Greek Hymns From Performance To Stone

This survey of inscribed hymns suggests that despite the permanence that inscribing affords, a hymn's textualization rarely represents its canonization within a ritual liturgy. There is very little evidence that inscriptions served as aids to performance or as a means of preserving hymns for future performances. Instead, hymns seem to have been inscribed to commemorate a particular past performance, perhaps the hymn's only performance. The event, rather than the song, seems to have been the object of memorialization. a paean by a poet as renowned as Sophocles could have circulated in written form, in a book, which then provided the source text for the Imperial performance memorialized in the inscription. Hymns were inscribed as dedications or as thank-offerings, even as physical tokens of the gods' favorable reception of hymnic performance. The cultural currents of the Second Sophistic provide a suggestive lens for making sense of the Palaikastro Hymn's late inscription. Keywords: Greek hymns; inscriptions; Palaikastro Hymn; performance; ritual; stone; texts