DEFINING THE ὝΜΝΟΣ

Over a hundred instances of the word ὕμνος from extant archaic poetry demonstrate that the Greek hymn was understood broadly as a song of praise. The majority of these instances comes from Pindar, who regularly uses the term to describe his poems celebrating athletic victors. Indeed, Pindar and his contemporaries saw the ὕμνος as a powerful vehicle for praising gods, heroes, men and their achievements—often in service of an ideological agenda.Footnote ¹ Writing a century later Plato used the term frequently and with much the same range. A survey of his usage reveals instances of ὕμνοι for gods, daimones, heroes, ancestors, leading citizens, noble deeds, sites and landscapes. Despite abundant evidence of Plato's own practice, studies of the Greek hymn posit an extreme narrowing of the genre in the classical period and cite the philosopher as the sole witness to, if not the originator of, this development. Two passages in particular, one from the Republic and one from the Laws, are seen to support the claim that by the fourth century b.c.e. the term ὕμνος refers exclusively to songs for gods. In Republic Book 10, we find the memorable edict on poetic censorship: ‘But we must know that of poetry only ὕμνοι for the gods and ἐγκώμια for the good must be admitted into our city.’Footnote ² Laws Book 3 offers what appears to be an even more straightforward pronouncement: ‘Back then our music was divided according to its various types and arrangements; and a certain type of song was prayers to the gods, and these were called by the name ὕμνοι.’Footnote ³ From these two statements has arisen the consensus that Plato saw a divine recipient as the defining feature of the ὕμνος and, moreover, that this position reflects the communis opinio from at least the fourth century b.c.e. onward.Footnote ⁴

A closer reading of these passages, combined with a thorough study of hymnic vocabulary in Plato and contemporary prose authors of the fifth and fourth centuries, reveals that the ὕμνος was regularly treated as a genre of praise suitable for the exemplary—whether god or human. Furthermore, this study reveals that rather than concerns over an honorand's divinity, two important points of contention emerge in the praise discourse of Plato and his contemporaries. First, what are the qualities and accomplishments that ought to be imprinted on the civic consciousness through long-lasting habitual praise? In the case of men, can a snapshot of a man's life afford him such commemoration or must we await a post-mortem reckoning to award this highest honour? The second point of interest surrounds the affective quality of that post-mortem praise. Here we see a sharp distinction drawn between the θρῆνος, which is repeatedly cast as a depressing and destructive lament for what has been lost, and the ὕμνος, which possesses the ability to charm and inspire its audience.

PLATO'S ‘DEFINITION’ RECONSIDERED

The Republic’s critique of the Muse and her expulsion from Callipolis represent the culmination of what Plato describes as the age-old quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Careful re-evaluation of the dialogue's most well-known passages has added considerable nuance to our understanding of Plato's attitude toward poetry and its role in civic life, helping to alleviate the tension between the infamous hostility toward verse expressed in the Republic and Plato's penchant for making strategic use of poetry throughout his dialogues.Footnote ⁵ Although the hermeneutic challenges associated with retrieving Plato's own beliefs from the positions advanced by characters in his dialogues are now well known, the habit of attributing positions articulated in Plato to the author remains hard to kick.Footnote ⁶ Reading Plato's dialogues as sophisticated narratives rather than a series of authoritative pronouncements and setting aside the a priori belief about a link between hymns and gods, we see that Plato's canonical definition of the ὕμνος in the Republic and the Laws is ambiguous at best.

In the final book of the Republic, Socrates remarks to Glaucon that it is foolish and indeed dangerous to rely on Homer as a guide for the conduct and study of human affairs and the arrangement of one's own life (606e1–607c6):

Throughout the Republic, poetry is shown to have immense power to shape the values and indeed souls of men. While some poetry produces positive results, Homer is said to have a deleterious effect on the character of his listeners. Beyond this insidious influence, Socrates here warns that Homer enthusiasts also advocate conscious adherence to the poet's dangerous ethical precepts. In an extreme reactionary stance, Plato expels all poetry from his ideal city, carving out an exception only for the edifying ‘ὕμνοι for the gods and ἐγκώμια for the good’. Scholars generally read this line as indicating that the ὕμνος is by definition for gods and the ἐγκώμιον is by definition for good men. It is far from clear, however, that this is the correct interpretation of the passage, and the text admits other interpretative possibilities that do not draw such a sharp distinction.

