Library › Greek: Myth, Hymn & Religion › Paean to Apollo and Asclepius
The Paean to Apollo and Asclepius is a cult hymn by Macedonius, a poet otherwise little known, preserved on an inscription from Athens. After an opening to Delian Apollo, it praises Asclepius, trained in the healing art by the Centaur on Pelion, and names his sons Podalirius and Machaon and his daughters Iaso, Aceso, Aegle and Panacea with Hygieia. It ends by asking the god to keep Athens safe and ward off disease.
The hymn is a rare surviving example of a cult paean, with its refrain of ie Paian repeated through the text and sung, as it says, by the youths of Athens. It shows how the healing god and his family were worshipped at Athens and how inscribed hymns preserved religious poetry that literary manuscripts did not.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: IG II² 4473; Powell, Collectanea Alexandrina p. 138). 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).