The Greek Hymns of Grzegorz Cnapius

The paper presents three Greek hymns to Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, written by the eminent Polish Jesuit and lexicographer Grzegorz Cnapius. The poems were added to the second volume of his dictionary Thesaurus Polono-Latino-Graecus printed in 1626. Their first modern edition, prepared by Janina Czerniatowicz and included in the anthology Corpusculum poesis Polono-Graecae saeculorum XVI–XVII (1531–1648), Wrocław 1991, is based on the second edition of the dictionary from 1644, which contains several errors. The main goal of the paper is, therefore, to produce an edition of the three hymns based on editio princeps of the dictionary’s second volume, published in 1626. Cnapius composed and delivered the hymns on the celebration of the canonization of the two Jesuits, which took place in Kraków. The hymns are written in hexameter and elegiac distich. The first poem to Ignatius Loyola is an alphabetical acrostic, while the second is a complex acrostic, the initial letters making the name Francis and the last – Xavier. In the third poem Cnapius praises the missionary work of Francis Xavier by comparing him to Alexander the Great, Heracles and Bacchus. The hymns contain many rare Greek words and prove Grzegorz Cnapius’s excellent knowledge of the Greek language.