If we take the statement at face value, there are at least two other ways to interpret what Socrates is saying in this clause. First, the dative qualifiers ‘for gods’ and ‘for the good’ might distinguish types of ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια acceptable in Callipolis from types that are not. On this reading, ὕμνοι addressed to gods would be admitted, whereas ὕμνοι in praise of other things (for example heroes or cities) would not. If it were true that Plato's audience already expected that the ὕμνος was by definition a song for a god, the addition of ‘for the gods’ might seem redundant. Such redundancy is not, of course, a persuasive argument in itself, because repetition can serve a stylistic or rhetorical purpose. As we will see repeatedly, however, Plato also approvingly mentions hymns for non-gods in the Republic and elsewhere.

Indeed, a more compelling interpretation of this clause would be to see the juxtaposition of ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια as expressing similarity rather than distinction.Footnote ⁷ This interpretation is echoed in Laws Book 7, when the Athenian lays out a series of musical laws, the fourth of which juxtaposes ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια without any apparent distinction (801e1–4):

These ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια are sung praises meant to augment the prayers (εὐχαί) prescribed for the gods in the second and third laws. In the second part of this law, it is made clear that daimones and heroes should be honoured in just the same way (ὡσαύτως), but, when the honours are reiterated, they are abbreviated to prayers with ἐγκώμια (μετ’ ἐγκωμίων εὐχαί). Furthermore, the fifth and final law first mandates ἐγκώμια for citizens, but when it is reiterated the formulation is expanded to include both ἐγκώμια and ὕμνοι without drawing attention to the addition (802a1–2). The elasticity in Plato's language for the honours accorded here is stylistic rather than eidographic.

In addition to scrutinizing these terms, we can learn a great deal about Socrates’ characterization of these acceptable ὕμνοι by looking at them in the context of the passage. The folly in admitting most poetry into the city is that it will have the consequence of habituating citizens to governance by pleasure (ἡδονή) and pain (λύπη).Footnote ⁸ The objectionable poetry is embodied in ‘the pleasuring Muse’ (ἡ ἡδυσμένη Μοῦσα) and is later bifurcated as ‘the pleasure-oriented music and mimesis’ (ἡ πρὸς ἡδονὴν ποιητικὴ καὶ ἡ μίμησις). Because Plato is sparing here in his description of the acceptable poetry, we can only infer that it lacks these offensive characteristics. These restrictions would no doubt disqualify a great many of the poems we think of as hymns, particularly those judged to have ‘literary’ qualities. Hymns by Hesiod, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar would almost certainly be excluded along with much of the diverse corpus known as the Homeric Hymns. The uninspired Muse-less hymns under discussion in Republic Book 10 are not representative of the genre as we conceive of it today, and it is hard to imagine many of Plato's contemporaries recognizing this as a representative, much less orthodox, formulation of the ὕμνος.Footnote ⁹

In contrast to the characterization of the Muse-less hymns that would be welcome in the thought-experiment of the Republic, the Athenian Stranger of the Laws purports to offer a description of ὕμνοι as they once were (700a7–b8):

The Athenian approvingly describes an earlier time when exacting laws divided music according to its various εἴδη (‘kinds’) and σχήματα (‘arrangements’).Footnote ¹⁰ To illustrate the orderly division, he lists various types of poetry beginning with prayers for gods, which he terms ὕμνοι. While this equation between hymns and prayers is far more straightforward than the mention of ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια in Republic Book 10, it is by no means clear that it can be excerpted and treated as Plato's definition of the ὕμνος. There are two important considerations to keep in mind as we study this passage more carefully: first, what purpose does this passage have in the Athenian's argument; second, what (if any?) relationship does the Athenian's eidography have to the ideas about hymns held by Plato and his audience.

This description of the ὕμνος belongs to a well-known discussion at the heart of the Laws’ project, wherein the Athenian pits law and order against individual liberty. The issue arises in Book 3 as the interlocutors attempt to determine which political system best encourages virtue and what laws would be needed to maintain such a system in Magnesia. Caricatures of Persia and Athens serve to illustrate extreme forms of the two ‘mother-constitutions’: monarchy and democracy (693d2–5). Whereas authoritarian Persia subjugated its people and deprived them of liberty, democratic Athens allowed its citizens to grow accustomed to unrestricted liberty with the result that they came to be governed by pleasure. In each case, a healthy political system devolved into chaos, and the Athenian attributes the outcome of the Greco-Persian conflicts to the fact that at the beginning of the fifth century Persia had already suffered its decline, whereas Athens had yet to do so. To illustrate Athens’ descent into lawlessness and excessive liberty, the Athenian contrasts formerly strict adherence to musical laws, as seen above, with subsequent rampant disregard for generic orthodoxy (700d2–e4):

Categories of song described earlier as discrete are here arrayed into pairs of mixed opposites that highlight the shocking results of following ‘frenzied and excessive lust for pleasure’ instead of the Muse's ‘correct and legitimate standards’. Mixing together the paean for Apollo and the dithyramb for Dionysus puts songs for the diametrically opposed offspring of Zeus on a collision course. Likewise, the ὕμνος is here ludicrously combined with its opposite, the θρῆνος. It is precisely the combination of things that you would not dream of combining that is meant to illustrate the Athenian's point about catastrophic consequences of excessive liberty.

