[radcliffe_g._edmonds_(editor)]_the_'orphic'_gold_(booksee.org).pdf

THE ORPHIC GOLD TABLETSAND GREEK RELIGION

The Orphic gold tablets, tiny scraps of gold foil found in gravesthroughout the ancient Greek world, are some of the most fascinatingand baing pieces of evidence for ancient Greek religion. This col-lection brings together a number of previously published and unpub-lished studies from scholars around the world, making accessible to awider audience some of the new methodologies being applied to thestudy of these tablets. The volume also contains an updated edition ofthe tablet texts, reecting the most recent discoveries and accompa-nied by English translations and critical apparatus. This survey oftrends in the scholarship, with an up-to-date bibliography, not onlyprovides an introduction to the serious study of the tablets, but alsoilluminates their place within scholarship on ancient Greek religion.

radcliffe g. edmonds ii i is an Associate Professor in theDepartment of Greek, Latin & Classical Studies at Bryn MawrCollege. He is the author of Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato,Aristophanes and the Orphic Gold Tablets (Cambridge, 2004).

THE ORPHIC GOLD TABLETSAND GREEK RELIGION

Further along the path

edited by

RADCLIFFE G. EDMONDS III

cambr idge univer s i ty pre s sCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore,

So Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City

Cambridge University PressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.orgInformation on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521518314

Cambridge University Press 2011

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place without the written

permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

isbn 978-0-521-51831-4 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence oraccuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to inthis publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,

or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of contributors page viiAcknowledgements viiiNote on abberivations x

part i the tablet texts 1

1 Who are you? A brief history of the scholarshipRadclie G. Edmonds III 3

2 The Orphic gold tablets: Texts and translations, with criticalapparatus and tablesRadclie G. Edmonds III 15

part ii texts and contexts 51

3 Text and ritual: The Corpus Eschatologicum of the OrphicsFritz Graf 53

4 Are the Orphic gold leaves Orphic?Alberto Bernab and Ana I. Jimnez San Cristbal 68

5 A child of Earth am I and of starry Heaven: Concerning theanthropology of the Orphic gold tabletsHans Dieter Betz (translated by Maria Sturm) 102

6 Common motifs in the Orphic B tablets and Egyptianfunerary texts: Continuity or convergence?Thomas M. Dousa 120

7 Center, periphery, or peripheral center: A Cretan connectionfor the gold lamellae of CreteYannis Z. Tzifopoulos 165

v

part iii semiotic and narrative analyses 201

8 Funerary gold lamellae and Orphic papyrus commentaries:Same use, dierent purposeClaude Calame (translated by Sarah Melker) 203

9 Initiation death underworld: Narrative and ritual in thegold leavesChristoph Riedweg 219

10 Sacred scripture or oracles for the dead? The semiotic situationof the Orphic gold tabletsRadclie G. Edmonds III 257

11 Dialogues of immortality from the Iliad to the gold leavesMiguel Herrero de Juregui 271

12 Poetry and performance in the Orphic gold leavesDirk Obbink 291

13 Rushing into milk: New perspectives on the gold tabletsChristopher A. Faraone 310

Compiled Bibliography 331Index 372Index locorum 375

vi Contents

Contributors

alberto bernabe, Catedrtico de Filologa Griega, UniversidadComplutense de Madrid.

hans dieter betz, Shailer Mathews Professor of New TestamentStudies (emeritus), University of Chicago.

claude calame, Directeur dtudes en littrature grecque et socit lcole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

thomas m. dousa, doctoral student, Graduate School of Library andInformation Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

radcliffe g. edmonds iii , Associate Professor of Greek, Latin &Classical Studies, Bryn Mawr College.

christopher a. faraone, The Frank Curtis Springer and GertrudeMelcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and in the College,University of Chicago.

fritz graf, Professor of Greek and Latin, The Ohio State University.

miguel herrero de jauregui, Investigador Contratado Ramn yCajal, Departamento de Filologa Griega y Lingstica Indoeuropea,Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

ana i. j imenez san cristobal, Profesora Titular de Filologa Griega,Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

dirk obbink, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan.

christoph riedweg, Professor of Classics/Greek Literature, Universityof Zrich, currently Director of the Swiss Institute in Rome.

yannis z. tzifopoulos, Associate Professor of Greek and Epigraphy,Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki.

vii

Acknowledgements

In some sense, this volume represents the thoughts that emerged, not froma single conference, but from a series of conferences. The rst was aconference, Roads Not Taken: Explorations of the Orphic GoldTablets, which, under the guidance of our mentor, ChristopherFaraone, I put together with Sarah Cohen in 1997 at the Franke Institutefor the Humanities at the University of Chicago while we were bothgraduate students. At that conference, Hans Dieter Betz presented anEnglish version of the paper he was preparing for the festschrift forWalter Burkert that was published the subsequent year. Fritz Graf pre-sented an overview of the tablets and their place within Orphic eschato-logical literature, ideas which were subsequently adapted and published inan Italian collection. Thomas Dousa, then a graduate student at theOriental Institute at Chicago, presented a version of the paper he hasexpanded and revised for this volume. The second conference was theVergilian Societys Symposium Cumanum The Cults of Magna Graecia,in June 2002, where I rst met Alberto Bernab and Ana Jimnez andbegan our long, stimulating, and fruitful dialogue about the nature ofOrphic materials. The third conference was Orfeo y el orsmo: nuevasperspectivas, organized by Bernab and his colleague, Francesc Casadess,in Mallorca, Spain, in February 2005. At this conference I met ChristophRiedweg and Miguel Herrero, and began to formulate the idea of puttingtogether this volume, including the papers that Herrero and I presented atthat conference.

Some additions have been made to the papers that grew out of theseconferences, notably the seminal article of Claude Calame, which was soinuential for subsequent scholarship, and the work of Yannis Tzifopoulos.Dirk Obbinks paper had been presented at the APA in 1992, but was neverpublished, although it was cited several times by members of that originalaudience. Christopher Faraone, whose essay also appears in this volume,was the one who suggested that I try to get it published, and I thank him

viii

and Dirk Obbink for their eorts in bringing this nearly lost text back intothe light.

