Orpheus and Pythagoras – Burkert

Greek Religion

pp 296-304

 

“…with the idea of the immortal soul the discovery of the individual had reached a goal which is only fulfilled in philosophy. It was Socratic care for the soul and Platonic metaphysics that gave it the classical form that was to predominate for thousands of years.”

 

2.3 Orpheus and Pythagoras

The gold leaves contain verses of traditional form which nevertheless aspire to be more than poetry: an esoteric knowledge, revelation rather than literature. With the catchwords Orphic and Pythagorean, Orpheus and Pythagoras, Herodotus points to figures who, in contrast to the diffuse but always traditional Greek religion, assume for the first time the role of founders of sects, if not religions. The one appears in the guise of a singer and poet, the other in the guise of a philosopher. The most radical transformation of Greek religion is traced to these names.

Precisely for this reason the problem of Orphism has become one of the most hotly disputed areas in the history of Greek religion.1 The lack of sound and ancient sources, imprecise concepts, and hidden Christian or anti-Christian motivations on the part of the interpreters have created a tangled web of controversies. Yet new discoveries have provided a new basis for discussion: the gold leaf from Hipponion, the Derveni Papyrus with a Presocratic commentary on the theogony of Orpheus,2 and graffiti from Olbia which attest Orphikoi in the fifth century bc.3

In myth Orpheus is a singer who casts his spell even on animals and trees, who finds the path into Hades to fetch Euridice, and who is finally torn to pieces by Thracian maenads. For the Greeks he is dated one generation before the Trojan War, since he was associated with the expedition of the Argonauts; for us no evidence goes back beyond the middle of the sixth century.4 Probably from this time onwards alleged poems of Orpheus were in circulation. The Derveni Papyrus now proves that at least in the fifth century a theogonic-cosmogonic poem of Orpheus was in existence; Plato and Aristotle probably quote from the same poem.5 It obviously tried to outdo Hesiod’s Theogony. The genealogy of the gods was extended backwards: before Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus, there is now Night as an ultimate beginning. Extraordinary and hybrid features are sought for, monstrous figures, incest motifs; Homeric form is lost in cosmic speculation. Oriental influences can hardly be doubted. At the same time there was a poem which dealt with Demeter’s arrival at Eleusis and the bestowal of culture; this was known to Aristophanes and his audience.5 A further poem about a descent into the underworld, probably involving Heracles, must also have existed, competing with Homer’s Nekyia.6 The authenticity of these works was questioned at an early date. There were guesses as to the true authors; a favourite candidate was Onomacritus, who had edited the oracles of Musaios in Athens about 520 bc and had been convicted of forgery in the process.7

These works are not pure poetry; they were simply ignored by later literary theory. They refer to mystery cults, clearly with the intention of interpreting or perhaps reforming those cults: Eleusis in particular is claimed to be a foundation of Orpheus,8 but relations are also established with Phlya, Samothrace, and with Dionysiac festivals in general.9 But their claims are

not limited to established cults. Wandering mystery priests appealed to the books of Orpheus. The amoral ritualism of these purifications and initiations was pilloried by Plato, who writes in the Republic.

Beggar priests and seers come to the doors of the rich and convince them that in their hands, given by the gods, there lies the power to heal with sacrifices and incantations, if a misdeed has been committed by themselves or their ancestors, with pleasurable festivals . . . and they offer a bundle of books of Musaios and Orpheus . . . according to which they perform their sacrifices; they persuade not only individuals but whole cities that there is release and purification from misdeeds through sacrifices and playful pastimes, and indeed for both the living and the dead; they call these teletai, which deliver us from evil in the afterlife; anyone who declines to sacrifice, however, is told that terrible things are waiting for him.10

Liberation from ancient guilt and better hopes for the next world are effected by mysteries, teletai, over which Plato, in the Phaedrus, has Dionysos preside.” They are performed according to the books of Orpheus and Musaios. Orpheotelestai who have much to say about existence in the next world are also mentioned elsewhere.’2 Euripides alludes to people who have Orpheus as their master, honour many books, celebrate Bacchic rites, and lead a vegetarian life.’3 The images of blessedness and of punishments in Hades which appear especially in Plato — the symposium of the hosioi and commensality with the gods on the one hand, and the lying in the mud, water carrying and Oknos on the other – are probably derived from such books.’4

The characteristic appeal to books is indicative of a revolution: with the Orphica literacy takes hold in a field that had previously been dominated by the immediacy of ritual and the spoken word of myth. The new form of transmission introduces a new form of authority to which the individual, provided that he can read, has direct access without collective mediation. The emancipation of the individual and the appearance of books go together in religion as elsewhere.

