Ὕμνοι about

Every god, nymph, hero, mortal, group, creature and place named in the thirty-four Homeric Hymns, read line by line in the Greek: 1,399 mentions of 285 beings and places, each with its hymn and line.

Views

• The graph: the hymns as hubs, every name around them; or, as in 2009, the gods as hubs. Click any name for the lines that name it, any hymn for its text.
• The matrix: hymns across, names down, a mark wherever a hymn names someone.
• The map: the places where they lie, the journeys the hymns narrate, and everyone else drawn toward the places of the hymns that name them.
• The posters: the graph and the matrix at 24 × 38.83 in, and the first poster of 2009.

How it was made

Peter Danenberg compiled the first version by hand in 2009 from the index of a Loeb edition (see the first poster). The 2026 version starts again from the text: every line of the Greek was read, and every word that names a being, group or place recorded, whether a name (Ἀπόλλων), an epithet standing for one (Ἀργειφόντης), a patronymic (Κρονίδης), a periphrasis (Κρόνου πολυώνυμος υἱός for Hades) or a personification (Γαῖα). Every capitalized word in the text is accounted for. The doubtful readings, about forty judgement calls, were settled one by one; doubtful mentions are kept, hidden by default, and shown by the doubtful switch in each view.

Names are given in the hymns' own epic-Ionic forms (Ἥρη, Ποσειδάων, Ἠέλιος), and beings the text never names in its own words (γέρων βατοδρόπος, the old man of Onchestos).

Sources

• Text. Hymns 1–33: the Greek and English of H. G. Evelyn-White, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Loeb Classical Library, 1914), as digitized by the Perseus Digital Library (CC BY-SA 4.0), with its typos corrected and noted. Hymn 34, Εἰς Ξένους, from T. W. Allen, Homeri Opera V (Oxford, 1912), p. 92, which prints it after Hymn 33 as the manuscripts do.
• Places. Identifications and coordinates from the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places, each choice noted on the place; coastlines and rivers from Natural Earth.
• Beings. Links to Wikidata, Theoi and Wikipedia.
• Colours. Pigmenta: cinnabar, verdigris, yellow ochre, Egyptian blue, murex purple, carbon black and green earth, pigments Greek painters used, tuned so that every kind stays distinct for colour-blind readers and in coated-paper CMYK. The sheet compares it with three other candidates.
• Type. EB Garamond and GFS Porson, both under the SIL Open Font License.

Data

Everything is plain CSV, in the repository: data/mentions.csv (hymn, line, form, lemma, entity, type, certainty, note), data/entities.csv, data/places.csv, data/routes.csv, the text in data/text/, the 2009 graph and its audit in data/legacy/, and the judgement calls in REVIEW.md.