This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ancient Greek Religion Hymns gathers seven of the atlas's hymns surviving from ancient Greek religion, spanning archaic epic invocation, classical philosophy and a late antique ritual collection.
The Delphic Hymns to Apollo, two paeans carved on the wall of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, are the earliest substantially complete pieces of notated music surviving anywhere in the world, the melody written above the words; the second is signed and dated to 128 BCE. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, generally treated as the earliest of the long hymns, tells how Zeus made Aphrodite fall for the mortal Anchises, its purpose partly to compliment the Trojan line through their son Aeneas. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo, in two parts on his birth at Delos and his founding of the oracle at Delphi, ends with an early first person poetic signature Thucydides quotes as Homer. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the longest of the group, tells the seizure of Persephone and Demeter's grief and is the principal literary source for the Eleusinian Mysteries, surviving in a single manuscript found at Moscow in 1777.
The Hymn to Zeus is the one substantial surviving piece of early Stoic writing, addressing Zeus as the rational principle ordering the cosmos rather than the god of myth. The Orphic Hymn to Hekate, first of the eighty seven Orphic Hymns, is a short cletic invocation used in ritual by a cult group, and the Orphic Hymn to Helios addresses the sun as Paian and Zeus and Dionysos at once, the collapsing of gods into one another characteristic of the whole late antique collection.