The controversies about Orphism focus on the extent to which it can be seen as a unified spiritual movement, whether based on the anthropogonic Dionysos myth or on the doctrine of immortality and transmigration of souls.

Orphic myth as known in later times, especially through the compilation called the Rhapsodies, led from theogony to the rise of men from the death of a god: Zeus raped his mother Rhea-Demeter and sired Persephone; he raped Persephone in the form of a snake and sired Dionysos. To the child Dionysos he hands over the rule of the world, places him on a throne, and has him guarded by Korybantes. But Hera sends the Titans who distract the child with toys, and while the child is looking into a mirror he is dragged from the throne, killed, and torn to pieces, then boiled, roasted, and eaten. Zeus thereupon hurls his thunderbolt to burn the Titans, and from the rising soot there spring men, rebels against the gods who nevertheless participate in the divine. From the remains that were rescued and collected, Dionysos rises again.’5

This myth became a theme in the poetry of Callimachus and Euphorion; here Dionysos bears the epithet Zagreus.16 No indisputable evidence leads back into the pre-Hellenistic epoch, yet there are numerous indirect indications that the myth was well known.’7 Xenocrates, Plato’s disciple, referred to Dionysos and the Titans to explain a famous passage in Plato’s Phaedo.,a Plato himself has those about Orpheus teach that the soul is banished into the body in punishment for certain crimes not to be named, and he alludes to the ‘ancient Titanic nature’ of man which can suddenly reappear.’9 That Herodotus mentions the sufferings of Osiris but assiduously keeps silent about them, although in Egypt itself there was no secret about the details of this myth, is to be explained by the assumption that the corresponding myth of the dismemberment of Dionysos was an unspeakable doctrine of the mysteries. Herodotus also alludes to an explanation of the Dionysiac phallic processions which is in fact provided by the Osiris dismemberment myth.20 Pindar, finally, speaks of Persephone accepting ‘requital for ancient grief’ from the dead before she allows them to rise to higher existence;2‘ this grief of the goddess for which men bear the guilt can only be the death of her child Dionysos. The Derveni Papyrus stops short of the birth of chthonic Dionysos – it seems to end with the mother incest of Zeus – but the system of divine monarchies treated in this text, starting from Ouranos as the first king, closely agrees with the one set forth in the basic testimony for Orphic anthropogony.22 One should therefore concede that the myth of the dismemberment of Dionysos is relatively old and well known among the Greeks but was consciously kept secret as a doctrine of mysteries. The obligation to secrecy will have been made more compelling because of the uneasiness of speaking in the light of day about the death of a god. This is in sharp contrast to the official, Homeric conception of the immortal gods. To what extent this myth and indeed the very cult of chthonic Dionysos and the beliefs in blessedness and punishments in the nether world are dependent on the Egyptian Osiris cult from the start remains at least a question that must be seriously asked.23 Once again this is not to say that all forms of Bacchic mysteries are built on this foundation. When the dead man in the gold leaves introduces himself as the ‘son of earth and starry heaven’, the myth of the Titans is not necessarily implied;24 the ‘penance for unjust deeds’ on the Thurioi leaves might be better grouped together with Pindar and Plato.25

In that late Hellenistic compilation of Orphica known as the Rhapsodies, anthropogony was connected with metempsychosis.26 This is a speculative doctrine more characteristic of India, which remained a kind of foreign body in the framework of Greek religion.27 It appears in the fifth century in varying forms in the works of Pindar, Empedocles, and Herodotus and later in Plato’s myths. Most impressive is the oldest text, Pindar’s second Olympian Ode written for Theron of Akragas in 476; there are also undated fragments from two funeral dirges, threnoi.28 According to Pindar there are three paths in the other world, three possibilities. Whoever has led a pious and just life finds a festive existence in the underworld, free from all cares in a place where the sun is shining at night; but evildoers suffer terrible things. The soul thereafter returns to the upper world where its fate is determined by its previous deeds; whoever stands the test three times enters the Island of the Blessed forever. One can compare with this the fact that in two of the Thurioi gold leaves immediate apotheosis is promised, whereas two others more modestly request escort to the ‘seats of the pure’; as in Pindar it is Persephone who makes the decision.29 In the remaining gold-leaf texts metempsychosis is not necessarily presupposed, but not excluded either.30 Herodotus refers to a more scientific conception of transmigration: the soul must wander through every domain of the cosmos, being drawn in with the breath of a newly born living creature.3‘ According to Empedocles the wandering through all of the elements is atonement for a blood guild incurred in the divine world; the goal is return to the gods, apotheosis.32 Many, as Plato asserts, hear in mysteries, teletai, and believe that there is not only punishment in the afterlife, but also that when the sinner returns again to this world the form of death he then meets with is exact retribution for earlier guilt. Aristotle quotes a verse attesting to this justice of Rhadamanthys.33

