorious daimon,

you who Bakchos Dionysos, the loud-roaring, Eiraphiotes,

sewed into your thigh, that he might come to term

to most divine Tmolos, and to fair-cheeked Hipta.

But, blessed one, ruler of Phrygia, most kingly of all,

may you come with favour, a helper to those who keep the mysteries.

After 3.The first lacuna in the volume. Abel marks it in the text with three spaced asterisks on a line of their own — not counted as a verse, as his marginal 5 shows — and reports in the apparatus that Lobeck saw a line had fallen out after 3, of roughly the sense μησὶ περιπλομένοις, καί μιν ταχέως ἐκόμισσας — “as the months came round, and you brought him forth swiftly”. The supplement is about gestation, which is what τετελεσμένος at the end of 3 means: not “perfected” in any mystical sense but carried to term. The gap is what leaves ἔλθοι without its destination until Tmolos arrives in the next line.

1–2.Sabazios is made Zeus — son of Kronos, father, and the one who carried Dionysos in his thigh — and then, at 5, ruler of Phrygia, which is Sabazios’s own country. The identification with Zeus is well attested on stone (Ζεὺς Σαβάζιος, Iuppiter Sabazius); but antiquity also equated him with Dionysos (Suda: “Sabazios and Dionysos are the same”), so in making him the father rather than the son the hymn is choosing one of two live ancient options, and never says it is choosing. Εἰραφιώτης in the same line is the Homeric cult-epithet that one ancient etymology derived from ἐρράφθαι, sewn up (Hesychius, Suda); others derived it from ἔριφος, a kid. It is left untranslated here because rendering it “thigh-sewn” puts one of those guesses into the line and says in advance what line 3 then says.

4.Ἱππαν — Hipta, attested in four inscriptions of the first to third centuries AD from the Katakekaumene in Lydia, three of them naming Sabazios with her, all within a few miles of one another; Mount Tmolos, named in the same line, is the Lydian range above Sardis. Her role as the nurse who carries the newborn Dionysos in a liknon with a serpent coiled round it comes from Proclus. This is the Phrygian-Lydian Dionysos, not the Theban one of the hymn two places back.

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.