When modern Western man seeks privileged information with a view to improving his lot he turns to science, law, medicine, school; with pounding heart he hears the doctor’s diagnosis, the lawyer’s advice, the scientist’s judgment, or the teacher’s assessment and feels either fortified or mortified. Of course, people still pray and sing hymns in Western ‘‘civilization,’’ too, but I wanted to indicate how all-encompassing and important prayer and hymn-singing to the gods were for ancient Greek man. For the professions in those days, whilst remarkably advanced and inventive, had not achieved the ascendancy which they have nowadays over religion. Ancient man quite simply still believed in invisible powers which held him in their grip. Even the famous Sophists in fifth-century Athens, despite their best efforts to undermine belief in the traditional Olympian deities, were hardly successful with the majority of the population, as continued worship showed (Mikalson 1983). For the intellectually enlightened, religious belief simply shifted from the ‘‘primitive’’ Olympians to new-fangled deities such as Fate, Chance, Health, or the Platonic Forms. It is not always appreciated that the famous ‘‘atheists’’ of antiquity were not labeled thus for not believing in any gods, but for believing in other, unconventional gods. That is the joke behind Aristophanes’ comic portrayal of Socrates, the greatest intellectual skeptic of the time: it was not that he was godless, but rather that he worshiped mad gods like clouds and atmospheric ‘‘swirl.’’
In view of this we should not envisage Greeks, even in the intellectual center of Athens, as ever having stopped praying and singing hymns to the gods. They certainly never stopped sacrificing or processing to temples, and prayers and hymns were an integral part of sacrifice and processions. Another way of putting this is to say that, since the vast majority of Greeks maintained an unbroken belief in supernatural powers throughout antiquity, and since these powers were conceived almost without exception in anthropomorphic (or better) shape, there was a never-ending desire and requirement to communicate with these deities. For that is surely the simplest definition of this topic: prayers and hymns are attempts by men and women to communicate with gods by means of the voice.
If I propose that the Greeks prayed often to one or several of their many gods to ask them for good things, and sang hymns to worship these gods, I expect the general reaction would be ‘‘Well, I knew that,’’ and one might stop there. We have a preconceived notion of what a prayer or a hymn is like, and anyone who has studied the Greeks even a little has an idea of which gods the Greeks addressed. So perhaps I should concentrate on surprising features of Greek hymns and prayers, or at least on selected themes which clash somewhat with preconceived notions.. If I do this, it is at the cost of a systematic treatment of ‘‘hymns and prayers’’ in handbook style. This can be found elsewhere. Nevertheless I shall attempt in the course of thematic remarks to allude to the main categories and distinctions involved. I will also try, in the main, to treat hymns and prayers together, although we can certainly distinguish them as phenomena. Like us, the Greeks had different words for hymns and prayers (hymnoi and euchai), as well as a bewildering array of terms for the different species of the genus ‘‘hymn’’; and there were various words for ‘‘prayer,’’ too, also with distinct shades of meaning. More on those later.
The preconceived notion is, presumably, that one ‘‘speaks’’ a prayer and ‘‘sings’’ a hymn. Hence Bremer (1981:193) gave an umbrella definition of‘‘hymn’’ as ‘‘a sung prayer.’’ Pulleyn (1997:44-7) took issue with this, arguing that hymns are often not, or not really, prayers, because they do not ask the gods for anything and that is what prayer does: ask the gods for good things. But the objection is a misunderstanding, in my opinion, as Bremer’s definition of the hymn as a ‘‘sung prayer’’ depends on a wider notion of‘‘prayer’’ (‘‘address to god(s)’’) than Pulleyn uses (‘‘request to god(s)’’). But singing is certainly one formal attribute of hymns which sets them apart from prayers. The Greeks trained choruses of men and women, boys and girls, to sing hymns to the accompaniment of various musical instruments within the context of cult. Alkman’s Louvre partheneion, for example, was a cult song (probably) for Artemis sung by a chorus of girls; or Pindar’s sixth paean was a cult song for Delphic Apollo performed by young men. Moreover, even ifwe did not believe our numerous sources which refer to sung cult hymns for the gods, we do have some texts of hymns transmitted with a sort of musical score to denote either the required vocal melody or the musical accompaniment (Furley and Bremer 2001: no. 2.6). We even have a few pictures of choruses performing song-dance. This must have been a feature of Greek society throughout the era concerned which was both utterly familiar to the Greeks and virtually unknown to us in Western society: outdoor choric performances of cult songs as part of community worship (Golder and Scully 1994-5). Choruses sang hymns as they processed to temples; they sang them standing, or moving sedately, round the god’s altar when they arrived there. And some song-dances for the god of inebriation, Dionysus, must have been - to judge from vase paintings of dancing maenads - as wild as any modern dancing to rock music. Singing involves not only melody but also meter: the vast repertoire of ancient Greek lyric meters was designed to introduce variety and beauty in choric performance, not to baffle modern students. Presumably the tunes and rhythms stuck in the ancient ear as tenaciously as some modern pop songs.
These musical features must have been largely lacking in prayers, although spoken language has its own melody and rhythm, and repetition can result in a sort of chant.
So I think Pulleyn (1997) is right when he says that hymns are distinguished from prayers not only by these formal aspects I have just been describing but also by their desire to please through artistic merit. This is a functional distinction. A prayer might be carefully formulated to convey a message as persuasively as possible to the god, but the Greeks probably did not envisage the god being particularly pleased to receive the prayer. Indeed Lucian has an amusing description of a rather harassed Zeus on Olympus opening the ‘‘prayer wells’’ in heaven to listen to the barrage of various and conflicting prayers reaching him from earth (Ikaromenippos 24-5). The hymn, on the other hand, was an agalma in its own right, a beautiful thing, designed by its words, music, dance-steps, and the beauty of its performers to please the god’s ear and eye. It was intended as entertainment for the god(s), a treat designed on the one hand to tempt the god to attend (he might have been distant and elsewhere before) and on the other to sway his mind to a pleasant mood of benevolence toward the community worshiping him so lavishly. In this way, the hymn is part of the system of reciprocal charis which many scholars have recognized in Greek religion (Bremer 1998). Charis is difficult to translate, because it is (at least) two-sided. On the one hand it expresses the feeling of gratitude felt by humans to the gods for giving them good things, and on the other it means that ‘‘grace’’ or ‘‘bounty’’ which the gods give men. And the word is related to chairo, Greek for ‘‘feel joy or happiness.’’ In worship the Greeks aimed at generating an atmosphere of reciprocal charis; they would express their grateful worship of the splendid gods; the gods, in turn, would - hopefully - grant them their charis, goodwill, which translated into wealth, health, and power. We can see how hymn-singing is part of the human ‘‘charis-drive’’; it is an aesthetic offering to go with other material offerings (animal sacrifice, libations, incense, etc.) designed to secure divine goodwill. Prayer, on the other hand, is a request put to god(s) backed up by references to other acts of worship (sacrifice etc.) which might induce the god(s) to grant the request. The prayer-request itself is not conceived as an offering, either material or aesthetic.
World History
