The so-called Homeric Hymns are a group of poems mostly written in the 7th to 6th centuries BCE and addressed to Hermes, Aphrodite, Dionysus, Demeter and other deities. These anonymous works are highly formulaic and adhere to a clear structure, including a description of the deity’s mythical genealogy, divine symbols and functions (often expressed through epithets), and a central episode from the mythical narratives connected with the deity. These hymns were part of religious ritual in ancient Greece. The stories often create an etiology or explanation of origins for some natural or social phenomenon found in the human world, and convey some general message about values essential to Greek society.

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In Summer 2021, students in Prof. Mareile Haase's Introduction to Classical Mythology at the University of Toronto Mississauga studied traditional motifs, themes, plots, and symbols of selected mythical entities in the primary sources. Based on their research, they authored their own hymns to a mythical being of their choice. These creations, while modelled on the Homeric Hymns, have different addressees, and express each student’s fascination with and their personal interpretation of their chosen god or being.

 

Throughout the first half of the course, guided and supported by the Teaching Assistant, Danielle Baillargeon, students engaged in close readings of the extant Homeric Hymns. They explored recurring structural elements such as invocations and epithets, religious imagery and symbolism, and the wide variety of – sometimes overlapping – functions of deities in a polytheistic religious system such as that of the ancient Greeks. Students also explored the possibilities which the anthropomorphism and sociomorphism of the ancient Greek and Roman gods offers to poets and visual artists alike, from Classical antiquity to the present.