None of these essays has appeared in quite the same form before, butsome have been translated or otherwise adapted from previously publishedpieces. Fritz Grafs chapter, Text and Ritual: The Corpus Eschatologicumof the Orphics was originally published as Text and Ritual: The CorpusEschatologicum of the Orphics, in La letteratura pseudepigrafa nellacultura greca e romana, Atti di un incontro di studi Napoli, 1517 gennaio1998, ed. Giovanni Cerri, Naples, 2000, pp. 5977. Are the Orphic GoldLeaves Orphic? by Alberto Bernab and Ana I. Jimnez San Cristbal is anadapted translation from their 2001 volume, Instrucciones para el ms all.Las laminillas rcas de oro, now published in English as A. Bernab andA. I. Jimnez San Cristbal (2008) Instructions for the Netherworld. TheOrphic Gold Tablets, Leiden, Boston, MA and Cologne. A Child of Eartham I and of starry Heaven: Concerning the Anthropology of the OrphicGold Tablets by Hans Dieter Betz was originally published as Der ErdeKind bin ich und des gestirnten Himmels: Zur Lehre vom Menschen inden orphischen Goldplttchen, from Ansichten griechischer Rituale:Geburtstags-Symposium fr Walter Burkert, ed. Fritz Graf, B.G. Teubner:Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998, pp. 399419, and has been translated for thisvolume by Maria Sturm. Claude Calames Orphic Invocations andCommentaries: Funerary Transpositions of Religious Discourse was origi-nally published as Invocations et commentaires orphiques: Transpositionsfunraires de discours religieux, from Discours religieux dans lantiquit,ed. Marie-Madeleine Mactoux and Evelyne Geny, Annales littraires delUniversit de Besanon, no. 578, Les Belles Lettres: Paris, 1995, pp. 1130,and has been translated for this volume by Sarah Melker. ChristophRiedwegs Initiation Death Underworld: Narrative and Ritual in theGold Leaves was originally published as Initiation Tod Unterwelt:Beobachtungen zur Kommunikationssituation und narrativen Technik derorphisch-bakchischen Goldblttchen, from Ansichten griechischer Rituale:Geburtstags-Symposium fr Walter Burkert, ed. Fritz Graf, B.G. Teubner:Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1998, pp. 359398, but has been adapted and translatedfor this volume by the author, with the assistance of Andreas Schatzmann,incorporating material from Riedwegs Posie orphique et rituel initiatique:lments dun Discours sacr dans les lamelles dor, Revue de lhistoire desreligions 219: 459481. My thanks to all of those involved in the laboriousprocess of translation, adaptation, and editing of all these essays, and espe-cially to Edward Whitehouse for his work on the indexes.

Acknowledgements ix

Thanks are also due to Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press,who encouraged me in this project and helped shepherd me through thevarious stages of it, to the readers for the Press, who contributed valuablecritiques that helped to shape the nal form of these essays, and to theeditors and assistants at Cambridge who helped whip the manuscript intoshape.

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations of ancient authors and works follow those of The OxfordClassical Dictionary, 3rd edn. Oxford 1999.

x Acknowledgements

part i

The tablet texts

chapter 1

Who are you?A brief history of the scholarship

Radclie G. Edmonds III

I am parched with thirst and I perish.But give me to drink from the ever-owing springon the right, by the cypress.Who are you? Where are you from?I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.

(gold tablet B4 from Crete = OF 479 Bernab 200407)

Who are you? ask the unnamed guardians, as the deceased begs for thewater of Memory. Where are you from? From the discovery of the rstgold lamellae in the nineteenth century to the most recent discoveries,scholars have asked much the same questions about the tablets themselves:Who are the people who chose to have these enigmatic scraps of gold foilburied with them in their graves? Where do these texts come from? Howcan we reconstruct the religious context of these mysterious texts?

Recent discoveries have prompted scholars to examine from new theo-retical perspectives both the contexts in which the tablets were producedand the structures of the texts themselves. This collection brings together inEnglish a number of previously published and new studies of the OrphicGold tablets, with the goal of making accessible to a wider audience some ofthe new methodologies being applied to the study of the tablets. Inaddition, a survey of the trends in the scholarship and a compilation ofthe recent bibliography not only provides an introduction to the seriousstudy of the tablets, but also illuminates the place of these tablets within thescholarship of ancient Greek religion.

A brief overview of the texts themselves and of the scholarly attempts toexplain where these texts came from may help orient the reader and preparethe ground for the new perspectives oered here. Relative to the mass ofmaterial in the canon of classical material, these gold tablets are newdiscoveries, latecomers to the ongoing study of ancient Greek culture.While much of the other evidence for Orphism and Greek religion came

3

through the manuscript tradition, in the works of the Neoplatonists or theauthors of the classical period, the gold tablets, like the Derveni Papyrus,were buried for centuries, out of the reckoning of scholars in the receptionand transmission of the classical tradition.

The scholarship on the gold tablets really begins only in 1879, even thoughthis date is more than forty years after the rst of the tablets was discovered.In 1879, excavations in two tumuli at Thurii in southern Italy uncovered fourtombs containing gold lamellae. The three tombs in Timpone Piccoloyielded the tablets subsequently labeled A1, A2, and A3, while the nearbyTimpone Grande had a single tomb, in which tablet A4 was found, wrappedup in the peculiar tablet C1. The text of A1 is the most extensive:

Pure I come from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,and Eukles and Eubouleus and the other immortal gods;For I also claim that I am of your blessed race.But Fate mastered me and the Thunderer, striking with his lightning.I ew out of the circle of wearying heavy grief;I came on with swift feet to the desired crown;I passed beneath the bosom of the Mistress, Queen of the Underworld,Happy and most blessed one, a god you shall be instead of a mortal.A kid I fell into milk.

A2 and A3 have nearly identical texts, similar to A1.

Pure I come from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,And Eukles and Eubouleus and the other gods and daimons;For I also claim that I am of your blessed race.Recompense I have paid on account of deeds not just;Either Fate mastered me or the lightning bolt thrown by the thunderer.Now I come, a suppliant, to holy Phersephoneia,That she, gracious, may send me to the seats of the blessed.

A4, from the other tumulus, seems an entirely dierent text:

But when the soul leaves the light of the sun,go straight to the right, having kept watch on all things very well.Hail, you having experienced the experience you had not experienced

before.A god you have become from a man. A kid you fell into milk.Hail, hail; making your way to the right,the sacred meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.

Lamella C1, in which A4 was carefully folded, is incomprehensible, a soupof letters, out of which various editors have picked key words that t in withtheir preconceived notions of its meaning rather like a Rorschach blot.

4 radcliffe g. edmonds iii

To explain these odd texts, the excavators called in the eminent classicistDomenico Comparetti, and Comparettis explanation set the terms of thedebate for the next century and a quarter. In his article in the 1882 Journal ofHellenic Studies, Comparetti linked the tablets from Thurii with anothertablet, discovered in nearby Petelia nearly forty years earlier, in which thespeaker claims to be the child of Earth and starry Heaven.

