Reader

Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 32

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 32 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 6

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Powerful Victory [Nike], by men desir'd, with adverse breasts to dreadful fury fir'd,

2

Primary

Thee I invoke, whose might alone can quell contending rage, and molestation fell:

3

Primary

'Tis thine in battle to confer the crown, the victor's prize, the mark of sweet renown;

4

Primary

For thou rul'st all things, Victory [Nike] divine! And glorious strife, and joyful shouts are thine.

5

Primary

Come, mighty Goddess, and thy suppliant bless, with sparkling eye, elated with success;

6

Primary

May deeds illustrious thy protection claim, and find, led on by thee immortal Fame.

Text notes and edition context

Work

Orphic Hymns

The Orphic Hymns compress cosmology, prayer, ritual address, and divine epithets into compact devotional poems especially suited to meditative and oracle-like reading; the corpus now also carries an Abel-based Greek witness aligned as honestly as possible against the existing Taylor English sequence.

Hymns | Original language: Ancient Greek

Late Hellenistic to early Imperial Greek religious poetry, often dated between the 2nd century BCE and 2nd century CE

You are reading Hymn 32.

Primary Edition

Thomas Taylor

English | Verse

Late 18th-century English verse translation

Taylor's version is archaic, charged, and openly mystical, making it one of the strongest public-domain oracle-friendly English renderings of the Orphic Hymns.

This edition uses canonical hymn numbering and line-level segmentation, omitting the prefatory Musaeus proem from the main corpus model.

Source family: English aggregate translations

Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi | Public-domain source texts

English prose and verse classics consolidated into a single aggregate dataset.

Primary source: English aggregate translations | Project Gutenberg / Internet Archive / Theoi.