A History of Ancient Greek Literature. Gilbert Murray

reward beyond the grave to the 'pure' and the 'impure' -- of course, none but the initiated being ultimately quite pure; and in the incarnation and suffering of Dionysus-Zagreus. Zagreus was the son of Zeus and the Maiden (Korê); he was torn asunder by Titans, who were then blasted by the thunderbolt. Man's body is made of their dead ashes, and his soul of the living blood of Zagreus. Zagreus was born again of Zeus and the mortal woman Sernelê; lived as man, yet god; was received into heaven and became the highest, in a sense the only, god. An individual worshipper of Bacchus could develop his divine side till he became himself a 'Bacchos,' his potential divinity realised.

      So a worshipper of Kybêbê in Phrygia became Kybêbos; and many Orphic prophets became Orpheus. The fabled Mænad orgies never appear historically in Greece. The connection with wine was explained away by the elect, and was in reality secondary. Dionysus is the god within, the spirit of worship and inexplicable joy: he appears best in communion with pure souls and the wild things of nature on the solitary mountains under the stars.

      The Orphic hymns brim over with this joy; they are full of repetitions and magniloquence, and make for emotion. The first hymn -- very late but typical -- runs: "I call Hecatê of the Ways, of the Cross-ways, of the darkness, of the Heaven and the Earth and the Sea; saffron-clad goddess of the grave, exulting amid the spirits of the dead, Perseia, lover of loneliness, Queen who holdest the Keys of the World, . . . be present at our pure service with the fulness of joy in thine heart."

      That hymn dates from the fourth century A.D., and so do most of our complete Orphic poems. We only possess them in their last form, when the religion was a dying thing. But it is a remarkable fact, that there is no century from the fourth A.D. to the sixth B.C. which is without some more or less celebrated Orphic teachers. At the height of the classical epoch, for instance, we know of a strong Orphic 'spirit in Pindar, Empedocles, Ion of Chios, Cratinus the comedian, Prodicus the philosopher, and probably in Euripides. Plato complains of the "crowd of books by Orpheus and Musæus," and inveighs against their doctrine of ceremonial forgiveness of sins. Besides this 'crowd' -- in the case of Musæus it amounted at least to eleven sets of poems and numerous oracles -- there were all kinds of less reputable prophets and purifiers. There was a type called 'Bakis' -- any one sufficiently 'pure' was apparently capable of becoming a Bakis -- whose oracles were a drug in the Athenian market. Epimenides, the medicine-man from Crete, who purified Athens after Kylon's murder, was the reputed author of Argonaulika,* Purifications,* and Oracles.* Though he slept twenty years in a cave, he has more claim to reality than a similar figure, Abâris, who went round the world with -- or, as some think, on -- a golden arrow given him by Apollo. Abaâris passed as pre-Homeric; but his reputed poems were founded on the epic of the historical Aristeas of Proconnêsus about the Arimaspi, which contained revelations acquired in trances about the hyperboreans and the griffins. Aristeas appeared in Sicily at the same time that he died in Proconnêsus.

These were hangers-on of Orphism; the head centre seems to have been Onomacritus. He devoted himself to shaping the religious policy of Pisistratus and Hipparchus, and forging or editing ancient Orphic poems. He is never quoted as an independent author. The tradition dislikes him, and says that he was caught in the act of forging an oracle of Musæus, and banished with disgrace by Hipparchus. However, it has to admit that he was a friend of that prince in his exile,7 and it cannot deny that he formed one of the chief influences of the sixth century.

      Before the sixth century we get no definitely Orphic literature, but we seem to find traces of the influence, or perhaps of the spirit, from which it sprung. The curious hymn to 'Hecatê the Only-born' in the Theogony(411 f.) cannot be called definitely Orphic, but it stands by itself in the religion of the Hesiodic poems. The few references to Dionysus in Homer have an 'interpolated' or 'un-Homeric' look, and that which tells of the sin and punishment of Lycurgus implies.

the existence of an Orphic missionary tale.8 The eternal punishment of the sinners in λ seems Orphic; so does the curious fact that the hero saw none of the blest. He could not, because he was not initiated. The Homeric preludes to Ares, to. Athena, and perhaps that to Poseidon, show some traces of the movement. Among the early epics the Alcmônis* dealt largely with purification, and contained a prayer to 'Zagreus, all-highest of all gods.' The Corinthian epics of Eumêlusshow a similar strain. Eumêlus was of the clan Bacchiadæ, his Eurôpia* was about Dionysus, and he treated the Orphic subjects of Medea and the Titan War. Several epics, like the Minyas,* contained apocalyptic accounts of Hades. The important fact is that the mystical and 'enthusiastic' explanation of the world was never without its apostles in Greece, though the main current of speculation, as directed by Athens, set steadily contrariwise, in the line of getting bit by bit at the meaning of things through hard thinking.

1 Jahn-Michaelis, Bilder-Chroniken. The Tab. Il.is in Baumeister's Denkmäler.

2 See Bethe in Hermes, 26.

3 Ath. 481 e, 477 d.

4 Pind., Nem.2. Cf.Θ,499.

5 See esp. 31.

6 Paus. ix. 31, 4.

7 Herodt. vii. 6.

8 Z., 132 f.

      III

      THE DESCENDANTS OF HOMER, HESIOD, ORPHEUS

       Table of Contents

      EPOS

      THE end of the traditional epos came with the rise of the idea of literary property. A rhapsode like Kynæthus would manipulate the Homer he recited, without ever wanting to publish the poems as his own. Onomacritus would hand over his laborious theology to Orpheus without intending either dishonesty or self-sacrifice. This community of literary goods lasted longer in the epos than in the song; but Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus had by the sixth and fifth centuries to make room for living poets who stood on their own feet.

The first epic poet in actual history is generally given as PISANDER of Camîrus, in Rhodes, author of an Heracleia.* Tradition gives him the hoariest antiquity, but he appears really to be only the Rhodian 'Homer.' The fragments themselves bear the brand of the sixth century, the talk of sin and the cry for purification. Pisander is not mentioned in classical times; he was, perhaps, 'discovered' by the romantic movement of the third century, as the earliest literary authority for the Heracles of the Twelve Labours, the Lion-skin and the Club.1 Heracles was also the hero of the prophet and poet PANYÂSIS of Halicarnassus: the name is Carian, but the man was the uncle of Herodotus, and met his death in a rebellion against Lygdamis, the Carian governor of his native state. He wrote elegies as well as his epic. One Alexandrian critic puts Panyâsis next to Homer among epic poets: generally, he came fourth, after Hesiod and Antimachus. In Quintilian he appears as a mixture of the last two writers -- his matter more interesting than Hesiod's, his arrangement better than that of Antimachus. The fragments are un-Homeric, but strong and well written. Accident has preserved us three pieces somewhat in the tone of the contemporary sympotic elegy. One speaker praises drink and the drinker with great spirit; another answers that the first. cup is to the Charites and Hôral and