They share the same artificial literary dialect of Greek, are composed in dactylic hexameter, and make use of short, repeated phrases known as formulae.

They may initially have served as preludes to the recitation of longer poems, and have been performed, at least originally, by singers accompanying themselves on a lyre or another stringed instrument.

Their influence on Greek literature and art was relatively small until the third century BCE, when they were used extensively by Alexandrian poets including Callimachus, Theocritus and Apollonius of Rhodes.

Their textual criticism progressed considerably over the nineteenth century, particularly in German scholarship, though the text continued to present substantial difficulties into the twentieth.

The Homeric Hymns were also influential on the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, particularly Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

[18] Like the Iliad and Odyssey, the hymns are composed in the rhythmic form known as dactylic hexameter and make use of formulae: short, set phrases with particular metrical characteristics that could be repeated as a compositional aid.

[20] Other hypotheses in ancient times included the belief that the Hymn to Apollo was the work of Kynaithos of Chios, one of the Homeridae, a circle of poets claiming descent from Homer.

[36] Originally, the hymns appear to have been performed by singers accompanying themselves on a stringed instrument, such as a lyre; later, they may have been recited, rather than sung, by an orator holding a staff.

[37] References to instruments of the lyre family (known interchangeably as phorminx) occur throughout the Homeric Hymns and other archaic texts, such as the Iliad and Odyssey.

[38] These lyres generally had four strings in the early period of the hymns' composition, though seven-stringed versions became more common during the seventh century BCE.

[42] The Homeric Hymns may have been composed to be recited at religious festivals, perhaps at singing contests: several directly or indirectly ask the god's support in competition.

[47] The hymns' narrative voice has been described by Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter as "communal", usually making only generalised reference to their place of composition or the identity of the speaker.

[48] Jenny Strauss Clay has suggested that the Homeric Hymns played a role in the establishment of a panhellenic conception of the Olympian pantheon, with Zeus as its head, and therefore in promoting the cultural unity of Greeks from different polities.

The Homeric Hymn to Hermes also inspired the Ichneutae, a satyr play composed in the fifth century BCE by the Athenian playwright Sophocles.

It is possibly alluded to in an anonymous third-century poem praising a gymnasiarch named Theon, preserved by a papyrus fragment found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and probably written by a student for a local festival.

[79] It also influenced the "Strasbourg Cosmogony", a poem composed around 350 CE (possibly by the poet and local politician Andronicus) in commemoration of the mythical origins of the Egyptian city of Hermopolis Magna.

[84] The sixth-century poet Paul Silentiarius celebrated the restoration of Hagia Sophia by the emperor Justinian I in a poem which borrowed from the Homeric Hymn to Hermes.

[87] The Homeric Hymns were copied and adapted widely in fifteenth-century Italy, for example by the poets Michael Marullus and Francesco Filelfo.

[88] The Stanze per la giostra [it] ('Stanzas for the Joust'), written in the 1470s by Angelo Poliziano, paraphrase the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and were in turn an inspiration for Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted in the 1480s.

[93] Although they received relatively little attention in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the playwright and poet William Congreve published a version of the first Hymn to Aphrodite, written in heroic couplets, in 1710.

[104] The anthropologist James George Frazer discussed the hymn at length in The Golden Bough, his influential 1890 work of comparative mythology and religion.

[109] The first Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite has also been cited as an influence on Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, particularly for the character of Lisa Freemont, played by Grace Kelly.

[121] The surviving medieval manuscripts of the poems date to the fifteenth century and are drawn primarily from the late-antique compilation of the Homeric Hymns along with Orphic and other hymnic poetry.

A manuscript known by the siglum V, commissioned by the Byzantine-born Catholic cardinal Bessarion probably in the 1460s, published the hymns at the end of a collection of the other works then considered Homeric.

[124] This arrangement became standard in subsequent editions of Homer's works, and played an important role in establishing the perceived relationship between the hymns, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

[137] Joshua Barnes published an edition of the hymns in 1711, which was the first to attempt to explain textual issues by citing parallels in other texts considered to be Homeric.

August Baumeister published an edition of the hymns in 1860, which was the first to integrate readings based on the Θ (theta) family of manuscripts (a sub-family of those descended from Ψ).

[146] In 1984, Bruno Gentili suggested that variations found in the manuscript tradition as to the reading of particular passages may have been considered equally-correct alternations (adiaphoroi) available to a rhapsode, and therefore that attempts to discriminate between them in modern editions were misguided.

[149] He published an updated version of his 1904 edition in 1936, co-edited with William Reginald Halliday; Sikes refused to collaborate on it, but remained credited as an editor.

[151] In his Loeb Classical Library edition of 2003, Martin West rejected the adiaphoroi argument of Gentili, choosing instead to posit a correct reading for each known alternation.