Hymn to Dionysus and Semele

The closing of the first hymn in the collection, whose body has scarcely survived.

It contains a threat, which is also a business consideration. "There is no way for one who forgets you to remember holy song." He who forgets the god loses not favour but memory, that is, his trade: a singer who has not honoured Dionysus will not be able to sing. The rhapsode's own professional fitness is made to depend on the soundness of his piety. The same link appears in the seventh hymn (homeric-dionysus-002), and both times it is stated in the closing, at the point where one passes to the main recitation.

Εἰραφιώτης is an epithet whose meaning was already disputed in antiquity. The card's Russian chooses "sewn into the thigh", after the familiar story of Zeus carrying the unborn son to term; the interpretation is the standard one but not the only one, and the word remains obscure. The choice here belongs to the translator, not to the source.

Both names in the last lines record an irregularity: a god born from a thigh, and a mother who changed her name — "Semele, whom they call Thyone". A mortal woman, on becoming divine, received another name, and the hymn records this as a fact without explaining it.