![]() This is not to say such short hymns can’t develop stories of their own. ![]() Several of the Hymns are short stories, yes, and most of the hymnal’s literary value comes from them, but the bulk of the Homeric Hymns are invocations, with one (13, To Demeter) being as short as three lines long. ![]() Translator Daryl Hine calls the Hymns something to the effect of “the world’s first short-story collection”: I heartily disagree. We have, as well, a collection of some 33 poems traditionally ascribed to him, called the “Homeric Hymns”, all of which invoke some deity or another, and some of which tell longer stories about those deities. Most of us are familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey, but these are hardly the only works - either in antiquity or today - attributed to Homer. ![]()
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