You will nd in the halls of Hades a spring on the left,and standing by it, a glowing white cypress tree;Do not approach this spring at all.You will nd the other, from the lake of Memory,refreshing water owing forth. But guardians are nearby.Say: I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven;But my race is heavenly; and this you know yourselves.But I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quicklyrefreshing water owing forth from the lake of Memory.And then they will give you to drink from the divine spring,And then you will celebrate? [the rites? with] the heroes.This [is the ? . . . of Memory, when you are about] to die ..?write this? . . . . . . ].?? shadow covering around

The mention of the water of Memory had led the rst editors to associatethe tablet with the oracle of Trophonius described by Pausanias.1 The childof Earth and starry Heaven they naturally read as Mnemosyne, goddess ofMemory, since all the deities of the pre-Olympian generation had Gaia andOuranos as parents. Comparetti, however, proposed a dierent reading. Heunderstood the child of Earth and starry Heaven to refer to the Titans,and he took the references to lightning and unjust deeds in the Thuriitablets to refer to murder by the Titans of the infant Dionysos, for whichthey were blasted by Zeus lightning.

Drawing on the account in the Neoplatonist Olympiodorus, Comparettipostulated an Orphic doctrine of original sin, founded on the shared guilt ofmankind as descendants of the Titans. The tablets, he argued, provideevidence for the main principles of the Orphic doctrine on psychogonyand metempsychosis, since the Olympiodoranmyth of anthropogony fromthe remains of the Titans furnishes mankind with a Titanic element, mixedin with the pure divinity of the soul. This Titanic element is the originalguilt for which the human soul is excluded from the community of the othergods and from her blessed abode, and is condemned to a succession of birthsand deaths.2 The anthropogony, attested explicitly only in the sixth ce

1 Goettling 1843: 8. The rst publication of the Petelia tablet was in Franz 1836: 149150.2 Comparetti 1882: 116.

Who are you? A brief history of the scholarship 5

Olympiodorus, thus provides the basis for all of the doctrines about the souland reincarnation attested to for Orpheus and his followers.3

In linking these texts to Orphism, Comparetti brought crucial newevidence into a debate over the nature of Orphism that had been ragingthroughout the nineteenth century. Perhaps the twomost important guresin this debate were Friedrich Creuzer and Charles Augustus Lobeck, buteach side had its partisans, and the controversies ranged over various issues.Creuzers Orphism was very much the heir of the Neoplatonic constructionof Orphism that is, as religious doctrines containing the secret wisdom ofthe ancients, preserved in enigmatic or allegorical form. For Creuzer it waspart of the secret tradition that ultimately went back to India, an abstracttheology that had to be passed on in the symbolic form of myths. Lobeck,however, rejected Creuzers symbolic interpretation and scoed at the ideaof a deep wisdom hidden within the texts. While dierent scholars fellsomewhere between the two extremes, uncomfortable with Lobecks radicalscepticism but unwilling to accept all of Creuzers symbolism, most accep-ted one basic Neoplatonic premise, that there was a coherent body ofOrphic ideas to be found not only in the various texts ascribed toOrpheus but also other texts that contained similar ideas. In none ofthese scholars, however, does Comparettis idea of an Orphic doctrine oforiginal guilt appear, even though Olympiodorus myth is known anddiscussed. Nevertheless, Comparettis Orphic Titanic interpretation waspicked up by Dieterich in his 1893Nekyia, which postulated a secret Orphickatabasis tradition that contributed to early Christian eschatologicalimagery, and the idea made its way into some of the most inuential studiesof Greek religion at the time, such as Rohdes Psyche and HarrisonsProlegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.

In the succeeding years, more tablets were published. Three tablets fromCrete were published in 1893 whose texts were similar to the Petelia tablet,but much abbreviated, containing only the essential features of the tree, thewater of Memory, and the claim to be the child of Earth and starry Heaven.

In 1903, Comparetti published a tablet from Rome, A5, which resemblesthe tablets from Thurii, but also mentions Mnemosyne.

Pure she comes from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,Eukles and Eubouleus, child of Zeus. But receive

3 For the peculiarities of Olympiodorus account see Brisson 1992, Edmonds 1999, and Edmonds2009. Olympiodorus is the only source to combine an anthropogony with the story of Dionysosdismemberment, rather than with the Titanomachy. For a defense of Comparettis reading, seeBernab 2002e and 2003a.


this gift of Memory, famed in song among men.Caecilia Secundina, come, having become a goddess by the custom.

This tablet seems to date from the second century ce, nearly ve hundredyears later than any of the other tablets found. Nevertheless, Comparettisaw this as the link between the two types of tablets, evidence that theyshared a common source, a source he imagined as an Orphic sacred text.

Comparettis interpretation was made canonical by the publication ofthese tablets in the collections of DielsKranz (Orpheus the pre-Socratic!)and Kern, whose 1922 edition of the Orphic fragments has only beenreplaced by Bernabs recent edition. The tablets became a standard pieceof evidence in the description of Orphism, and Comparettis explanation ofthem in terms of the myth of Dionysos Zagreus formed the backbone of theunderstanding of Orphism for this period.

The nature of Orphism and of other Greek mystery religions was a hottopic among the scholars of religion, and the question of the relation of theGreek mysteries to early Christianity was often debated.4 Orphism asreconstructed by Comparetti and elaborated by Macchioro and the likewas an important player in this game, since Orphism was easily comparableto Protestantism a movement protesting against mainstream Greekreligion, complete with its own doctrine of original sin coupled with theinnate divinity of mankind. Graf has discussed the role that Orphism playedin the culture wars of this period over the role of institutional religion inthe modern nation state, where the historicization of Christianity by tracingits connections with pagan antiquity had signicant repercussions for con-temporary society.5 It is important, however, to note that the same basicreconstruction of Orphismwas used on all sides of these issues, although thedetails were manipulated back and forth to support dierent positions. Theelaborations of this imagined Orphism became more and more grandiose,prompting a skeptical reaction and critiques. In the wake of these critiques, thescholarship divided into two camps, the PanOrphist and the Orpheoskeptic,reminiscent of the divisions in the previous century between Creuzer andLobeck. While the latter denied that Orphism ever existed as a coherentreligious movement, the former developed the picture of a dogmatic religion

4 Comparetti indeed notes the importance and interest of the tablets to the study of Christian origins.Quindi grande pure la discrepanza di opinioni emesse su tal soggetto dal dotti moderni, dal Lobeckal Rohde ed alla pleiade di dotti che in questi ultimi tempi hanno scrutato le non numerose notiziepervenuteci sui misteri antichi, oggi particolarmente e con grande interesse studiati in correlazionecolle origini e i precedenti del misticismo cristiano. Comparetti 1910: 51 (emphasis added).