This discussion of music from the Laws fits together with the Republic passage examined above, proclaiming in unison that governance by ἡδονή (‘pleasure’) leads to chaos. Notably, however, the Republic blames this outcome on the Muse, whom the Laws portrays as the righteous, if ignored, lawgiver. This inconsistency reveals that the characterization of the Muse is a conceit conforming to the agenda of each dialogue rather than a deeply held belief. Plato's primary emphasis here, which he maintains consistently, is the deleterious effects of pleasure rather than the finer points of music theory. Regardless of who is to blame for this obsession with pleasure, both works agree that such a scenario is a danger that must be addressed. In the Republic, the strictly defined hymn belongs to a potential future corrective and in the Laws it is a relic of a purer past. Such a ὕμνος emphatically does not represent the status quo for the dramatic setting of either dialogue nor, perhaps, for their audiences.

This depiction of Persian and Athenian political history is dramatically oversimplified in service of advancing a particular narrative. The same can be said of the Athenian's selective treatment of music history, which is an ad hoc component of an argument that is not especially interested in eidography per se.Footnote ¹¹ To understand what Plato means when he refers to the ὕμνος, and, perhaps more importantly, what the context suggests his audience will understand by that term, it is far more revealing to set these well-known passage alongside Plato's other uses of the term.

To construct the fullest picture of Plato's usage of the word ὕμνος we benefit also from studying a handful of other hymn-words. The most common of these is the verb ὑμνέω, which has a broader semantic range and yet still offers some evidence for the concepts associated with the ὕμνος. Whether the noun or the verb came first, at its most basic level ὑμνέω is the action and ὕμνος is the product resulting from that action. By the mid to the late fifth century, however, the verb comes to indicate not just the performance of praise poetry but can also describe any kind of repetitive utterance. Plato, in particular, makes use of this extended meaning, when he wants to emphasize that something is said frequently and is thus common knowledge.Footnote ¹² While there is no parallel broadening of the semantic range of ὕμνος, this secondary usage of the verb suggests that repetitiveness may have been linked with the hymn either conceptually or in practice.

Considerably rarer are Plato's other hymn-words, including the noun ὑμνητής and the verbs ἐφυμνέω and ὑμνῳδέω. That these words are uncommon presents a different situation, because audience members are unlikely to be as familiar with them and must therefore infer meaning from context and their understanding of the words’ relationship to better-known words. Thus, by analogy with other agent nouns ending in –της, one could immediately understand a ὑμνητής to be someone who performs the action described by ὑμνέω and/or produces a ὕμνος, even though Plato's is the first recorded use of the term. The interpretation of Plato's two compound hymn verbs is more challenging, because, although their formation is straightforward (ἐπὶ + ὑμνέω and ὕμνος + ᾄδω/ἀείδω), the way in which they are distinct from ὑμνέω is not obvious. The former may imply the singing of a hymn subsequent to something else, while the latter seems to be an emphatic synonym of ὑμνέω that stresses the singing of ὕμνοι as opposed to other songs. In the case of both verbs, earlier usage is restricted to tragedy and they do not appear again after Plato for several centuries.Footnote ¹³

Frequently, Plato employs the terms ὕμνος and ὑμνέω to refer to singing praises without any special connection to the divine. This usage is in keeping with the archaic meaning of ὕμνος, which described songs irrespective of whether gods were the objects of their praise. In one of many passages detailing musical censorship in Magnesia, the Athenian warns that ‘no one should dare to sing (ᾄδειν) any unauthorized music if the Guardians of the Laws do not approve, not even if it is sweeter than the ὕμνοι of Orpheus or of Thamyras’.Footnote ¹⁴ Here, the stress is on the ideological appropriateness of songs that educate citizens by praising the praiseworthy. In connection with the legendary poets Orpheus and Thamyras, ὕμνος retains its broad, archaic meaning of ‘song’.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, the cosmology detailed in Republic Book 10 describes the Fates singing in concert with the eight Sirens, each of whom emits a single tone, ‘and [the Fates] sang (ὑμνεῖν) to the harmony of the Sirens. Lachesis [hymned] the past, Clotho the present, and Atropos the future’.Footnote ¹⁶