Aristotle also writes that it was stated ‘in the so-called Orphic poems’ that the soul, being borne by the winds from out of the universe, enters a living creature with its first breath; but he also knew Pythagorean myths according to which ‘any soul can enter any body.’34 And in a satirical poem, Xenophanes, our earliest witness for Pythagoras, ascribes to him the belief that a human soul, indeed the soul of a friend, could be present in a whipped dog.35

With Pythagoras we are finally confronted with a historical personality. It is not to be doubted that this man, born on Samos, was active in the second half of the sixth century in southern Italy, above all in Croton and Metapontum; his followers, Pythagoreioi, gained some prominence well into the fourth century, especially in Tarentum.36 From a later perspective Pythagoras became the founder of mathematics and mathematical science. The pre-Platonic testimonies point rather to a strange mixture of number symbolism, arithmetic, doctrines of immortality and the afterlife, and rules for an ascetic life. Legends which are old and characteristic introduce Pythagoras as the hierophant of an Eastern style Meter cult who proves his doctrine of immortality by a descent into the underworld. That an Ionian of the sixth century should assimilate elements of Babylonian mathematics, Iranian religion, and even Indian metempsychosis doctrine is intrinsically possible.

The apparently rival traditions of the Orphic and Pythagorean doctrines of metempsychosis are seen to coincide, when Pythagoreans from southern Italy, including Pythagoras himself, are mentioned along with Onomacritus as the true authors of Orphic poems.37 Admittedly, this is overlapping rather than identification. Bacchic, Orphic, and Pythagorean are circles each of which has its own centre, and while these circles have areas that coincide, each preserves its own special sphere. The nomenclature is based on different principles: mystery ritual, literature marked by the name of an author, and a historically fixed group with their master; Dionysos is a god, Orpheus a mythical singer and prophet, and Pythagoras a Samian of the sixth century. Within the sphere of Orphica, two schools may perhaps be distinguished, an Athenian-Eleusinian school which concentrated on the bestowal of culture allegedly to be found in the Demeter myth and the Eleusinian mysteries, and an Italian, Pythagorean school which took a more original path with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Orphic and Bacchic coincide in their concern for burial and the afterlife and probably also in the special myth of Dionysos Zagreus, while Orphic and Pythagorean coincide in the doctrine of metempsychosis and asceticism. However that may be, the difficulties of precise demarcation should not lead to a denial of the phenomena themselves.

What is most important is the transformation in the concept of the soul. psyche, which takes place in these circles?8 The doctrine of transmigration presupposes that in the living being, man as animal, there is an individual, constant something, an ego that preserves its identity by force of its own essence, independent of the body which passes away. Thus a new general concept of a living being is created, empsychon: ‘a. psyche is within.’ This psyche is obviously not the powerless, unconscious image of recollection in a gloomy Hades, as in Homer’s Nekyia; it is not affected by death: the soul is immortal. athanatos.39 That the epithet which since Homer had characterized the gods in distinction from men now becomes the essential mark of the human person is indeed a revolution.