5 Graf and Johnston 2007: 5861. Smith 1990 discusses the long history of the study of Greek mysteriesin relation to early Christianity, pointing out many of the uses to which they were put.


whose sectaries and doctrines inuenced Greek religion and culture from thePisistratids to Plato to Paul. In each generation of scholarship, the gold tabletsremained central to the debate. In his superb critical work of 1941, The Arts ofOrpheus, the skeptic Linforth pointedly omitted the tablets and refused evento discuss them as Orphic, while Guthrie relied on their testimony at crucialpoints in hisOrpheus and Greek Religion, a balanced and scholarly restatementof the PanOrphist position.6

It is worth noting the balance in types of tablets found at this point. Ofthe tablets found, four were of the pure from the pure A type, and fourwere of the child of Earth and starry Heaven B type. No more tabletsresembling the Thurii tablets have been found, however, making themseem a more isolated phenomenon, especially since only the two identicaltablets A2 and A3 actually have the lightning and unjust deeds central toComparettis thesis. By contrast, eight more B tablets have been publishedin the intervening years, and more are soon to be published by Tzifopoulos.Four of these from Crete (as well as the most recently discovered ones) andone said to be from Thessaly are the abbreviated version (B6B9 and B12),like the other Cretan tablets, but several longer versions, like the Peteliatablet, have been found (B2, B10, B11). Tablet B10 from Hipponion,published in 1975, remains the most signicant of these, not only becauseit seems to be the earliest in date (end of the 5th century), but because it isthe longest and most complete version surviving. Indeed, the discovery ofthe Hipponion tablet, coming as it did so soon after the discovery of theDerveni Papyrus, heralded the next major phase in the debates overOrphism and the tablets place within it.7

The 1987 discovery of a grave at Pelinna in Thessaly with two nearlyidentical tablets in the shape of ivy leaves added a new type of text.

Now you have died and now you have been born, thrice blessed one, on thisvery day.

Say to Persephone that Bacchios himself freed you.A bull you rushed to milk.Quickly, you rushed to milk.A ram you fell into milk.

6 Guthrie 1952. The rst edition was in 1935, but Guthrie engages directly with Linforth in his secondedition almost as little as Linforth had with Guthrie in his work.

7 Zuntz 1971 pulled together all the tablets discovered before the Hipponion tablet and provided a newcritical edition, whose attention to detail and context has made it the fundamental basis for all subsequenteditions. Zuntz, however, saw the tablets not as Orphic but Pythagorean and vehemently rejected anyassociation of them with Orphism under any description or Dionysiac religion of any kind. B11, which issaid to have been found somewhere in central Sicily, remains in a private collection, where it has not beenseen by scholars, except for its initial editor, Jiri Frel, whose publication remains problematic.


You have wine as your fortunate honor.And you go beneath the earth, celebrating rites just like the other blessed ones.

These texts share one salient feature with the tablets from Thurii, thepeculiar slogan of an animal going into milk, but they are otherwise dier-ent from the other types of tablet. However, the prominent role forDionysos, under the name of Bacchios, renewed the question of the relationof the tablets, and Orphism in general, to Dionysiac cult, especially sincethe Hipponion tablet promised that the deceased would walk along thesacred road with the other mystai and bacchoi.

Two recent publications of tablets from Pherai in Thessaly presentsomething dierent yet again, raising further questions about the tabletsrelations to Bacchic or Metroac mysteries. One tablet contains a mysticpassword Andrikepaidothyrsou, along with an invocation of the goddessBrimo, a gure often identied with Demeter or Hekate.

Passwords: Male child of the thyrsos, Male child of the thyrsos;Brimo, Brimo;

Enter the sacred meadow. For the initiate is without penalty.

Another proclaims bearers connection with the rites of Demeter and theMountain Mother.

Send me to the thiasos of the initiates. I have [seen] the festivals,the rites of Demeter Chthonia and of the Mountain Mother.

In recent years, a number of even shorter tablets have been discovered intombs in Thessaly andMacedonia, many containing simply the name of thedeceased or the title, mystes initiate. Clearly, these tablets too weredesigned for initiates in some mystery, or at least for those claiming theprivileges of the initiate. Other tablets convey a greeting to Plouton orPersephone from the deceased, but none of these shorter tablets shares thesingle uniting feature of all the other gold tablets, a narrative of the soulsjourney to the underworld. Such brevity makes drawing the line betweenOrphic gold tablets and, for example, protective amulets on gold lamellaevery dicult. While these shorter tablets may come from the same sort ofreligious context as the other tablets, only the tablets with a narrative lendthemselves to the sort of semiotic analysis that has been one of the morefruitful tools for illuminating the enigmatic tablets in recent years.

The discovery of new types of tablets and the continued uncovering ofnew examples has once again sparked debate over the nature and contexts ofthese enigmatic documents. Despite the fact that the images of lightningand unjust deeds appear conned to the tablets of Timpone Piccolo at


Thurii alone, some scholars have nevertheless attempted to t all the tabletsinto the model of Orphism rst set out by Comparetti. Bernabs edition(with Jimnez San Cristbal) of the tablets and his new edition of theOrphic fragments rely on the hypothesis of a unied but secret Orphictradition that produced the tablets. For others, however, these twenty-oddscraps of gold foil seem to come, not just from a variety of places around themargins of the Greek world (Southern Italy, Thessaly, Crete), but from anumber of separate sources. The short and long versions of the B texts areclearly related, but the texts from Thurii, Rome, and Pelinna present anumber of signicant dierences. After surveying this motley lot, thequestions still remain: who are you? where are you from?

In light of the new evidence, the debate between the skeptics and thePanOrphists has been renewed, and once again, the tablets are central to thedebate. However, scholars have also made use of new literary criticalmethodologies and interdisciplinary approaches, so that there is not onlynew material being discussed but also new ways in which the material isanalyzed. The essays in the volume represent some of these new approaches.

Bernab, as part of his monumental new edition of theOrphic fragments,has provided new critical editions of all the texts of the tablets, but moretablets continue to be added to the corpus. This volume includes anupdated version of Bernabs texts, along with a critical apparatus andepigraphic transcription for each of the texts.8 In addition, there is anEnglish translation of these dicult and often fragmentary texts. Thetexts are grouped into six categories, following the typology set up byZuntz and expanded by Riedweg and Tzifopoulos.

The A group contains the four texts found at Thurii in 1879, three ofwhich begin with the identication of the deceased as coming pure fromthe pure. The tablet A5 from Rome that proclaims that Caecilia Secundinacomes pure from the pure also belongs in this category. The B groupcontains all the tablets with the self-presentation formula I am the childof Earth and starry Heaven, both the short versions (mostly from Crete)and the longer versions from Petelia, Pharsalos, Hipponion, and Entella.The C group contains only the anomalous text from Timpone Grande atThurii. No translation has been provided, but the reader may compare

8 The epigraphic transcriptions are drawn from Pugliese Carratelli 2001, while the critical apparatus isselected from Bernab 200407 fasc. 2, with additions and alterations by Edmonds. The apparatus inBernab 200407 fasc. 2 is far more comprehensive, but, due to its very size and depth of detail,somewhat unwieldy to work with. Bernab 200407 fasc. 2 should also be consulted for comprehen-sive bibliographical notes on every detail of the tablet texts. See now Graf and Johnston 2007 for textsthat come closer to the epigraphic transcriptions.