Plato also uses hymn terminology to refer to specific extant poems that would not fit within the narrow definition of the ὕμνος commonly attributed to him. Most significant is his use of the rare compound ὑμνῳδέω in Laws Book 3 (682a1–5):

Here Plato offers verses of the Iliad in which Aeneas outlines his lineage to Achilles as a prime example of how inspiration allows poets special access to the truth when they ‘hymn-sing’. If Plato or his fourth-century audience specifically thought of the ὕμνος as a song for a god, his use of the emphatic ὑμνῳδέω (ὕμνος + ᾄδω/ἀείδω) to describe a class of poetry exemplified by the Iliad, much less a hero's account of his genealogy, would be difficult to explain.Footnote ¹⁷

Heedless of his own dire pronouncement on genre-blending in Laws Book 3, Plato's Athenian frequently mixes hymn vocabulary with other musical terminology without regard for generic specificity. In the second book of the Laws, he describes using charms (ἐπῳδή) to habituate the souls of children to concord. In his discussion about this powerful music, he comments on the slippage in terminology (659e1–5):

Later, when describing these same charms, the Athenian uses the word ὕμνος in place of ἐπῳδή with no difference in meaning. The inconsistency in vocabulary appears to be an unmarked case of variation.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, in a discussion about the organization of the festival calendar in Laws Book 7, he speaks of a ‘song that must be hymned’ (ᾠδὴν δεῖ ἐφυμνεῖσθαι, 799a9), which he describes later in the same passage as a ὕμνος (799b5), thereby establishing an equivalency between the two expressions. A similar conjunction of terms is employed when the ‘Dionysiac’ chorus of elders in Laws Book 7 is charged with using their discernment to distinguish between good and bad music (812c5–7):

The activity described by ὑμνέω here is the promotion of ideologically sanctioned music that charms the listener and inspires him to pursue the good. In both instances, the Athenian's own failure to maintain the strict orthodoxy he describes in Laws Book 3 is in keeping with the norm elsewhere in Plato where generic slippage is commonplace.Footnote ²¹

Numerous instances throughout the Platonic corpus indicate that hymn terminology primarily emphasizes poetic praise, overlapping significantly with ἐγκώμιον vocabulary. In Republic Book 8, Euripides and other poets are accused of praising tyranny (τὴν τυραννίδα ἐγκωμιάζει, 568b3) and it is made clear that such ‘hymners of tyranny’ (τυραννίδος ὑμνητάς, 568b8) are not welcome in the city. Although the agent suffix makes the meaning of the rare ὑμνητής easy to guess as ‘one who ὑμνεῖν’, in this context Plato describes the ὑμνητής as ‘one who ἐγκωμιάζειν᾽, equating rather than distinguishing ὕμνος and ἐγκώμιον. This synonymy mirrors the reading I suggested above for the famous expulsion passage from Republic Book 10. In the Symposium, the thesaurus expands to include ἔπαινος, as the participants discuss the shameful lack of praise accorded to Eros. In the course of explaining Phaedrus’ complaint, Eryximachus uses verbal and nominal forms of ὕμνος, ἐγκώμιον and ἔπαινος interchangeably to describe praises of gods, Eros, Herakles, salt and other such things—among these only the praise of salt is scoffed at as undeserving.Footnote ²² We hear that Phaedrus objects to there being no ἐγκώμιον for Eros, a situation Eryximachus proposes they remedy by ‘honouring’ (κοσμέω, 177c7) the god and having everyone ‘say an ἔπαινος’ (εἰπεῖν ἔπαινον, 177d2). Later Aristophanes describes this endeavour as hymning: ‘If we are to hymn [ὑμνέω] rightly the god who is the source of this [sc. human flourishing], we must hymn Eros.’Footnote ²³ The only distinction made here is the elevation of prose logoi to poetic ὕμνοι, and the divine status of Eros is repeatedly praised but never disputed. Demurring from detailing all of Athens’ καλὰ ἔργα, Aspasia makes the same distinction between ‘hymning in verse’ (ἐν μουσικῇ ὑμνήσαντες) and ‘honouring in naked prose’ (λόγῳ ψιλῷ κοσμεῖν) more explicitly in Menex. 239b8. As in the Symposium, the divinity of the honorand is not in question; these ἔργα are not gods. Furthermore, when Critias proposes to tell Socrates about Athens’ greatest ἔργον, he says that in commemorating the accomplishment he and Socrates will be ‘offering an ἐγκώμιον’ (ἐγκωμιάζω) to the goddess Athena just as if ‘singing a ὕμνος’ (ὑμνέω) for her—the only distinction being between prose and verse praise (Ti. 20d7–21a3).Footnote ²⁴

