e collection was then regarded as Homeric.
Baumeister agrees with Wolf that the brief Hymns were recited by
rhapsodists as preludes to the recitation of Homeric or other cantos.
Thus, in Hymn xxxi. 18, the poet says that he is going on to chant "the
renowns of men half divine." Other preludes end with a prayer to the God
for luck in the competition of reciters.

This, then, is the plausible explanation of most of the brief Hymns--they
were preludes to epic recitations--but the question as to the long
narrative Hymns with which the collection opens is different. These were
themselves rhapsodies recited at Delphi, at Delos, perhaps in Cyprus (the
long Hymn to Aphrodite), in Athens (as the Hymn to Pan, who was friendly
in the Persian invasion), and so forth. That the Pisistratidae organised
Homeric recitations at Athens is certain enough, and Baumeister suspects,
in xiv., xxiii., xxx., xxxi., xxxii., the hand of Onomacritus, the forger
of Oracles, that strange accomplice of the Pisistratidae. The Hymn to
Aphrodite is just such a lay as the Phaeacian minstrel sang at the feast
of Alcinous, in the hearing of Odysseus. Finally Baumeister supposes our
collection not to have been made by learned editors, like Aristarchus and
Zenodotus, but committed confusedly from memory to papyrus by some
amateur. The conventional attribution of the Hymns to Homer, in spite of
linguistic objections, and of many allusions to things unknown or
unfamiliar in the Epics, is merely the result of the tendency to set down
"masterless" compositions to a well-known name. Anything of epic
characteristics was allotted to the master of Epic. In the same way an
unfathered joke of Lockhart's was attributed to Sydney Smith, and the
process is constantly illustrated in daily conversation. The word [Greek
text], hymn, had not originally a religious sense: it merely meant a lay.
Nobody calls the Theocritean idylls on Heracles and the Dioscuri "hymns,"
but they are quite as much "hymns" (in our sense) as the "hymn" on
Aphrodite, or on Hermes.

To the English reader familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey the Hymns must
appear disappointing, if he come to them with an expectation of
discovering merits like those of the immortal epics. He will not find
that they stand to the Iliad as Milton's "Ode to the Nativity" stands to
"Paradise Lost." There is in the Hymns, in fact, no scope for the epic
knowledge of human nature in every mood and aspect. We are not