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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 61

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 61 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 8

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

The piercing eye of Justice [Dike] bright, I sing, plac'd by the throne of heav'n's almighty king [Zeus],

2

Primary

Perceiving thence, with vision unconfin'd, the life and conduct of the human kind

3

Primary

To thee, revenge and punishment belong, chastising ev'ry deed, unjust and wrong;

4

Primary

Whose pow'r alone, dissimilars can join, and from th' equality of truth combine:

5

Primary

For all the ill, persuasion can inspire, when urging bad designs, with counsel dire,

6

Primary

'Tis thine alone to punish; with the race of lawless passions, and incentives base;

7

Primary

For thou art ever to the good inclin'd, and hostile to the men of evil mind.

8

Primary

Come, all-propitious, and thy suppliant hear, when Fate's predestin'd, final hour draws near.

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 61.

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.