Pugliese Carratellis transcription with Bernabs attempt to pick somecomprehensible words out of this baing text.9 The Pelinna tablets havebeen collected with three other texts in the D group, following the classi-cation proposed by Tzifopoulos in his forthcoming study. All of these textslack the characteristic formulas of self-presentation that distinguish theA and B tablets, but, with their mention of deities such as Dionysos,Brimo, and Demeter, they contain more than a simple identication ofthe deceased. The E group contains those tablets which proclaim a greetingto Plouton and/or Persephone, while the F group are those with merely aname or the label mystes.

Following the texts and translations are several tables by Tzifopoulos,summarizing the archaeological contexts of the gold tablets. While many ofthe tablets discovered earlier have no reliable archaeological context, some ofthe more recently discovered tablets were found in a context whose salientfeatures can be described in detail. As Tzifopoulos stresses in his own essay,the archaeological context of these tablets is an often over-looked source ofinformation for trying to reconstruct the religious contexts from which thegold tablets come. The tablets use as grave goods clearly marks theirimportance for understanding ideas of life, death, and afterlife, and theirparticular signicance can only be understood in relation to other ancientevidence of this kind.

The rst set of essays in the volume looks at a variety of dierent kinds ofcontexts to help illuminate the nature of the gold lamellae. Grafs essayopens the volume by placing the tablets within the context of other writingsattributed to Orpheus that pertain to eschatology. Graf surveys the ideasabout theogony, eschatology, and ritual found in the texts attributed toOrpheus, particularly the early evidence found in Plato and the DerveniPapyrus. This reprinted essay does not analyze the gold tablets themselves indetail, but it provides the background of other contemporary texts con-cerned with many of the same issues as the tablets, helping modern scholarsto grapple with the question of whether and how these tablets may beconsidered Orphic. Bernabs essay in this volume, Are the Orphic GoldLeaves Orphic? pursues this question in greater detail, comparing theelements of the tablets with other texts and images considered Orphic.Bernab is the leading exponent of the new PanOrphist position, arguing

9 Strictly speaking, tablet A4 really ought to be part of the C group, since it was found wrapped insidetablet C and lacks the characteristic pure from the pure formula of the other A tablets. However, ithas been grouped with the other A texts since Zuntz, and it shares the kid in milk and god frommortal elements with tablet A1.


for a fairly coherent religious movement with denable doctrines that can beseen in the gold tablets. This essay, written in conjunction with Jimnez,summarizes in English many of the conclusions from their recent book onthe gold leaves.

Several of the other essays place the gold tablets within specic culturalcontexts. Betzs essay, translated into English from the version published ina festschrift for Walter Burkert, examines the tablets in a broader philo-sophical and religious context, comparing their ideas of human nature tothose of contemporary religious and philosophical schools, especially thosefrom the literature of Early Christianity. Betz notes the similarities anddierences between the B tablets child of Earth and starry Heaven self-presentation formula and various ways of dening human nature inGnostic, Christian, and contemporary pagan texts. While Betzs surveyexamines religious contexts somewhat later than the majority of the tablets,Dousa looks into material from a much earlier date, raising the question ofthe origins of some of the peculiar images and ideas in the tablets. Dousacompares the scenario in the B tablets of the water in the afterlife juxtaposedwith a tree with the parallels in Egyptian funerary materials, noting not justthe similar images but also noting the important dierences. Supercialcomparisons with Egypt have often been made by classicists, but theEgyptian material has never been explored in detail, and Dousa pointsout crucial factors that make a simple continuity of the tablet texts fromEgyptian material improbable. Tzifopoulos, in his essay, examines not thegeneral religious context in which the various tablets were produced, but thespecic time and place from which the largest group of tablets comes. Sincemore tablets have been (and indeed continue to be) found in Crete thananywhere else in the Greek world, Tzifopoulos looks at the tablets withinthe context of specically Cretan religion, pointing out the ways in whichthe tablets may have been adapted for the local religious environment.Tzifopoulos emphasizes the importance of the archaeological context forilluminating aspects of the religious context that are not recoverable fromthe texts alone.

The second set of essays, however, concentrates on the close analysis ofthe texts alone to uncover aspects of the religious context of the tablets thatare not immediately apparent. Semiotic analysis has proved a fruitfulmethod in opening up the mysterious tablet texts, and several of the essaysmake use of the insights derived from careful attention to the semioticsituation of the tablet texts. Calames essay, here translated from the originalFrench, was the rst to examine the texts in this way, and he draws anumber of useful conclusions about the nature of the tablets and the


religious context in which they were produced. In a revised and translatedversion of his contribution to the festschrift for Walter Burkert, Riedwegmakes use of semiotic analysis to reconstruct a hypothetical original textfrom which all the verses from the various tablets came and to locate thevarious verses in ritual contexts, be they funerary or initiatory. Edmonds, onthe other hand, shows that many of the same semiotic patterns could beproduced in a dierent genre of text. Rather than a didactic poem, excerp-ted and used for ritual purposes, Edmonds proposes that some of the tablettexts show the characteristics of traditional verse oracles such as the itinerantreligious specialists mocked in Plato and Aristophanes used. The secondperson addresses, future verbs, and imperatives in hexameter verse suggestthat the B tablets may have been a short oracle text, one piece from thecollections of the oracle-mongers rather than excerpts from a single kata-basis text sacred to the followers of Orpheus. Taking a dierent perspectiveon the dialogic interchange in the tablets, Herrero compares the soulsdialogue with the powers of the underworld to the scenes in the Homericepics in which a hero puts forth his own lineage. The similarities betweenthese scenes of self-denition through genealogy are striking, but the dier-ences between the heroes boasts and the supplications of the tablets areilluminating for an understanding of the religious ideas behind the tablets.These essays all show how much can be gleaned from a semiotic analysis ofthe texts, as well as the crucial importance in reconstructing the religiouscontext of the model used for the religious phenomenon of Orphism.

The last two essays explore another facet of the language found on thetablets, the performative aspect and its relation to the ritual context of thetablets. Obbink raises the question of why these texts might have beenformulated in poetic language and examines the ways in which the poeticverses in the tablets are shaped by the conventions and patterns of the largerGreek verse tradition. Obbink emphasizes the performative aspect of thepoetic language and uses his analysis to explore the link between the versesand their possible ritual contexts. Faraone also examines the ritual context ofthe tablets, but he focuses on the non-hexametrical sections that appear insome of the tablets, rather than the hexameters that make up the bulk of theverses. His analysis links the mysterious declarations in these sections tomyths and rituals connected to the cyclical return of Dionysos.

