Homeric Hymns

Despite the Hymns’ fragmentary quality, their shared themes include shared motifs. One of these motifs is the subjugation of mortals to the will of the gods, which illustrates the intersection of mortal and immortal worlds. A fleeting and almost comic example of mortal subjugation appears in Hymn 5, when Aphrodite towers over her mortal lover Anchises and terrifies him, warning him not to brag of their romp lest Zeus smite him.

Mortals’ subjugation also appears in the story of Apollo deceiving the Cretan sailors by transforming himself into a dolphin. And the motif appears again when Dionysus, in Hymn 7, reestablishes the separation between mortals and immortals in an act of wrath: Angered that he has been taken prisoner by Etruscan pirates, he brutally murders many of the crew and turns some into dolphins—but he spares the helmsman who correctly inferred Dionysus’s divinity. The will of the gods observes a natural order that humans disrupt and are subjected to; this cosmic narrative from antiquity offers its own explanations for why the world functions as it does and why humans must behave in certain ways.