Greek Hymnic Spaces (2015) (original) (raw)

Greek Christian Poetry and Hymnography (2):

Oxford Handbook to the Early Church

Greek Christian hymns are a massive part of the surviving literary record of the early church, but have rarely attracted the level of scholarly attention that they deserve. This article discusses Greek hymnody; the classical origins of the Greek Christian hymns; the Bible and the ancient liturgy; stages of Syrian influence on Byzantine hymnography; hymns of the heterodox-orthodox Struggles; littérateur poets in Greek late antiquity; and the flowering of Byzantine hymnography in the sixth to eleventh Centuries. In Greek hymnody, one can see creed, antiphon, poem, prayer, song, and sacrament welded to form a seamless unity: here Byzantine theology, mysticism, and liturgical chant merge into a profound symbiosis in a programme that already consciously understood itself to be a the ology of beauty and of culture. The ancient hymn is thus a potent symbol, still awaiting its full articulation.

In situ: Liturgical Poetry and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity

in M. Ahuvia , A. Kocar (eds.), Placing Ancient Texts: The Ritual and Rhetorical Use of Space (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018), 87-98. , 2018

This essay examines several liturgical poems in which a correspondence exists between the texts and the space in which they were performed. A key term in my investigation is ekphrasis, a rhetorical technique common in classical Greco-Roman world that influenced late antique liturgical poets. I begin with a discussion of the impact of ekphrasis on Christian and Jewish poetic texts and continue with an examination of several poems that appropriate the ekphrastic technique and use it as part of their own liturgical and ritual practices. Finally, I situate these poems alongside the architecture and the artwork of the synagogues and churches of late antiquity in which they were performed.

Urbano-Ruiz, M. (2024), «Greek Christian Hymnography through the Ages: a Survey», Estudios Bizantinos 12, 189-212

Estudios Bizantinos , 2024

Religious poetry is one of the great representatives of Byzantine literature. Within the poetic sphere is the genre of hymnography, whose greatest exponent is a type of hymn known as kon-takion. Since the first editions of kontakia in the 19th century, brief studies of certain aspects of this type of hymn have appeared, but they have all been published in a scattered manner, and the scholarly interest has generally focused on the hymnographers rather than on the hymnic genre itself. The purpose of this article is to provide an update of the existing bibliographical material and to offer a diachronic overview of the history of hymnography. This study is original in its synoptic character, bringing together the various aspects of the hymn, from its origins to its apogee, which have often been studied separately.

WHOSE HYMNS?: THE ARCHITECTURE AND AUTHORSHIP OF THE HOMERIC HYMN COLLECTION

A persistent problem in the scholarship on the Homeric Hymns concerns the organization of the collection: how, or indeed if, the poems are ordered. Several attempts have been made to explain the principle or principles underlying the order of the Hymns, but while these theories 1 account well for the disposition of most of the poems in the collection, they disagree in important places about where precisely to draw the boundaries between the majors subgroups of Hymns.

On the Issue of Performativity of Hymns

The article indicates that the study of the semantic-communicative component of hymns makes it possible to identify performative frameworks-"pillows", on which the foundation of speech activity rests. Thus, the obligatory semantic-communicative component of the hymns is informing the deity about his/her qualities, in other words, it is praising. The article reviewed three hymns written in Old English ("The Kentish Hymn", "The Caedmon's Hymn") and Early Middle English ("The Godric's Hymn"). The author focuses on paganism in Old English hymns. Thus, the work emphasizes that at the dawn of Christianity, for a smooth transition from paganism to Christianity, the image of Jesus Christ was presented as the image of a leader (Cyning-Leader), while believers were represented as His warriors. The cross as the main Christian symbol often appears made of wood and is identified with the cosmic world tree growing right into heaven.

Showing praise in Greek choral lyric and beyond

American Journal of Philology 133 (2012) 543–572

This paper focuses on the use of the verb δείκνυμι in Greek choral lyric. in Alcman, Pindar, Bacchylides and Philodamus the verb is found construed with direct objects meaning ‘song’, ‘hymn’ or ‘poetry’ (ὕμνος, γάρυμα, μέλος, ἀρετά (= ἀρετᾶς κλέος), δῶρον Μωσᾶν, μουσικά). It is argued that in these instances δείκνυμι should be translated not as ‘display’ or ‘reveal’, but simply as ‘sing’: this usage finds an exact parallel in Vedic Sanskrit where the cognate root diś- is likewise used with ‘song of praise’ as its object (stóma-, námaükti-, gír-) and the subject is likewise a poet. It is through the lens of this comparison that the Greek contexts can be understood: δεῖξαι ὕμνον, μέλος, etc. is an archaism of the melic poetry that goes back to the Indo-European poetic language where the precursor of δείκνυμι encoded the relationship between laudandus and laudator; the poet was “showing forth” a song of praise as a gift to a deity or a patron, expecting rewards in return. In view of the correspondence between Greek and Vedic, the possibility has to be considered seriously that the use of Latin dīcō in Augustan poets of reciting or performing verse (dīcere carmen) as well as of praising (dīcere laudēs) continues the same inherited phraseology. This paper further argues that a Hittite cognate of the same root can be identified in tekrin tekrizzi (which denotes some kind of a speech act in a recently published text) and that the semantic development of the root *deyḱ- from “show” to “speak, sing” usually thought to have taken place independently in Italic and Germanic (Latin dīcō, etc.) happened already in the protolanguage, but this second meaning remained limited to the domain of the poetic language. Based on these results the paper offers a new interpretation of the unclear epic epithet ἀριδείκετος (ἀνδρῶν / λαῶν / ἀνάκτων #), whose traditional explanation as a metrically lengthened form of *ἀριδέκετος ‘well received’ (to δέκομαι) has always lacked conviction. Instead, this form (together with the proper name Ἀριδείκης found in epichoric prose inscriptions) can now be understood as “most famous”, “well worth praising (in song)”.

Praise and persuasion in Greek hymns

The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1995

Largely because the processes of transmission have been unkind, the religious hymns sung by the Greeks during worship of a god on a public or private occasion have received less than their due attention from modern scholars. Our sources frequently mention in passingthathymns were sung on the way to Eleusis, for example, or at the well Kallichoron on arrival at Eleusis, or by the deputations to Delos for the Delia, but they usually fail to record the texts or contents of these hymns. Until the fourth century BC temple authorities did not normally have the texts of cult songs inscribed; and the works themselves were by a diversity of authors, some well-known, some obscure, making the collection of their ‘hymns’ a difficult task for the Alexandrian compilers. Some such hymns were traditional—Olen's at Delos, for example — handed down orally from generation to generation; others were taught to a chorus for a specific occasion and then forgotten. Nor do the surviving corpora of ‘hymn...