Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Hymns (Fragments)
This set contains the few surviving fragments of hymns by Bacchylides of Ceos, the lyric poet of the fifth century BC and nephew of Simonides. They are very short: scraps naming Loxias (Apollo), an address to Hecate as torch-bearing daughter of Night, a lament beginning with a cry of grief over a child, and the name of Celeus, the king of Eleusis in the myth of Demeter.
Hymns to the gods were among the kinds of poem gathered in the ancient edition of Bacchylides, but almost nothing of them survives. These remnants give at least a taste of the divine subjects he treated and of his elevated manner, and they complement the fuller evidence for his choral poetry found in the victory odes and dithyrambs.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Snell–Maehler frr. 1–3). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).