This revolution, however, was brought about in stages with the result that the break could even be overlooked. At first this constant something is quite distinct from man’s empirical waking consciousness: Pindar describes it as the very opposite of this, sleeping when the limbs are active, but revealing its essence in dreams and finally in death.40 Ecstatic experiences of a Bacchic, Shamanistic, or Yoga type may stand in the background. Furthermore, what appears in the fifth century is not a complete and consistent doctrine of metempsychosis, but rather experimental speculations with contradictory principles of ritual and morality, and a groping for natural laws: the soul comes from the gods and after repeated trials returns to them, or else it runs forever in a circle through all spheres of the cosmos; sheer chance decides on the reincarnation, or else a judgement of the dead; it is morally blameless conduct that guarantees the better lot or else the bare fact of ritual initiation that frees from guilt.4’ The idea finally that the soul is some light, heavenly substance and that man’s soul will therefore eventually ascend to heaven set the stage for a momentous synthesis of cosmology and salvation religion.42 Since these contradictory motifs were assimilated at a pre-philosophical level, at the level of free mythoi and not as dogmas, the contradictions with the existing traditions were not found disquieting. Pindar is in a position to propound the doctrine of transmigration according to the predilections of his Sicilian patrons without infringing upon the traditional, aristocratic system. Even Plato holds that metempsychosis may offer an explanation for existing cults, if priests were to look for explanations at all instead of practising what is incomprehensible.43 He therefore intends to change as little as possible in the traditional polis cults. That the doctrine of metempsychosis, whether in its quasi-scientific form or in its moral variant, notwithstanding its role in mystery cults, should make ritual and thus polis religion superfluous, not even Plato was prepared to concede. And yet with the idea of the immortal soul the discovery of the individual had reached a goal which is only fulfilled in philosophy. It was Socratic care for the soul and Platonic metaphysics that gave it the classical form that was to predominate for thousands of years.

BIOS

Every initiation means a change in status that is irreversible; whoever has himself initiated on the basis of his individual decision separates himself from others and integrates himself into a new group. In his own eyes the mystes is distinguished by a special relation to the divine, by a form of piety. Every festival stands in contrast to everyday life; the sacred is followed by the freedom of the hosion.’ Yet the hosiotes gained by an initiate is of a special kind, corresponding with the purification which precedes initiation and sometimes contrasting with the initiation ritual itself. The mystai of Samothrace emphatically call themselves the pious and the just, whereas at the initiation a crime comes to the foreground.2 Vegetarianism follows on omophagy among the Idaean mystai of Euripides.3 And again the Bacchae of Euripides boast of the special purity of him who ‘knows the initiations of the gods’, and yet at the same time there is the ‘delight of omophagy’.4 In a simpler mood the Eleusinian mystai assert that they, as initiates, lead their life piously in relation to foreigners and to ordinary people.5 There were Laws of Triptolemos in Eleusis that laid down the duty ‘to honour parents, to glorify the gods with fruits, and not to harm animals’.6 This article however cannot have been intended to enforce general vegetarianism. Eleusinian mystai did not live a distinctive way of life. But the Idaean mystai in Euripides, once made hosioi, wear white garments, avoid contact with either birth or death and decline to eat anything in which there is a soul. Orphic motifs are probably making themselves felt here; for the distinctive, strict way of life, bios, is generally regarded as characteristic of the Orphics and the Pythag­oreans: there is a bios Orphikos as well as a bios Pythagoreios.

The Orphic life is determined above all by dietary taboos.7 Orphics eat no meat, no eggs,8 no beans,9 and they drink no wine.10 This kind of purity stands in polar opposition to the initiation in which animal sacrifices are generally involved. Bacchic initiations are unthinkable without wine. In myth Dionysos is boiled and roasted; precisely this, ‘to roast what has been boiled’, is expressly forbidden to the Orphics.” A late testimony seems to indicate that the initiate also had to swallow an egg.’2 Certain forms of sexual abstinence also evidently belonged to the Orphic life, yet we have to infer this from the reflections in myth.’3

To Orpheus and his followers Plato attributes a doctrine that gives a radical reason for all such renunciations: the soul has to ‘suffer punishment’ in this life for ‘whatever it may be’; it is enclosed in the body as in a prison which at the same time is to preserve and to protect the soul ‘until it has paid what is due’.’4 In the Phaedo Plato used the much discussed expression phroura, guard-post, for this protecting prison.’5 Aristotle also mentioned as a doctrine of ‘old seers and mystery priests’ that we are in this life and body ‘as punishment for certain great deviances’.16 The unnamed great crime is obviously the murder of Dionysos by the Titans, our ancestors. Only lifelong purity can eradicate the guilt, in particular abstinence from everything in which there is soul, empsychon. It is forbidden to kill oneself before the due time.’7 Thus myth becomes the foundation for a dramatic reversal of the values of life. Nothing but burden and punishment is to be looked for. But by this very fact those who are humiliated and oppressed in reality are given the possibility of finding meaning in a troublesome life. The wandering Orpheotelestai were themselves sometimes no better off than beggars.’8 Thus Orphism, like other sects, probably appealed to the class of the small man most of all.

