The Orphic Hymns consist of a prooemium and 87 hymns addressed to several deities in a late Orphic initiation of sorts. They were composed probably in Asia Minor during the second or third century CE. The bulk of these hymns are made up of divine epithets often linked together in chains of considerable length. The lexicon attempts to give a comprehensive account of the roughly 850 epithets, bringing together the most relevant information scattered

in the scholarly literature and adding others from various sources (literary, epigraphic, lexicographic, scholia etc.) in order to provide an overview of their usage and the main details of their models.