The collection as a whole concludes with a bibliography of the scholar-ship on the gold tablets. The volume of scholarly literature on these briefand obscure texts is indicative of the crucial role they have played inthe scholarship of ancient Greek religion and of Orphism in particular.The breadth of bibliography is also a mark of the recurring and ongoing


controversies in the eld, the disputes over the very nature of the religiousphenomenon labeled Orphism and the place of the gold tablets within it.The enigmatic nature of these texts invites questions, and the answersscholars have provided have varied widely, often contradicting one anotherin fundamental ways. Such conicting interpretations arise not only fromthe obscure and fragmentary condition of the texts, but also from theabsence of any direct contemporary references to the gold tablets thatmight help provide clear interpretive contexts for them. The essays in thisvolume continue the exploration of these fascinating gold tablets that wasbegun over a century ago, and, if they arrive at no clear conclusion orconsensus, at least they take us further along the path.


chapter 2

The Orphic gold tabletsTexts and translations, with critical apparatus and tables

Radclie G. Edmonds III

15

t e x t s and tran s l a t i on s

The A group (see Table 2.2)

A1 Thurii, 4th century bce (51 36mm) OF 488Pure I come from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,and Eukles and Eubouleus and the other immortal gods;For I also claim that I am of your blessed race.But Fate mastered me and the thunderer, striking with his lightning.I ew out of the circle of wearying heavy grief;I came on with swift feet to the desired crown;I passed beneath the bosom of the Mistress, Queen of the Underworld,Happy and most blessed one, a god you shall be instead of a mortal.A kid I fell into milk.

, , . {} { } {} .

, ,{} {} {} , . .


1 BJ, Z , : PC , .4 BJ, Z {} { } : GJ ,Colli {} ;BJ, Z : lam. Comparetti, Kern, GJ , TG, PC, Dieterich, O, Kaibel .

8 BJ {}: GJ , Kern, Colli, PC, TG .

The Orphic gold tablets: Texts and translations 17

A2 Thurii, 4th century bce (47 28mm) OF 489Pure I come from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,And Eukles and Eubouleus and the other gods and daimons;For I also claim that I am of your blessed race.Recompense I have paid on account of deeds not just;Either Fate mastered me or the thunderer inging the lightning bolt.Now I come, a suppliant, to holy Phersephoneia,That she, gracious, may send me to the seats of the blessed.

{} , {},

{} {}{} . {} . , {} {}.

1 BJ, O, Z , : PC , .2 BJ : lam., PC, Z, TG .5 BJ {}: GJ, TG, PC, O, Colli, Kern , Comparetti ; BJ, TG : GJ , Z, Colli, Comparetti {} , DK .

6 BJ, PC, DK, Kern : O, Z ; BJ, GJ, Colli : TG,PC, Z, O , DK, Kern .

7 BJ {}: DK {}.


A3 Thurii, 4th century bce (46 25mm) OF 490Pure I come from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,And Eukles and Eubouleus and the other gods and daimons;For I also claim that I am of your blessed race.Recompense I have paid on account of deeds not just;Either Fate mastered me or the lightning bolt thrown by the thunderer.Now I come, a suppliant, to holy Phersephoneia,That she, gracious, may send me to the seats of the blessed.

, ,{} {} {} . {} . {} , {} [] {} .

1 BJ, O, Z , : PC , .2 BJ {}: O fortasse supplendum.3 BJ, Z {}: TG, PC, Colli, O, Kern .

4 BJ, Z .: TG, PC .

5 BJ, GJ : TG, PC, O, Colli, Kern , Comparetti ; BJ, GJ, TG, PC : Z , Colli, Comparetti , DK .

6 BJ : O, Z , ; BJ : GJ, TG, PC, , Z, O , DK, Kern .

7 BJ : DK .

recto verso

() () [.]


A4 Thurii, 4th century bce OF 487But when the soul leaves the light of the sun,go straight to the right, having kept watch on all things very well.Hail, you having experienced the experience you had not experiencedbefore.

A god you have become from a man. A kid you fell into milk.Hail, hail; make your way to the right,the sacred meadows and groves of Phersephoneia.

, . {} . {} .

2 BJ . : Santamara in BJ {} ,TG, PC ? , Z , Colli {.}, O | , Comparetti ; BJ : Colli .

3 BJ, Z : TG, PC .5 BJ, Z : TG, PC, Comparetti .6 BJ {} : DK

.

*


A5 Rome, 2nd century ce (65 24mm) OF 491Pure she comes from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,Eukles and Eubouleus, child of Zeus. But receivethis gift of Memory, famed in song among men.Caecilia Secundina, come, having become a goddess by the custom.

, , . , .

1 BJ, Z , : PC , .2 BJ, GJ, West : Z, PC, TG , Colli . , Murray . = hic recipeMemoriae arma.

4 BJ, Z, PC : Colli , Murray .


The B group (see Table 2.3)

B1 Petelia, 4th century bce (45 27mm) OF 476You will nd in the halls of Hades a spring on the left,and standing by it, a glowing white cypress tree;Do not approach this spring at all.You will nd another, from the lake of Memoryrefreshing water owing forth. But guardians are nearby.Say: I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven;But my race is heavenly; and this you know yourselves.I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quicklyrefreshing water owing forth from the lake of Memory.And then they will give you to drink from the divine spring,And then you will celebrate? [rites? with the other] heroes.This [is the ? of Memory, when you are about] to die ..?write this?].?? shadow covering around

{} , . , . , . . .[] [] [ ], [ ] [].[] [ ] [.] [in right margin . . .


4 lam., West, GJ, TG : BJ , Goettling, Franz .7 BJ :West .10 [ ] B: [ ] Franz, Kaibel, Murray, Gallavotti.11 Edmonds [ ] []: BJ, GJ, TG, Kaibel

[ ] [], Franz [] [], Goettling [ ] [].

12 Edmonds [] [: BJ, Guarducci [] [, O , Anon in Brit. Mus. Cat. [, Gallavotti [] [ ] [, PC [] [; Merkelbach [] [ ] [; Marcovich [] [ ] [.

13 GJ : BJ [ ] [ ], Comp. [ (Orpheus), West conj. [ ] [ .

14 GJ : BJ ex Janko ined. [ ] [], O [ .

[ . .][ . ][ .][ ][ . .][[ .][in the right margin


B2 Pharsalos, 4th century bce (42 16mm) OF 477You will nd in the halls of Hades a spring on the right,and standing by it, a glowing white cypress tree;Do not approach this spring at all.Further along you will nd, from a lake of Memory,the refreshing water owing forth. But guardians are nearby.And they will ask you for what need have you come;to them you should relate very well the whole truth;Say: I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven;Starry is my name. I am parched with thirst; but give me to drink from thespring.