It is hardly possible to find a single basic idea in the conglomerate of prescriptions that make up the Pythagorean life. They are called akousmata, things heard, derived from the oral teaching of the master, or symbola, tokens of identity.’9 They are not part of a ritual: there is no Pythagorean telete; the bios has discarded cult. Certain parallels to mystery rites remain: the prohibition of beans, the preference for white garments. It is amazing that there was not absolute vegetarianism, but special prohibitions on eating certain parts of sacrificial animals; piglet sacrifices, parts of which were eaten, are mentioned.20 There are rules designed to demonstrate exceptional piety: to enter the sanctuary barefoot, not to dip one’s hands in the water vessel at the entrance of the temple, to pour out libations at the handle of the vessel where human lips have not been placed. Prescriptions concerning burial are added, such as the prohibition of woollen garments mentioned by Herodotus.2‘ Many regulations affect everyday life: to straighten the bed when rising from it and to eliminate all traces of one’s presence; not to poke the fire with a knife; not to step over a broom or a yoke; not to sit down on a measure of corn; not to look into a mirror by light; not to speak without light; not to break bread; not to pick up what has fallen from the table, ‘because it belongs to the heroes.’ Outstanding among the purely moral prescriptions is that in contrast to normal practice the husband is forbidden extramarital sexual intercourse.22

To take the akousmata seriously means a disconcerting narrowing of life. As one rises or goes to bed, puts on shoes or cuts one’s nails, rakes the fire, puts on a pot or eats, there is always a rule to be observed, something wrong to be avoided. A mythical reflection of this scrupulousness is the belief that the whole air is full of souls: the motes in the air which one sees dancing in a ray of sunlight are indeed souls; Pythagoreans marvel at a man who believes he has never encountered a daimon.23 The Pythagoreans share with the Orphics the view that life is trouble and punishment: ‘Good are the troubles, but the pleasures are evil at all events; for whoever has come in for punishment must be punished.’24

Thanks to their tokens Pythagoreans met easily and extended financial and political support to one another. At least for a period, in Croton and in other places, a form of communal life arose of men and women bound together by their special rules; these communities almost look like an early form of monasteries.25 Whoever entered such a group had to renounce private possessions; he underwent a five-year period of silence; if he turned apostate he was treated as dead, and a gravestone was erected for him. Comparable radicalism is to be found only in Judaism.

The word puritanism has been used very tellingly to describe the Orphic and the Pythagorean bios,26 in the sense of a severe and gloomy view of life stressing by means of radical regulations the tension with this world and with corporeality as such. It is true that individual seers and wandering priests had probably always been prone to a distinctive way of life; Pythagoras is to be seen in a tradition of metragyrtai and miracle workers such as Epimenides.27 Certain abstinences and purifications were always demanded in connection with festivals and especially with initiations. Yet when the exceptional state becomes the permanent mark of a group, it changes its function. The alter­nating rhythm of the extraordinary and the normal is discarded, and in its place there appears the opposition between the common, despicable world and the special, self-chosen life. The peculiarities of this way of life require continuous self-confirmation in a closed circle. Thus Orphic and Pythag­orean purity can be interpreted as a protest movement against the established polis.28 The dietary taboos impeach the most elementary form of community, the community of the table; they reject the central ritual of traditional religion, the sacrificial meal. Yet Empedocles alone seems to have carried this out in a radical way. There were many possibilities of compromise, affecting even the doctrine of metempsychosis;29 initiation sacrifices continued to be performed. Yet the true act of divine service, for Orphics and Pythagoreans, was now the offering of incense.30 At all events, instead of the pre-existing communities of family, city, and tribe there was now a self-chosen form of association, a community based on a common decision and a common disposition of mind.

For the Pythagoreans this new form with its elitist claim led to catastrophe. In southern Italy around the middle of the fifth century political upheavals took place in the course of which the assembly houses of the Pythagoreans were set on fire, and Pythagoreans were massacred in large numbers.3‘ Civil war was no rarity in Greek cities; yet here for the first time it seems to have led to a kind of pogrom, the persecution of those who were different from others in their way of life and disposition. Thereafter Pythagoreanism remained a marginal phenomenon, an undercurrent that manifested itself in changing forms. The tradition of Pythagoras was associated with dietetic medicine, that is, the method of protecting health through a precisely regulated way of life on the basis of individual decision (diaita) ,3Q and also with the movement of the cynics who went to extremes in their protest against the established customs through a provocative life style,33 and finally with the Essenes, the Jewish sect that had its monasteries by the Dead Sea.34 The form of the self-imposed bios can as easily lead beyond religion itself as become the starting-point for an entirely new and different kind of religion. Yet this only took full effect long after the end of the Classical Age.

