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Reader | Orphic Hymns, Hymn 62

Orphic Hymns

Orphic tradition

Hymn 62 | Primary edition: Thomas Taylor

Text

Position

Line 1 of 10

Line RefThomas Taylor | English
1

Primary

O Blessed Equity [Dikaiosune], mankind's delight, th' eternal friend of conduct just and right:

2

Primary

Abundant, venerable, honor'd maid, to judgments pure, dispensing constant aid,

3

Primary

A stable conscience, and an upright mind; for men unjust, by thee are undermin'd,

4

Primary

Whose souls perverse thy bondage ne'er desire, but more untam'd decline thy scourges dire:

5

Primary

Harmonious, friendly power, averse to strife, in peace rejoicing, and a stable life;

6

Primary

Lovely, loquacious, of a gentle mind, hating excess, to equal deeds inclin'd:

7

Primary

Wisdom, and virtue of whate'er degree, receive their proper bound alone in thee.

8

Primary

Hear, Goddess Equity [Dikaiosune], the deeds destroy of evil men, which human life annoy;

9

Primary

That all may yield to thee of mortal birth, whether supported by the fruits of earth,

10

Primary

Or in her kindly fertile bosom found, or in the depths of Marine Jove [Zeus] profound.

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 62.

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.