A Venn diagram of the Platonic vocabulary surveyed thus far would situate ὕμνος at the intersection of musical terminology and praise terminology, suggesting that these are the essential characteristics associated with the hymn. Thus reading the mention in Republic Book 10 of ‘ὕμνοι for the gods and ἐγκώμια for good men’ as an eidographic distinction based on the divinity of the honorand attributes to the author a perspective that does not square with his practice elsewhere. The extreme censure of music in Callipolis belongs to an agenda aimed at calibrating citizens’ values so that they may correctly recognize the Good, the Beautiful and the True as praiseworthy instead of being deceived by mimesis and ruled by fickle passions. Distinctions between divine and non-divine objects for song do not guide the ideological project Plato describes.

PRAISE VS LAMENTATION

Whereas a study of Plato's usage of hymn vocabulary fails to reveal a concern over the divine/mortal status of a hymn's praiseworthy honorand, Plato emphatically and repeatedly takes pains to differentiate praise from lament. In fact, this is the key distinction the Athenian Stranger makes in the eidographic passage from Laws Book 3 discussed above. He stresses that the ὕμνος and the θρῆνος are opposites (τὸ ἐναντίον), whose combination exemplifies the lawless chaos resulting from excessive liberty. For this pairing to serve as an apposite example illustrating the Athenian's point, the primary characteristics of these genres ought to be opposed to one another in an obvious way. In the abstract, it is possible to conjure a variety of dimensions along which these two genres might be opposed, but in Platonic practice we see that praise and lament are differentiated according to the affect each betokens. In the Timaeus we find a diametric opposition between ‘hymning’ (ὑμνέω) the power of sight and ‘lamenting’ (ὀδύρομαι, θρηνέω) its loss (47b4). The conjunction of the two verbs of lamentation stresses the fact that hymning is contrasted not just with the genre of dirge-singing per se but also with attitudes associated with wailing and lamenting more broadly. The same contrast is made ironically at the beginning of the Republic when Cephalus describes old men lamenting their decrepitude: ‘some bewail (ὀδύρομαι) their relatives’ mudslinging regarding old age, and because of this they harp on (ὑμνέω) old age as the cause of many of their ills.’Footnote ²⁵ Here ὑμνέω is used in the sense ‘say repeatedly’ rather than ‘praise’, but it is the double entendre that juxtaposes lamentation and praise to serve up this ironic witticism.

The extensive description of the rituals to be performed upon the death of an Auditor in the final book of the Laws provides rich detail that ties together these strands (947b3–c8):

Again we find celebratory praise contrasted with woeful lament. The qualification of ὕμνος here with οἷος establishes a rough equivalency between the poetic ὕμνος and the singing (ᾄδω) of a prose ἔπαινος, emphasizing the fact that praise is the primary component of the hymn. Furthermore, we learn that the praise heaped upon the deceased Auditor is sung, rather than spoken, praise of his εὐδαιμονία (εὐδαιμονίζοντας ᾠδῇ)—that eminently desirable quality describing the well-lived life. Finally, the description of the last part of the ceremony in which the boys’ chorus ‘hymns the patriotic song’ (τὸ πάτριον μέλος ἐφυμνεῖν) recalls the description of choruses hymning charms (ἐπῳδή) that promote state ideology in Laws Book 2.Footnote ²⁷

ὝΜΝΟΙ FOR MORTALS

Plato neither describes hymns as the exclusive domain of immortals nor does he recommend that they be restricted along these lines. Throughout his corpus, hymns are deemed an appropriate and even necessary honour for exceptional excellence, and it is this quality alone that is the focus of concern. The Auditors praised with ὕμνοι rather than lamented with θρῆνοι at their burial are of course mortals—exemplary mortals whose civic distinction and attainment of εὐδαιμονία warrant high praise and emulation. Looking across the Platonic corpus, one sees several other examples of ὕμνοι performed for such exalted citizens just as they are performed for gods. The Theaetetus offers one such instance (175e5–176a2):