, .

5 BJ: Verdelis , lam.6 BJ: Verdelis .7 BJ: Verdelis 8 BJ: PC, Colli .9 BJ, Cassio: Verdelis .


B3 Eleutherna, 2nd1st century bce (56 10mm) OF 478I am parched with thirst and I perish. But give me to drink from the ever-owing spring on the right, where the cypress is. Who are you? Fromwhere are you? I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.

, . ; ; .

1 BJ: PC, Comp. ; O, Colli .2 BJ, Comp. : GJ, TG, Z ; BJ, Colli : PC , O .3 BJ, Colli ; ; PC ; ; O ; ;


B4 Eleutherna, 2nd1st century bce (62 13mm) OF 479I am parched with thirst and I perish. But give me to drink from the ever-owing spring on the right, where the cypress is. Who are you? Where areyou from? I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.

{} , . ; ; .

1 BJ: PC, Comp. ; O, Colli .2 BJ, Comp. : GJ, TG, Z ; BJ, Colli : PC O .3 BJ, Colli ; ; PC ; ; O ; ;


B5 Eleutherna, 2nd1st century bce (54 7.5mm) OF 480I am parched with thirst and I perish. But give me to drink from the ever-owing spring on the right, where the cypress is. Who are you? Fromwhere are you? I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven.

{} [], . ; ; [].

1 BJ: PC, Comp. ; O, Colli Murray .2 BJ, Comp. : GJ, TG, Z ; BJ, Colli : PC O .3 BJ, Colli ; ; PC ; ; O ; ;

[ . ][ . ][ . ]

B6 Eleutherna, 2nd1st century bce (45 12mm) OF 481I am parched with thirst and I perish. But give me to drink from the ever-owing spring on the right, by the cypress. Who are you? From where areyou? I am the daughter of Earth and starry Heaven.

, . ; ; .

1 Guarducci: PC , Colli .2 BJ : lam. , fort. Gallavotti, . fort.

Tzifopoulos; BJ, Comp. : GJ, TG, Z ; BJ, Colli : PC .3 BJ, Colli ; ; PC ; ;4 BJ, Guarducci : lam. , PC (?) = glio?,

Gallavotti , Tzifopoulos , .



{} , . {} ; ; .1 BJ: PC, Comp. ; Colli , Verdelis {} .2 BJ, Comp. : Z ; BJ, Colli : PC .3 BJ, Colli ; ; PC ; ; BJ : Verdelis,

Colli .


{} , . ; ; {}.

1 BJ: lam. , Verdelis .2 BJ : Verdelis ; BJ, Comp. : Z ; BJ, Colli : PC O .

3 BJ, Colli ; ; PC ; ;


B9 Thessaly?, 4th century bce (22 37mm) OF 484I am parched with thirst and I perish. But give me to drink from the ever-owing spring. On the right is a white cypress. Who are you? From whereare you? I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven. But my race is heavenly.

. ; ; .

1 BJ : Cassio .2 BJ : Gallavotti .


B10 Hipponion, 5th century bce (56 32mm) OF 474This is the [?] of Memory. When you are about to die you will go to the well-built halls of Hades; a spring is on the right,and standing by it a glowing white cypress tree;there the descending souls of the dead refresh themselves.Do not go near to this spring at all.Further along you will nd, from the lake of Memory,refreshing water owing forth. But guardians are nearby.They will ask you, with sharp minds,why you are seeking in the shadowy gloom of Hades.Say: I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven;I am parched with thirst and I perish; but give me quicklyrefreshing water to drink from the lake of Memory.And then they will speak to the underworld ruler,and then they will give you to drink from the lake of Memory,and you too, having drunk, will go along the sacred road that theother famed initiates and bacchics travel.

, , . . . . . { } [] , .


1 lam. : BJ, GJ, Burkert ap. Pugliese Caratelli 1974, Guarducci , TG , PCh, Pugliese Carratelli 1974 , Luppe, Merkelbach , Gallavotti ,West , Marcovich , Riccardelli , Lloyd-Jones .

2 PC, TG : BJ, GJ, Merkelbach , Z ; BJ : Pugliese Carratelli 1974, West corrupt. ex .

3 BJ : PC h, Marcovich .

6 BJ, TG : PC, GJ h.7 BJ : PC h; BJ : Marcovich, West .8 BJ, Z : PC, GJ, TG , Luppe ] .

9 BJ : Z ] , GJ , Luppe ] ; BJ, Ebert : PC, Z [].

10 Sacco, BJ, TG : GJ , Pugliese Carratelli 1993 h ,Z .

11 BJ, TG : GJ , Z , Merkelbach ; B : West [], Gallavotti [].

12 BJ : Z , Guarducci .

13 : BJ {} , GJ h , TG , Lazzarini , West , PC h , Z , Janko .

14 BJ, Gallavotti { }: lam. , Lloyd-Jones , Riedweg .

15 BJ, Luppe, PC, Gallavotti : Pugl. 1974 , Merk. , Burkert ap. Z; BJ : PC h h.

16 PC : BJ , Merkelbach, Burkert ap. Pugliese Caratelli : PC, Feyerabend .

[[


B11 Entella?, West Sicily, 3rd century bce OF 475When you are about ] to die

] ?remembering? hero] shadow covering around

You will nd in the halls of Hades ] a lake on the right,Standing by it, a glowing white] cypress tree;

This is where all the descending so]uls refresh themselves.this spring, do no]t go near at all.

Further along you will nd,] from the lake of Memory,refreshing water owing forth. ]But guardians are nearby.

They will ask you, ] with sharp minds,What you seek in Hades shadowy] gloomSay: I am the child of Earth and ] starry Heaven;And I am parched with thirst and I pe]rish; but give merefreshing water owing forth ] from the lake of Memory.But m[y race is heavenly. And this you know yourselves.And then[ they will speak to the underworld ruler.and then [they will give of the lake of Memoryand then [Passwords: Ph[and Phe[??

] ] ]

, ] ] ] ]

] ] ]

] {} ]

] ]

*************


[ . [ [ [ [ [[

1 BJ ] : Frel ] , Riedweg ] .

2 Riedweg ] : Frel ] .3 Riedweg : Frel 4 Riedweg , ] : BJ ] , Frel ] .

5 Riedweg ]: Frel ].11 Riedweg ] {}: Frel ?] .13 Riedweg : Frel .15 Riedweg [ .: Frel [

17 Riedweg [ : Frel [

.18 Riedweg: [: Frel [ .


B12 Crete, 2nd1st century bce (36 13mm) OF 484aHe is parched with thirst and he perishes. But give me to drink from thespring of Sauros on the left of the cypress. Who are you? From where areyou? Earth is my mother and starry Heaven.

