Talk:Orphic Hymns/GA1

GA Review

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Nominator: Michael Aurel (talk · contribs) 06:14, 22 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Reviewer: UndercoverClassicist (talk · contribs) 11:32, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'll review this. It's clearly an outstanding piece of work, and the scholarship shines through throughout. I'm afraid I've gone above the strict standards of GA in a few (many?) cases -- please feel free to push back, but I hope the comments are reasonable and helpful.UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 11:32, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Great, thanks for reviewing this! Feel free to be harsher than the GA standards require if you'd like; the article will only be the better for it (and I'll have you to thank if I choose to take this article further). – Michael Aurel (talk) 12:37, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved

The Orphic Hymns open with a proem: this took me a minute to parse. I think you mean that the collection known as the Orphic Hymns consists of a proem, followed by eighty-seven short poems, each addressed to a deity or a group of deities. As written, it's possible to read that every one of those hymns opens with a proem.
Yes, that's the intended meaning. I've rephrased to "The collection of eighty-seven hymns is preceded by a proem". – Michael Aurel
The individual hymns in the collection ... typically gain the attention of the deity they address: I think we can say that they call for or seek the attention of a deity, but knowing whether Zeus Astrapaios actually did pay attention to any given recitation is, I think, a bit beyond what WP:V can do.
Aha, indeed – let's not start making supernatural claims here. I've opted for "call for the attention". – Michael Aurel (talk) 05:12, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Suggest linking or explaining "epithets", which has a specific meaning in Greek poetry/religion beyond its normal English sense.
Linked Epithet#Religion, here and in the body, for now. I've considered a few possible brief explanations, but they all end up sounding as though they're restating information from the previous sentence. It might be possible to shuffle information between these two sentences, though, such that we give the reader a better idea of what epithets are; I'll ponder this. – Michael Aurel (talk) 09:09, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The most prominent god in the collection is Dionysus: consider a rephrase for clarity: Dionysus is not the most prominent god that is invoked in the poems, but rather the god who is invoked most often.
Good catch – rephrased to "The god featured most prominently in the collection". – Michael Aurel (talk) 09:09, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Orphic Hymms seem to have belonged to a cult community: typo.
A sly one – fixed. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Van Liempt's first name appears to have been "Leonard", judging from this bibliographical record of his doctoral thesis.
Well spotted. Inserted. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A small one, but why is Johannes Galenos not Ioannis? Seems odd to Latinise his first name but not his second, or really to Latinise either, given that he spoke Greek. Is he the same guy as Ioannes Diakonos Galenos?
Yes, that's our man. "Johannes Galenos" was a slightly muddled amalgam of the renderings in Morand ("Jean Galenos") and West ("Johannes Galenus"); I've opted for "Ioannes Galenos", per the article you've highlighted and Athanassakis and Wolkow. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
3rd and 4th-century AD: hyphen, keeping the space, after 3rd.
Fixed. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some of these translations have places of publications, others don't. Fayant seems to have it twice. Is there a logic here?
Nope, just me being lazy in some cases. I think I've fixed all of these now, in the editions/translations section and the references section. – Michael Aurel (talk) 04:42, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The note completely outdated. against Taylor's translation is almost certainly correct, but still needs to be sourced.
This was really just an expression of irritation towards this translation's prominence online. I've removed it, as such a comment could probably be added to multiple works listed there. – Michael Aurel (talk) 04:42, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Optional, but I'd consider using citation templates for the selected translations, or otherwise moving the year closer to the front: the list is in chronological order, but the reader has to do a bit of looking around to figure that out.
I've moved the dates to the front of the citations; though this is not entirely consistent with the references section, this is probably not an issue. – Michael Aurel (talk) 04:42, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really understand the logic in the references -- some sources have dates, others don't; some page numbers are preceded by e.g. "Introduction", most aren't. Granted, GA doesn't really require any logic to this section at all.
All sources should hopefully be cited with regular page numbers except for Rudhardt 2008, which I've only been able to access through an online version which doesn't have pagination, and instead numbers the paragraphs in each chapter; as such, I've ended up citing this as "Rudhardt 2008, Chapter x, para. y", where "Introduction" is sometimes the chapter cited. Dates are included only when the author has multiple works listed. Also, if there are any other parts of the current citation style which you find baffling, feel free to highlight them, as most readers will no doubt share in your confusion. – Michael Aurel (talk) 05:00, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Absolutely fine: it is a fairly sacred principle here and at FAC that nominators may use whatever citation style they like, as long as it's consistent and makes reasonable sense. I've been on the other side of this conversation enough time to defer to your methods here. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:02, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The Hymns were in antiquity attributed to the mythical poet Orpheus, and modern scholarship has mostly continued to see the collection as being situated in the Orphic tradition.: most readers will, I think, interpret this as saying that modern scholars generally believe the hymns to have been written by Orpheus. I think a very brief mention of what Orphism was is needed here. (talk) 05:12, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
previously known only though the collection, have since been discovered in inscriptions in Asia Minor: I think we need a sense of some dates here.
