The aim of the work is to identify specific features of the prose hymn in the honor of gods as a rhetorical genre, poorly represented in late antique oratory and known mainly from the corpus of a famous Greek orator of the 2nd century, a representative of the Second Sophistic, Aelius Aristides. If we, along with a number of researchers, admit that Aristides had any noticeable influence on the formation of canon of this rhetorical genre, it seems expedient, at first, to compare his orations with the poetic hymns of previous eras (primarily with pseudo-Homeric and Callimachus’ hymns), and secondly, to compare various hymns of Aristides, written by him for more than three decades. Thus, we selected for the analysis the hymns which refer to different periods of Aristides’ creativity and to opposite stylistic groups («Regarding Serapis» (XLV K), «Regarding the Aegean Sea» (XLIV K) and «The Isthmian oration: regarding Poseidon» (XLVI K)). The paper explores the stylistic, structural and narrative levels of textual organization.