2.3 Orpheus and Pythagoras

VI 2.3                                                                                        ORPHEUS AND PYTHAGORAS 463

  • Resp. 364 b—365 a; Graf 14-16.
  • See VI 2.1 n. 19.
  • Lac. apophth. 224 e; Theophr. Char. 16.12.
  • Hippol. 952-4.
  • 94-150.
  • OF 60-235; the anthropogony only occurs in Olympiod. In Plat. Phd. 41 Westerink = OF 220, a text not derived from the Rhapsodies; Titans as man’s ancestors in Dion Or. 30.10, and already in Hymn. Apoll. 336, cf. Plat. Leg. 701 c.
  • Fr. 643; Euphorion Fr. 13 (Powell); W. Fauth, RE IX A 2 2 21-83.
  • Linforth (see n. 1) 307-64; HN 225 n. 43; the picture on a fourth-century Pelike, Leningrad 1792 St., GGR 46.1 has been interpreted as referring to the birth of chthonic Dionysos, E. Simon AK 9 (1966) 78-86, Graf 67-76.
  • Xenocrates 20 (Heinze), referring to Plat. Phd. 62 b.
  • Crat. 400 c; Leg. 701 c.
  • Murray in Harrison (2) 342 f.; Hdt. 2.49; Diod. 1.22.7, Plut- ^- 358 b.
  • Fr. 133.1; P. Tannery, RPh 22 (1899) 129; HJ. Rose, HThR 33 (1943) 247.
  • See n. 15.
  • See III 2.10 n. 15. Anthropogony from a slain god is Babylonian, ANET68; 99 f.; V. Maag, Kultur, Kulturkontakt und Religion, 1980, 38-59.
  • See VI 2.2 n. 1; Gnomon 46 (1974) 327.
  • See VI 2.2 n. 20.
  • OF 224.
  • Hopf, Anlike Seelenwanderungsvorstellungen, Dissertation, Leipzig, 1934; W. Stettner, Die Seelenwanderung bei Griechen und Romern, 1934; H.S. Long, A Study of the Doctrine of Metempsychosis in Greece from Pythagoras to Plato, 1948; L&S 120-36, on India, 133 n. 71.
  • 01. 2.56-80; Fr. 129-31; 133; K. v. Fritz, Phronesis 2 (1957) 85-9; D. RolofT, Gottdhnlichkeit, Vergbttlichung und Erhebung gu seligem Leben, 1970, 186-97.
  • See VI 2.2 nn. 20-22; Zuntz 336 f.
  • See VI 2.2 n. 9.
  • 2.123.
  • Empedocles VS 31 B 115-46; Zuntz 181-274.
  • Leg. 870 de; Arist. EN 1132 b 25; cf. Pind. 01. 2.57 f.; Plat. Meno 81 b.
  • An. 410 b 29 = OF 27; AN 407 b 20; L & S 121.
  • PS 21 B 7 = 7 a (West); L&S 120.
  • L & S 109-20. A coin from Metapontum, fourth century bc, with a portrait of Pythagoras, was published in lamblichus, De Vita Pythagorica, L. Deubner, 2nd edn, ed. U. Klein, 1975, xx.
  • Ion PS B 2 = FGrHist 392 F 25; Suda s.v. Orpheus, cf. Arist. 7.75; L&S 128-31.

38 Rohde II 1-37 tried to derive this from Dionysiac ecstasy, Dodds 135-78 from Scythian shamanism; ci. L & S 162-5; Jaeger 88-106. Sceptical observations in Claus 111-21, who, however, disregards empsychon.

39 First direct attestation: Hdt. 2.123, *n the context of metempsychosis. Dikaiarchos in Porph. Vit. Pyth. 19 on Pythagoras; Aristotle on Alcmaeon, VS 24 A 12; E. Ehnmark ‘Some remarks on the idea of immortality in Greek religion’, Eranos 46 (1948) 1-21; W. Jaeger, ‘The Greek ideas of immortality’, HThR 52 (1959) 135~47 = Humanistische Reden und Vortrdge, 2nd edn, i960, 287-99.