There are no references to the Orphic Hymns in antiquity: not sure about the tense or the confidence here. Suggest "No references to the Orphic Hymns are attested in surviving ancient sources, apart from the Hymns themselves" or similar. After all, the overwhelming majority of ancient literature is lost, so we cannot know that no reference was ever made to them. Might benefit from the term "secondary references", or some other way of indicating we mean "other texts taking about the Hymns".
the Byzantine writer Johannes Galenos: I think we need a date here.
In the Middle Ages, the Orphic Hymns were preserved in a codex which also included the Orphic Argonautica: as I know it, the earliest possible date of this codex is the C4th, which is before the "Middle Ages" to most people: see the "Textual history" section in Homeric Hymns
I think we need to put a date on the various hypotheses for the date of the Hymns in the first paragraph of the relevant section, given that most are C19th.
Christian Petersen, who saw the influence of Stoicism in the Hymns, posited that they must have been composed after the flourishing of Stoic thought: again, when exactly is "the flourishing of Stoic thought"?
though others have instead seen Platonic or Neoplatonic influence in the collection.: ditto: these things did not have their heydays at the same time.
On the basis of the language and meter of the Hymns, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff judged that they can not have been composed before the 2nd century AD, but were earlier than Nonnus: that they could not (sequence of tenses). When did Nonnus write?
with Gabriella Ricciardelli pointing to the prominence of Dionysism at that time in Asia Minor: we've mentioned Dionysus in the lead, but have yet to connect the hymns to his worship in the body. Nor have we said there that they were composed in Asia Minor, or given any indication of why this is believed to be so. This gets explained in the next paragraph, so a minor restructure might be helpful.
A number of early scholars: can we name any of these, or be more specific than "early"? Do we mean 12th-century Constantinople, 15th-century Florence, or 19th-century Berlin?
Link, explain (it becomes important in this paragraph), and transliteration-template temenos.
Likewise, I don't think it would hurt to be explicit about where Pergamon is.
In the Hymns themselves, there are several traces of Orpheus as their composer: Orphic Hymn 76 to the Muses mentions "mother Calliope": this seems a bit tenuous. The Iliad quite regularly mentions "Father Zeus", but nobody has suggested that Heracles composed it.
Reading this section of the body text, I would reaffirm my suggestion from the lead that we need a discussion of exactly what Orphism was.
The collection can be seen as an example of the broader genre of hymns in Orphic literature, of which there are examples dating back at least as far as the 5th century BC;: not clear here whether we mean that hymns, Orphic literature, or Orphic hymns date back to the C5th.
Ivan Linforth, however, contests that it is equally likely that the name of Orpheus was simply stamped upon the work for its "prestige: It's probably germane here that Linforth didn't believe that "Orphism" really existed. This could be brought into the discussion of what/if Orphism was.
and ends in the word γῆρας ("old age"): pedantry: lang template but no italics for Greek, use the gloss template for a gloss, which gives single rather than double quotes.
Done, here and elsewhere. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
in which Orpheus speaks to Musaeus (who is usually described as his student or son in Greek literature).: this bracket would be better with the first body mention of Musaeus in the section above.
Personal taste, perhaps, but I would transliterate Greek where quoting it, in addition to the original alphabet if you like. In general, I try not to use untransliterated Greek in the main flow of a sentence (rather than in brackets), because most readers can't sound it out.
(a title listed among the works of Orpheus in the Suda): the Suda needs a bit of an introduction: this isn't a source we can just throw around as if it is authoritative on matters of classical literary biography.
It names the deity (sometimes using an epiclesis),: needs an explanation.
They are written in dactylic hexameter, and also display a consistency in metrical composition: I think it would help to be explicit (we imply it in the next sentence) that dactylic hexameter was a metre of prestigious poetry, particularly of Homeric/Hesiodic epic).
"Greek Magical Papyri" isn't generally italicised in English, as it's a description rather than a title.
Italics removed, not too sure why they were there. – Michael Aurel (talk) 03:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
contain a number of words and forms from later literature, spanning up to the imperial period: many readers will not intuitively know the dates for that.
