UNLIMITED Audiobooks and eBooks

Over 40,000 books & works on all major devices

Get ALL YOU CAN for FREE for 30 days!

The Homeric Hymns

Andrew Lang

How does All You Can Books work?

All You Can Books gives you UNLIMITED access to over 40,000 Audiobooks, eBooks, and Foreign Language courses. Download as many audiobooks, ebooks, language audio courses, and language e-workbooks as you want during the FREE trial and it's all yours to keep even if you cancel during the FREE trial. The service works on any major device including computers, smartphones, music players, e-readers, and tablets. You can try the service for FREE for 30 days then it's just $19.99 per month after that. So for the price everyone else charges for just 1 book, we offer you UNLIMITED audio books, e-books and language courses to download and enjoy as you please. No restrictions.

Book Excerpt: 
. . .Olympiad.  About that period Terpander is said to have given the lyre seven strings (as Mercury does in the poem), in place of the previous four strings.  The date of Terpander is dubious, but probably the seven-stringed lyre had long been in common use before the poet attributed the invention to Hermes.  The same argument applies to the antiquity p. 36of writing, assigned by poets as the invention of various mythical and prehistoric heroes.  But the poets were not careful archæologists, and regarded anachronisms as genially as did Shakespeare or Scott.  Moreover, the fact that Terpander did invent the seven chords is not beyond dispute historically, while, mythically, Apollo and Amphion are credited with the idea.  That Hermes invented fire-sticks seems a fable which robs Prometheus of the honour.  We must not look for any kind of consistency in myth.

The learned differ as to the precise purpose of the Hymn, and some even exclude the inve. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Although some of Lang's scholarly writing, that accompanies the hymns, probably is a bit outdated, I found the passages about whether Egyptian myths influenced the Greek ones quite interesting.