Homeric in Metre, Not in Authorship

The thirty-three poems collected as the Homeric Hymns were ascribed to Homer in antiquity and are not by him. They are Homeric in a narrower and quite precise sense: they use the same dactylic hexameter, the same artificial epic dialect and the same stock of formulaic phrases as the Iliad and the Odyssey, because they come out of the same oral tradition of hexameter performance. Most were composed in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. The collection as a corpus is very much later, probably late antique, and the Hymn to Ares may be as late as the fifth century CE, which makes the corpus a thousand-year container rather than a single moment.

The short hymns give away the original function. Several end with a line announcing that the singer will now pass to another song, which marks them as prooimia: preludes a rhapsode sang to establish the god's presence and win favour before launching into epic recitation. The long hymns are the same genre grown to independence. They open and close in the manner of a prelude but carry a full narrative in between, and it is those four (to Demeter, Apollo, Hermes and Aphrodite), that make the collection indispensable.