As in the Laws Book 12 passage above, the crucial qualifier for humans who merit hymns is εὐδαιμονία. The discernment necessary to identify correctly those who have achieved this state is rare and possessed only by philosophers. Those who are not philosophers, we are told, offer praise incorrectly owing to their ignorance of what is truly praiseworthy. Thus, the philosopher is surprised to hear a tyrant or a king being praised (τύραννόν τε γὰρ ἢ βασιλέα ἐγκωμιαζόμενον, Tht. 174d3–4) and finds it laughable when men ‘hymn their lineage’ (τὰ δὲ δὴ γένη ὑμνούντων, Tht. 174e5), because ‘he thinks the praise (ἔπαινος) belongs to those with dim and trifling vision, who are unable, owing to lack of education, to keep the whole always in view’.Footnote ²⁹ It is not inappropriate to offer hymns to one's mortal forbearers, but praising them with insufficient cause is characterized as foolish. At the beginning of the Critias, Hermocrates encourages Critias to embark on his speech without hesitation (108c1–4):

The characterization of Critias’ logos praising the ancient Athenians as a hymn echoes the description of the Symposium speeches for Eros as ὕμνοι. Of course, Critias is not going to sing a hymn, yet even in this loose usage of ὑμνέω the pivotal detail expressed by a causal participle is that the praise is offered because of the goodness of the citizens (ἀγαθοὺς ὄντας).

Honouring mortals with hymns is not only compatible with Plato's views, it is essential to the ideological programme espoused in several of his works. In Republic Book 5, Socrates advocates following Homeric practice in ‘according honours in such ways to whichever of the young are good (agathoi)’.Footnote ³¹ He goes on to expand on this position by characterizing such praise for the young as positive reinforcement (468d7–e2):

Beyond the heroic honours specified in Il. 8.162, Plato adds that the good (agathoi), both men and women, should receive hymns, because such songs have the ability to mould the characters of men—a manipulation captured in Plato's use of the verb ἀσκέω, ‘to work raw materials’.

The Athenian of the Laws would certainly endorse the use of hymns for citizens as ideological tools to inculcate state-sanctioned values, but he would strenuously object to offering up such praise of young people (801e1–802a5):

Here the Athenian proposes two parallel laws outlining the practice of praise in Magnesia: first, that gods, daimones and heroes receive appropriate praise in ὕμνοι, ἐγκώμια and prayers; second, that deceased citizens who were exemplary throughout their entire lives should also receive ἐγκώμια. After Klinias assents to these, the Athenian emphasizes the most important aspect of the latter law, explaining that you can only be sure men and women merit praise once their lives have run their full course. Honouring men who are still alive (ἔτι ζῶντας) would not be without risk (οὐκ ἀσφαλές), because the remaining portion of one's life would offer the chance for blameworthy conduct.Footnote ³⁴ To the extent that there is a distinction between hymnic praise received by mortals and by immortals it has to do with permanence and consistency. A god's permanence and immutability make it clear that he is praiseworthy because he will be, in Plato's conception, unfailingly good. A mortal, on the other hand, is subject during his life to the vicissitudes of fate making his goodness and thus praiseworthiness changeable. Once complete, a mortal's life either will or will not rise above the threshold necessary to merit a hymn.

As we have seen elsewhere in the corpus, Plato treats ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια as coexisting within a nexus of praise with minimal, if any, interest in the distinction between the two. Here, the Athenian first describes praising mortals with ἐγκώμια (801e9) and then, when he repeats himself, he uses ὕμνοι and ἐγκώμια (802a1). We have already seen Plato use both of these terms, individually and jointly, to describe (approvingly) praise for both gods and mortals, individually and jointly. On rereading Socrates’ dire pronouncement in Republic Book 10 that ‘the only poetry that must be welcomed into the city are ὕμνοι for theoi and ἐγκώμια for the agathoi’, it is difficult to maintain the view that Plato is enforcing a generic distinction about a correlation between genre and honorand that he routinely ignores. The only distinction between the two terms that we have seen recur is one between verse and prose, which, if operative here, suggests that the best interpretation of this passage would be an expansion along the lines of ‘praises in verse and prose for gods and good men’.Footnote ³⁵

PLATO'S ὝΜΝΟΣ AND THE ROLE OF PRAISE IN UTOPIA

The above survey of hymn terminology reveals that, for Plato, the ὕμνος, like the ἐγκώμιον or the ἔπαινος, belongs to a broader discourse of praise and blame, marking out and making conspicuous that which is good and thereby worthy of emulation. Moreover, the ὕμνος is a song, and as such Plato characterizes it as possessing tremendous power over men owing to its ability to make a deep impression on their souls. This sketch of the ὕμνος as a song praising the praiseworthy is broadly applicable to each and every instance of the term in Plato's corpus. The tautological formulation is useful because it reminds us that we can only properly understand the ways in which Plato conceives of the ὕμνος if we contextualize it within his ideological framework of praiseworthiness.Footnote ³⁶

