Author Description

The Homeric Hymns invoke many gods. The shorter hymns probably introduce other poems, while the longer ones present amusing accounts, with Homeric authority, of the origins and activities of the gods they address. These constitute important sources of the tales for later mythographers, scholars, and readers. The translations, in a meter like the original Greek dactylic hexameter of the Homeric epic, are intended above all to entertain. Thus the notes are limited to what might help the modern reader or listener understand the works, and the poems are best read aloud with attention to the musical meter. The Frog-Mouse-Battle is a short mock-epic probably used as attractive teaching material in Byzantium, so that students could learn while laughing, so to speak. To suggest how that might have succeeded, the translator has appended a discussion between a teacher and four students about a passage which has been omitted or questioned in our time, and might well have been in the early twelfth century, the time of the fictional classroom meeting.