In the Homeric Hymns the Hymn to Ares is a rebuttal to the notion in popular media that Ares is incompetent, amoral, or evil. This Hymn, on the other hand, is a warrior's prayer for courage and discipline in battle and preferably no need to go to war in the first place. The initial lines of the Hymn are a list of complimentary epithets. Such a list is a common feature of the beginning of Homeric Hymns and often a primary component of abbreviated Hymns. I wonder, therefore, if such introductions were not pedagogical tool for memorizing the appropriate epithets. In contemporary times, the line "immortal, invisible, god only wise" is virtually unforgettable. These epithets could further provide an inspiration for the poet to fill the space between the invocation and the missa est, either with a known tale or a tale of his own invention appropriate to the god and rendered unverifiable by attribution to a distant region. A contemporary example of the former could be the responses before and after the Gospel, which in liturgical traditions is determined by a lectionary; an example of the latter could be the Prayers of the People, which contains sufficient flexibility to include quotidian concerns.
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