Library › Greek: Lyric & Elegy › Paean to Apollo
The Paean to Apollo is a lyric hymn by Aristonous of Corinth, preserved in an inscription at Delphi dated to about 334/3 BC together with a decree honouring the poet. The paean praises Apollo as lord of the Delphic oracle, tells how, after purification in Tempe, he came to Pytho and won his seat by persuading Earth and Themis, honours Athena Pronaia and the other gods of the place, and ends with a prayer for lasting prosperity.
The poem is one of the best preserved examples of the Delphic paean and gives a Delphic version of how Apollo took the oracle, in which he gains it by persuasion rather than by slaying the Python. The accompanying decree shows how Delphi rewarded visiting poets, and the text is valuable for the religion, poetry and civic life of the sanctuary.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Powell, Coll. Alex. pp. 162–164 (FD III.2 no. 191)). 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).