Plato's works do not speak with one voice, and thus we find variation within the corpus regarding certain details. It is fruitless to attempt to force into agreement the opposing positions expressed by Socrates of the Republic, who recommends offering hymns to exemplary young citizens, and the Athenian of the Laws, who legislates that such praise must be withheld until after a citizen has reached the end of life. This discrepancy, however, is no obstacle to our study of the ὕμνος, because it does not concern what a hymn is, but rather indicates different levels of scrutiny being applied to the notion of praiseworthiness. As we have seen in the Theaetetus, Plato indicates that proper discernment is required to employ correctly hymnic praise.Footnote ³⁷ One's ability to recognize the good allows him to select subjects that partake in the good so that the resulting ὕμνος will edify those who hear it and will in turn habituate them toward the pursuit of the good. Both Socrates and the Athenian are aligned in so far as they have marked out the good for praise; their prescriptions differ in degree only. In different works and indeed in different portions of the same work we find Plato's characters applying varying levels of scrutiny to a given concept. Occasionally this occurs as a consequence of Plato's dialectic procedure, whereby a conclusion is reached by applying increasing pressure to a proposition. Elsewhere, we find that the level of scrutiny is dictated by the circumstances of a particular scenario rather than by strict adherence to doctrine.Footnote ³⁸

The question of who or what is sufficiently good to warrant hymnic praise is fundamental to the issue under consideration here. For Plato, the gods are by definition wholly good and are therefore all automatically worthy of ὕμνοι. Mortals, on the other hand, might fall anywhere on the spectrum from possessing little or no good to being thoroughly good, like the Auditors in the Laws.Footnote ³⁹ While they advocate hymnic praise for mortals in several instances, Plato's characters do not reach a consensus regarding the threshold of praiseworthiness necessary for earning a hymn. Instead, ὕμνοι are described as appropriate for mortals, and often prescribed for them, according to the specific constraints of a given dialogue. Platonic praxis makes clear that the divine/mortal dichotomy that will become a litmus test for Didymus Caecus and Proklos in Late Antiquity is by no means a defining feature of Plato's ὕμνος.Footnote ⁴⁰ In fact, Platonic theology represents mortal and divine as permeable categories in so far as humans’ immortal souls can achieve divine or godlike status via the philosophic pursuit of the good.Footnote ⁴¹

PLATO'S USAGE IN CONTEXT

Prose authors active from the middle of the fifth to the late fourth century—that is, Plato's exact contemporaries as well as those writing within a generation of his birth and death—provide conclusive evidence that the ὕμνος was indeed viewed widely as a genre of praise suitable for both gods and men. Usage throughout this period demonstrates that the ὕμνος is an important component of praise discourses, whose commemoration of men's excellence and great deeds is designed to contribute to a shared civic identity. In particular, we find ὕμνος vocabulary (both nominal and verbal forms) used to describe the praise of legendary and contemporary men, whose exemplarity is cited in an effort to shape civic identity and political ideology at Athens. In particular, our evidence for the Funeral Oration casts the ὕμνος and the epitaphios logos as part of a joint enterprise.Footnote ⁴²

The bulk of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as recorded by Thucydides, lauds Athens and its political institutions before asserting that praise of the city necessarily constitutes praise of its citizens, whom he spends the remainder of the speech recognizing in their own right. As he segues from Athens to her citizens, Pericles offers a rationale for the structure of his speech. In this narratorial intervention, Pericles describes his act of praising the city as ‘hymning’ (ὑμνέω).Footnote ⁴³ Standing in front of a crowd at a sombre state funeral, Pericles is not, of course, singing a song, and we might be tempted to dismiss this lexical choice as a rhetorical flourish. Yet, repeated use of hymnic vocabulary in similar contexts down through the late fourth century b.c.e. strongly suggests that the ὕμνος was an integral part of the praise discourse surrounding cities and citizens alike. Pericles’ word choice was meant to elevate his speech, but his choice of the ὕμνος is in keeping with the expectations his audience would have had for that genre.Footnote ⁴⁴

