sallayaskan siu ̄nas kuis sallis, utar kue ̄dani dassu, ‘who controllest all lands,
whom they constantly praise, who art greater than the great gods, whose word
is strong’.^6 It is not so typical of early Greek hymns, but appears from the fifth
century on, as at Soph. Ant. 781–4Εn ρω qνκατε μα ́ χαν, | Εn ρω,i $ν κτ μασι
ππτει, | i $ν μαλακαι
παρειαι
| νεα ́ νιδο $ννυχε3ει; Plaut. Poen. 1187 f.^7
The virtues for which the deity is praised are of course very varied. But it is
a fundamental property of gods that they have power, and it is a recurrent
theme in hymns to the highest gods that their power is the greatest. ‘Parmi les
dieux, toi seule, déesse Soleil d’Arinna, (es) importante et grande... J’ajoute
qu’il n’est pas de divinité plus importante et plus grande que toi’ (CTH 376
i 31′–34′, trs. Lebrun (1980), 167 f.). ‘No god, no mortal is greater than thou,
Indra’ (RV 6. 30. 4). ‘For indeed none even in the past was ever born mightier
than thou’ (8. 24. 15). ‘Thou alone art the king of all creation’ (6. 36. 4).
‘Thine is the power in heaven’ (Archil. 177. 1). ‘Seated under no one’s rule
does he exercise a lesser authority than others; he does not pay homage to the
power of anyone sitting above him’ (Aesch. Supp. 595–7). The Muses them-
selves, hymning Zeus on Olympus, sing of ‘how far the noblest of the gods he
is, and the greatest in power’ (Hes. Th. 49).
His power resides in the thunderbolt, which is feared not only by us
terrestrials but by the gods. Oceanus is the great father of all the rivers and
springs, ‘but even he fears great Zeus’ bolt and his terrible thunder when he
flashes from heaven’ (Il. 21. 198 f.). This may have been a motif in Indo-
European hymns to the thunder-god: compare RV 8. 97. 14, ‘before thee all
creatures, O god of the vajra-, (and) heaven and earth tremble in fear’, with
the only half-intelligible lines from the old Latin Carmen Saliare,
quome tonas Leucesie, prae tet tremonti
†quot ibet etinei de iscum tonarem†.
When you thunder, Leucesios, they tremble before thee,
all who...Another ground for praising a deity is that only through his agency and
good will certain desirable things happen. This is a rather unspecific feature,
worth illustrating only where particular stylizations are involved. One such is
the double negative formulation, ‘not without thee (does so and so come
about)’. RV 2. 12. 9 yásma ̄n ná rté vijáyante jána ̄so, ‘without whom the
(^6) CTH 832. 2–4, cf. 6–9= Lebrun (1980), 380. This is a Hittite version of an Akkadian hymn
to Isˇtar; the Akkadian version of these lines, however, does not have relative clauses but simple
predicates, see the edition by E. Reiner and H. G. Güterbock, JCS 21 (1967), 257 f. Parallel
relative clauses also in CTH 383 i 5–10= Lebrun, 310.
(^7) More in Norden (1913), 171–6.
- Hymns and Spells 309