40 Pind. Fr. 131 b; L&S 134.

41 L & S 133-5.

42 In all probability Iranian influences were active here: F. Cumont, Lux Perpetua,

464 NOTES TO PAGES 3OO-9                                                                                                                VI 3

1949; B.L. van der Waerden, Die Anfange der Astronomie, 1966, 204-52; L & S 357“68.

43 Plat. Meno 81 a.

3 BIOS

  • See V 4 n. 8.
  • Aristoph. Pax 278; SIG 1052 f.; see VI 1.3 n. 34.
  • Fr. 472; see VI 1.2 n. 23.
  • Bacch. 74, 139.
  • Ran. 455.
  • Xenocrates 98 (Heinze) in Porph. Abst. 4.22.
  • Leg. 782 c; Eur. Hipp. 952; J. Haussleiter, Der Vegetarismus in derAntike, 1935, 79-96.
  • Q. conv. 635 e; Macr. Sat. 7.16.8.
  • <^291.
  • Drunkenness is Dionysos’ revenge for his ‘sufferings’, Plat. 672 b.
  • Probl. ined. 3.43 (Bussemaker); Iambi. Fit. Pyth. 154; Ath. 656 b.
  • Cap. 2.140; P. Boyance, MEFR 52 (1935) 95-112.
  • Both Orpheus and Hippolytos are represented as misogynists.
  • Crat. 400 c.
  • Phd. 62 b, with the commentary of Xenocrates, see VI 2.3 n. 18.
  • Fr. 60.
  • Phd. 62 b; J.C.G. Strachan, CQ 20 (1970) 216-20.
  • Lac. apophth. 224 e; Plat. Resp. 364 b.

19 F. Boehm, De symbolis Pythagoreis, Dissertation, Berlin, 1905; Haussleiter (see n. 7) 97—157J L & S 166-92.

20 L & S 180-2.

21 See VI 2.2 n. 11.

22 Iambi. Vit. Pyth. 50, 132.

23 Arist. An. 404 a 16; Fr. 193.

24 Iambi. Vit. Pyth. 85; his source is Aristotle.

25 Iambi. Vit. Pyth. 96-100, probably following Aristoxenus; but lamblichus is writing with an eye to Christianity and may have retouched the picture.

26 Dodds 135-78.

27 L & S 147-61.

  • Detienne, ‘La cuisine de Pythagore’, Arch, de Social, des Rei. 29 (1970) 141-62; cf. Detienne (2) 163-217.
  • ‘A human soul does not enter animals which may be sacrificed,’ Iambi. Pyth. 85; or, alternatively: to be killed in sacrifice is justly ordained execution as atonement for a crime committed in an earlier existence, Porph. in Stob. 1.49.59, cf. Plat. Leg. 870 e; L & S 182.
  • This is the only form of offering acknowledged in the late collection of Orphic Hymns.
  • L & S 117.
  • L & S
  • L & S 202-4.
  • Ant. lud. 15.10.4.

 

1 Basic collection of material in OF (1922); W.K.C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion, 1935 (2nd edn, 1952); K. Ziegler, RE X VIII 1200-316, 1321-417; I.M. Linforth, The Arts of Orpheus, 1941; Nilsson Op. II 628-83; Dodds 147-9; L. Moulinier, Orphe’e et I’orphisme a I’epoque classique, 1955; L&S 125-36; Graf (1974); Wilamowitz advocated extreme scepticism towards everything ‘Orphic’, GdH II 182-204, followed by Linforth, Moulinier, Zuntz.

3 A.S. Rusajeva, Vestnik Drevnej Istorii 143 (1978) 87-104; M.L. West, ZPE 45 (1982) 17-29-

4 Ibykos PMG 306; frieze from the Sikyonian treasury at Delphi.

5 OF 14-16; 21; 24-8; on the different versions of Orphic theogony W. Staudacher, Die Trennung von Himmel und Erde, 1942, 77-121; M.L. West, The Orphic Poems, 1983-

6 Graf 158-81; 139-50.

7 Paus. 8.37.5; 1.22.7; Philoponos In de an. 186.26 on Arist. Fr. 7. The whole tradition on Onomacritus may be fanciful elaboration of Hdt. 7.6 (see II 8 n. 90).

8 Graf 22-39.

9 Paus. 9.27.2; 9.30.12; Ephoros FGrHist 70 F 104.