The Orphic Hymns: Text, Translation, and Notes

Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow are classicists, and this book, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is a scholarly translation with the original Greek text and detailed commentary of the Orphic Hymns, a collection of ancient Greek ritual hymns addressed to various deities and associated with Orphic religious practice. As a primary source in careful modern academic translation, it is the strongest possible evidence for the language and content of these specific ritual hymns. Its limit is that the hymns' precise date, authorship and the exact nature of the ritual community that used them remain genuinely uncertain and debated among classicists, a limit the translators' own commentary addresses directly rather than resolving with false certainty.