Orpheus (Orphic Hymns)

The Orphic Hymns are a collection of 87 short Greek hexameter hymns, each addressed to a god, a daimon or a personified power, together with a prefatory poem addressed to Musaeus, the pupil of Orpheus. The tradition ascribes them to Orpheus, the legendary singer of Thrace, but they are in fact anonymous late-antique poems, usually dated to about the second or third century AD and composed for the use of small cult groups. Each hymn was meant to be sung during an offering, and most carry a note naming the incense burned with it.

They are given here in Thomas Taylor's rhymed translation, first published in 1787 and reissued in a second edition in 1824; the text follows Bertram Dobell's 1896 facsimile reprint of that second edition. Taylor, the English Platonist, read the hymns through the Neoplatonic theology of Proclus, and his own long notes and dissertation, which fill most of the volume, are not part of the poems and are left out. His prose notes are omitted; only the verse is kept, with his fumigation headings recorded as each poem's note.