They also contain a number of language devices, such as anaphora, alliteration, assonance, and repetition, as well as forms of wordplay, such as etymologies on the names of gods: I need some convincing that at least the first four of these are notable or unusual. I can't think of a work of ancient literature that doesn't include all of those!
in a codex which also included the Orphic Argonautica, and other Greek hymns such as the Homeric Hymns (in the lead): the comma after Argonautica needs either to be moved after Greek hymns or dropped. Consider linking "codex", too.
One of the most salient characteristics of the Orphic Hymns is the strings of epithets which comprise a significant portion of their content: what does salient mean here -- it normally means "relevant" or similar. "Distinctive"?
A number of the gods featured in the Hymns are identified with one another. On the basis of shared attributes or associations, two deities in the collection may be brought closer together to the point of coalescing, partially or fully; these linkings of pairs of gods are not complete assimilations, however, as each deity, while adopting features of the other god, still retains their own individual characteristics: well above par for GA, but I found this bit tricky to parse, and that's with a reasonable background in Greek religion and the idea of syncretism. Might be worth a thought about how to make it a bit clearer.
Though earlier scholars such as Jane Ellen Harrison saw this identifying tendency as conferring upon the collection an "atmosphere of mystical monotheism", this idea of a monotheistic bent to the Hymns has been rejected by more recent scholars.: another beat on my drum about putting dates on scholars: Harrison is later than most of the "early scholars" we have so far named.
the latter of whom is referred to under several names of the former: a bit mealy-mouthed: could we just have "Dionysus is called by several names normally used for Protogonos-Phanes"?
the Mother of the gods: is this Cybele, as the "Great Mother"? If so, capitalise "Gods" as part of her name/title.
The only definitively Orphic deity in the collection is Protogonos: He's been Protogonos-Phanes so far: any reason to give only one name here?
Of all the deities featured in the Hymns, however, the most prominent is Dionysus: see earlier discussion re. "prominent" in this context.
The Hymns also mention various personifications whose names are common words, such as the Sea, the Sun, Sleep, and Death: this may be slightly misleading to those without a lot of grounding in Greek religion. At least the last three of these are commonly invoked as regular gods in Greek religion; we imply that the Orphics have taken natural phenomena and turned them into gods, which isn't quite what was going on here. Pretty much every abstract noun can be deified in conventional Greek religion (see also Victory, Moon, Peace, any river or mountain you like...)
in addition, the collection contains several references to known non-Greek gods, such as Isis and Men.: consider "the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Anatolian god Men", which would help avoid the misreading of "Men" as "men". On first read, I wasn't sure what the word "known" was doing here; the next paragraph makes clear that we need it because we don't know who some of the others were. It might be useful to move this bit about non-Greek deities down into that paragraph, which would clarify and make more coherent the geographical discussion?
though hymns attributed to Orpheus are mentioned in works such as the Derveni papyrus and Pausanias's Description of Greece,: another ring on my bell for rough dates (these texts are hundreds of years apart).
He refers to epithets from the hymns to Helios and Selene: see my earlier query about personifications: Sun has now been promoted (and wikilinked) to Helios, which will confuse most people, but I think this second approach is better.
In the early Middle Ages (or perhaps late antiquity): for most scholars, those terms overlap largely or even totally. What difference are you trying to pull out here?
The earliest known codex containing the Orphic Hymns to arrive in Western Europe was brought to Venice from Constantinople by Giovanni Aurispa in 1423—a manuscript which likely dated to the 12th or 13th century: there's a lot of "maybes" holding this line of reasoning together (that Aurispa's codex was Ψ and that Ψ dates to those years -- it might have been Ω, which is a descendant of Ψ), but I can see good reasons for not getting into those weeds here.
OK, this is a niche one: we've somehow got two different printings of ϕ: one in the body text and one in note 174. The one in the note looks odd to me: advise simply replacing with a unicode ϕ unless there's some reason to use the other variant?
The second paragraph of "Transmission and scholarship" is very technical. I don't think we should lose the detail or precision, but it would be worth thinking about how to help non-specialists navigate all the terminology (see apographs, stemmata, degeneration, descendant, hyparchetypes...)
In the mid 15th century, following the arrival of the codex brought by Aurispa to Renaissance Italy, the Orphic Hymns seem to have attained a level of popularity amongst the educated: in Italy, or anywhere else? In particular, when you say "Italy", do you really mean "Florence" (as is the case for the Homeric Hymns).
denoted in the manuscript tradition by Iunt: this is pretty opaque: known as "Iunt." in scholarship? I assume it needs the dot, as it's an abbreviation?
In the section "List of the Orphic Hymns", any chance of some elucidation as to what these hymns are about, how long they are, or their dates? Very much above and beyond for GA, but I did something similar in Homeric Hymns using a table.

That's the text: I'll give the notes and bibliography a good look, then do the images and spot checks. Really impressive work. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 10:27, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]