A fragment from Gorgias’ Funeral Oration reveals that he too saw the ὕμνος as a fitting vehicle for praising men—under the right conditions. ‘Trophies over non-Greeks demand hymns (ὕμνοι), but those over Greeks demand laments (θρῆνοι).’Footnote ⁴⁵ Thus, his speech for Athenians who died during the Peloponnesian War blends praise for Athenians’ past victories over the Persians (ὕμνος) with lament for a war that pitted Greeks against other Greeks (θρῆνος).Footnote ⁴⁶ Although Gorgias and Pericles offer differing attitudes on Athenian involvement in the Peloponnesian War, they both take for granted that praiseworthy human accomplishments are valid subjects for hymns.Footnote ⁴⁷ When the Athenian Stranger of Plato's Laws derides the ‘a-musical lawlessness’ (700d2) of combining the opposite genres of ὕμνος and θρῆνος, he may well be levelling his critique at Gorgias’ speech and others like it. The broader context makes clear, however, that his objection is not over celebrating human excellence in hymns but rather over conflating the emotional responses evoked by these types of song, which ought to be distinguished as opposites. Indeed, the Stranger himself prescribes hymns for the mortal Auditors. Although it is difficult to unpack Plato's attitude toward the funeral oration from his Menexenus, Aspasia follows both Pericles and Gorgias in aligning her own praise discourse on Athenian accomplishments with the ὕμνος.Footnote ⁴⁸

Lysias too situates his Funeral Oration within an explicitly hymnic praise discourse that highlights the contrast between celebration and lamentation. As in earlier examples of the genre, we find a recalibration of what type of human accomplishment merits the highest form of praise. Lysias, however, goes a step farther by using the language of the ὕμνος to define the encomiastic agenda of his speech—indeed, that of all funeral orations—namely to secure for his honorands renown of the sort which merits eternal praise. Naturally, the gods enjoy this permanent status, as do those ancestors (real and fictive) whose achievements are indelibly etched in the Athenian consciousness.Footnote ⁴⁹ These gods and figures of legend constitute the canon of the praiseworthy and it is right to memorialize them by celebrating their excellence with hymns. ‘First, I shall recount the ancient ventures of our forbearers, taking remembrance of them from their fame; for it is fitting for all men to remember them by hymning (ὑμνέω) them in songs’ (2.3).Footnote ⁵⁰ Lysias implies that the men his speech commemorates already enjoy the same distinction, claiming that ‘everywhere, in every nation people hymn the excellence of these men even as they lament their own misfortunes’ (2.2).Footnote ⁵¹ The use of ὑμνέω here refers not only to the celebration of success but also to the ongoing nature of that celebration—a dimension stressed by the hyperbole of ‘everywhere, in every nation’.Footnote ⁵² By asserting that those being buried merit the same mode of praise as the heroes fixed in the Athenian canon, Lysias ascribes to them permanent rather than transient renown. At the end of his speech, Lysias returns to this dichotomy between transience and intransience, here figuring his honorands’ natural condition (φύσις) as impermanent but their excellence (ἀρετή) as undying. The former deserves lamentation, but the latter is celebrated in hymns.Footnote ⁵³ In addition to their celebratory and joyous character, Lysias reminds us that hymns connote permanence and thus are suited exclusively to honorands who merit eternal praise—a distinction he attempts to confer on those he praises in his speech.Footnote ⁵⁴

Lysias conceives of his praise as having a paideutic function and instructs his audience to draw lessons from the exempla he lays out for them (2.3):

Praise discourse is designed to encourage the listeners to emulate those they hear celebrated. Plato frequently expresses similar sentiments, often emphasizing poetry's power to enchant men's souls.Footnote ⁵⁶ Throughout the fourth century, all varieties of praise discourse situate themselves as analogous to hymns as they attempt to extol exemplary individuals and groups for their praiseworthy qualities.Footnote ⁵⁷

Representative of a zeitgeist that asserted prose as the equal of verse, Isocrates claims to be a bold innovator because he uses speeches rather than songs to elevate contemporary individuals to exemplary status.Footnote ⁵⁸ His surviving speeches dwell at length on the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion of individuals from the canon of hymned men.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the Evagoras, composed sometime during the second quarter of the fourth century, he laments the plight of men who feel they have little hope of earning due praise even if their excellence should surpass that of forbearers who are celebrated in hymns and tragedies (9.5–7). Isocrates complains that Evagoras’ own fame suffers in this very way, since he is not nearly so well known as the heroes of the universally hymned Trojan war (τὸν ὑπὸ πάντων ἀνθρώπων ὑμνούμενον, 9.65) despite being superior to them in courage, wisdom and the sum total of his excellence as revealed in his deeds and ventures. Luckily for Evagoras, he has in Isocrates an encomiast who promises to secure his spot in the canon of those men who enjoy perpetual praise.Footnote ⁶⁰