Hymnus
（
ὕμνος). In general, an invocation of the gods, especially
in the form of an ode sung by a choir, to the accompaniment of the cithara, while they stood
round the altar. For the so-called Homeric Hymns (to Aphrodité, Hermes, Demeter,
etc.), see the article
Homerus. For wedding hymns,
see
Epithalamium. For the Orphic Hymns, see
Orpheus. Many of the Pindaric odes, written in
lyric measures, are to be classed as
ὕμνοι. (Cf. Aristoph.
Eq. 530.) Famous among Greek hymns is the noble hymn to Zeus by the
Stoic
Cleanthes (q.v.). See
Musica.
In Latin, examples of hymns in the older sense are the songs of the Salii (
carmina
Saliaria), sung by the priests of Mars (see
Salii); the hymn of the Arval Brethren (see
Fratres Arvales); the hymns composed by Horace (
carmen saeculare）
for the Ludi Saeculares in B.C. 17, and sung in honour of Diana and Apollo (see
Ludi Saeculares); and some of later date, like the poem
called
Laus Herculis, in 137 hexameters, by an anonymous author (see
Bährens in the
Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie, etc.,
105, 52.503); the
Hymnus Claudii ad Lunam （
Poet. Lat. Min., ed.
Bährens, iii. 163); and the parodic hymn to Pan (id. iii. 170).
The early Christian hymns in Greek and Latin are interesting. Of those in Greek, only a
comparatively few are written in the classic metres— e. g. those by Clemens
Alexandrinus (about A.D. 220), Englished by Dr. Dexter in his “Shepherd of Early
Youth;” Gregory of Nanzianzus (A.D. 360), Synesius (A.D. 400), and Sophronius (A.D.
629). Others, and especially those used by the Eastern Church, are strongly Oriental in style,
due to the constant study of the Jewish Psalter. No authors of Latin hymns are mentioned
earlier than A.D. 325, the date of the Council of Nice. Soon after, however, two great
hymnologists—St. Hilary and St. Ambrose—appear, both in the fourth
century, followed by Prudentius (A.D. 350-410), whose poems in 1860 reached a sixty-third
edition; Sedulius of the same period; Venantius Fortunatus (A.D. 530- 609), and Gregory the
Great (A.D. 540-604). Some of the most magnificent of the Latin hymns are of unknown
authorship. Such are the famous
Veni, Creator Spiritus, popularly ascribed to
Charlemagne, but really of earlier date; the hymn beginning
Verbum Dei, Deo Natum; and, above all, the sublime
Dies Irae,
the despair of translators, which is often attributed to Thomas of Celano, but on no sure
authority (Mohnike,
Hymnologische Forschungen, i. pp. 1-24).
The Latin hymns are interesting from a linguistic and metrical standpoint, as usually
reverting to the older and more natural accentual system of prosody instead of preserving the
artificial and unpopular distinctions of syllabic quantity. Among the common people, in their
folk-songs (e. g. the songs of the soldiers in their barracks and during the triumphs, the
chants, spells, and nursery songs), the accentual system still survived, and, as in the
Instructiones of Commodianus, written in the third century A.D., the popular
system sometimes made its way even into written literature. It was natural that the Christian
hymns, being composed not for the learned and fastidious, but for the common
people—for provincials and non-Romans—should avail themselves of the far
freer range allowed by the loose laws of accent. Thus St. Augustine, even in the title of one
of his psalms (
Psalmus contra Partem Donati), shows his desire to escape from
the rigid restrictions of the Augustan prosody—in other words, to write a
canticum and not a
carmen. In the later hymns, many
metrical ingenuities are introduced, such as the so-called leonine and other rhymes (see
Leonini Versus), of which a good account will be
found in the introduction and notes to Archbishop Trench's
Sacred Latin
Poetry (London, 1874).
For the Greek Christian hymns, see Christ and
Paranika's Anthologia Graeca
Carminum Christianorum (1871);
Chatfield's Hymns of the Eastern
Greek Christian Poets (1876)—the former giving the original text
and the latter the English reading; and
Petra, Hymnographie de
l'Église-Grecque (1867);
Analecta Sacra
Inedita (Paris, 1876). On the Latin hymns, see the work of Trench already
cited; Cardinal
Newman's Carmina Ecclesiae (1876); Du
Méril, Poésies Populaires Latines (1843);
Mone,
Hymni Latini, 3 vols.
(1853-55); and Duffield
(1888).
There is a dictionary of Hymnology by Julian
(1888). On the versification of
the Christian hymns (usually trochaic and iambic metres with a special preference for the
iambic dimeter, with rhyme and frequent alliteration), see
Schuch, De
Poësis Latinae Rhythmis et Rimis (1851); Hümer,
Der iamb. Dimeter bei den christl.-lat. Hymnendichtern der vorkaroling.
Zeit (Vienna, 1876); id.
Die ältesten lat.-christl.
Rhythmen (Vienna, 1879); and the article
Rhyme.
