A chance discovery in Moscow in 1777 recovered the two hymns that open the collection, the fragmentary To Dionysus and To Demeter (complete save some lacunose lines), in a single fifteenth-century manuscript. Most surviving Byzantine manuscripts begin with the third Hymn. The longer ones show signs of having been assembled from pre-existing disparate materials. In the briefest ones, the narrative element is lacking. The long ones comprise an invocation, praise, and narrative, sometimes quite extended. The hymns, which must be the remains of a once more strongly represented genre, vary widely in length, some being as brief as three or four lines, while others are in excess of five hundred lines. Walter Burkert has suggested that the Hymn to Apollo, attributed by an ancient source to Cynaethus of Chios (a member of the Homeridae), was composed in 522 BC for performance at the unusual double festival held by Polycrates of Samos to honor Apollo of Delos and of Delphi. The hymns to Helios and Selene are also thought to have been composed a bit later than the others, but earlier than the one to Ares.

This still places the older Homeric Hymns among the oldest monuments of Greek literature but although most of them were composed in the seventh and sixth centuries, a few may be Hellenistic, and the Hymn to Ares might be a late pagan work, inserted when it was observed that a hymn to Ares was lacking.

The oldest of the hymns were probably written in the seventh century BC, somewhat later than Hesiod and the usually accepted date for the writing down of the Homeric epics.

Verrall noted in 1894, 'that is to say, it has come down labeled as 'Homer' from the earliest times of Greek book-literature.' 'The whole collection, as a collection, is Homeric in the only useful sense that can be put upon the word,' A. While the modern scholarly consensus is that they were not written during the lifetime of Homer himself, they were uncritically attributed to him in antiquity-from the earliest written reference to them, Thucydides (iii.104)-and the label has stuck. The hymns are 'Homeric' in the sense that they employ the same epic meter- dactylic hexameter-as the Iliad and Odyssey, use many similar formulas and are couched in the same dialect. The Homeric Hymns ( Ancient Greek: Ὁμηρικοὶ ὕμνοι, romanized: Homērikoì húmnoi) are a collection of thirty-three anonymous ancient Greek hymns celebrating individual gods.

Hesiod homeric hymns