{} {} {} {}. ; {} {}

{}

2 Tzifopoulos \A: BJ, GJ .3 Tzifopoulos {} , ; ; ;4 Tzifopouls

B13 and B14 Eleutherna, 2nd century bce unpublished


The C group (see Table 2.4)

C1 Thurii, 4th century bce (81 23mm) OF 492Pugliese Carratelli .

Bernab 200407 , , - (?) . *, - {} , , , - *

The D group (see Table 2.5)

D1 Pelinna, ca. 275 bce (40 31mm) OF 485Now you have died and now you have been born, thrice blessed one, on thisvery day.

Say to Persephone that Bacchios himself freed you.A bull you rushed to milk.Quickly, you rushed to milk.A ram you fell into milk.You have wine as your fortunate honor.And you will go beneath the earth, having celebrated rites just as the otherblessed ones.

, , . .{} . . . .

4 BJ, GJ, PC : TP ?, Lloyd-Jones .6 GJ : PC , TP , .7 BJ, Luppe : GJ .


D2 Pelinna, ca. 275 bce (35 30mm) OF 486Now you have died and now you have been born,thrice blessed one, on this very day.Say to Persephone that Bacchios himself freed you.A bull you rushed to milk.A ram you fell into milk.You have wine as your fortunate honor.

, , .[] . . . .

5 BJ, GJ : PC , TP , .

D3 Pherai, 4th century bce OF 493Passwords: Man-boy-thyrsos, Man-boy-thyrsos. Brimo, Brimo. Enter thesacred meadow. For the initiate is without penalty.

. . .. . . 2 lam.: BJ ex Hordern 2000 .


D4 Amphipolis, 4th3rd century bce OF 496nHoly priestess of Dionysos Bacchios am I, Archeboule (daughter) of Antidoros

[]

1 BJ: Hatzopoulos [?]

D5 Pherai, 4th3rd century bce OF 493aSend me to the thiasos of the initiates. I have seen the festivalsof Demeter Chthonia, and the rites of the Mountain Mother.

[] , [].

1 PS []: BJ, GJ []


The E group (see Table 2.6)

E2 495 [] [] . To Plouton andPersephone, hail!

E3 496k Philiste to Persephone, hail!E4 496b To Persephone,

Poseidippos the pious initiateE5 494 To Plouton and PersephoneE6 495a {} Philotera

to the Mistress, hail!

1 Riedweg = OF 4961 ; GJ

The F group (see Table 2.7)

F1 496i EuxenaF2 496e initiateF3 496h PhylomagaF4 496c Dexilaos, the initiateF5 496d Philon, the initiateF6 496a PhiloxenaF7 496j PhilemenaF8 XenaristeF9 AndronF10 496g BottakosF11 496f HegesiskaF12 EpigenesF13 Palatha


Table 2.1 Tablet Groups sigla in dierent editions

#Editioprinceps

Bernab andJimnez

Graf andJohnston

TortorelliGhidini

PuglieseCarratelli Colli Kern

A1 1879 488/L9 5 5 II.B1 4.A65 32cA2 1879 489/L10a 7 6 II.A1 4.A66a 32dA3 1879 490/L10b 6 7 II.A2 4.A66b 32eA4 1879 487/L8 3 4 II.B2 4.A67 32fA5 1903 491/L11 9 23 I.B1 4.B31 32gB1 1836 476/L3 2 2 I.A2 4.A62 32aB2 1951 477/L4 25 8 I.A3 4.A63 B3 1893 478/L5a 10 14 I.C1 4.A64 32b iB4 1893 479/L5b 11 15 I.C2 4.A70a 32b iiB5 1893 480/L5c 12 16 I.C3 4.A70b 32b iiiB6 1939 481/L5d 16 17 I.C4 4.A70c B7 1954 482/L5e 13 18 I.C5 4.A70d B8 1954 483/L5f 14 19 I.C6 4.A70e B9 1977 484/L6 29 9 I.C7 4.A70f B10 1974 474/L1 1 1 I.A1 4.A72 B11 1994 475/L2 8 13 I.A.4 B12 2006 484a/L6a 18 21 C 1879 492/L12 4 3 III 4.A68 47D1 1987 485/L7a 26a 10 II.B3 D2 1987 486/L7b 26b 11 II.B4 D3 1991 493/L13 27 12 II.C.2 D4 2001 496n/L16n 30 D5 2007 493a/L13a 28 E1 1967 495a/L15a {38} E2 1893 495/L15 15 20 II.C.1 E3 196162 496k/L16k 37 E4 1989 496b/L16b 31 E5 1998 494/L16l 17 22 F1 1969 496i/L16i 23 F2 1977 496e/L16e 20 F3 1986 496h/L16h 35 F4 1987 496c/L16c 21 F5 1987 496d/L16d 22 F6 1989 496a/L16a 32 F7 1994 496j/L16j 24 F8 1992 /S3a F9 1992 /S3b F10 1992 496g/L16g 36 F11 1992 496f/L16f 34 F12 1999 /S5 33 F13 1981


Table 2.2 GROUP A Lamellae with Pure from the Pure formula

Provenance Date Gender ShapePositionin grave Coin Burial and grave-goods

A1 Thurii,Italy

iv c. bce not known rectangular unfolded close tohand

no Inhumation. A tumulus of three strata: in the rst morethan ten persons carelessly interred; in the secondfragments of pottery; in the third gravel mixed with sandand lime. In this lower third, three graves were found(A1A3). In the four corners of the chamber of cist-grave1 small hollows lled with ashes of bones and plants,indications of funeral sacrice; no mention of a con; noother oerings

A2 Thurii,Italy

iv c. bce not known rectangular folded once close tohand

no Inhumation. Under the tumulus (A1 above) cist-grave 3:no mention of a con; no other oerings

A3 Thurii,Italy

iv c. bce not known rectangular unfolded close tohand

no Inhumation. Under the tumulus (A1 above) cist-grave 2:no mention of a con; no other oerings

A4 Thurii,Italy

iv c. bce male? rectangular folded nine times andplaced inside no. C1(table 2.4) which was foldedlike an envelope

near thecranium

no Inhumation (partial cremation). Above the grave: a tumulusof eight strata, each consisting of ashes and carbon andburnt pottery sherds topped by earth above, indication ofrituals and sacrices and worship of the dead inside as ahero. Ouside the grave: a few small black vases. Inside:bronze locks of the con, two silver medallions on thechest decorated with female heads, similar to the ones ofPersephone on Apulian vases, a few small pieces of goldfrom the dresss decoration, two small wooden boxes withinlaid palmettes. The cremation took place in situ and theremains were simply covered by a white sheet whichdisintegrated when touched by the excavators

A5 Rome,Italy

ii c. ce female not known not known notknown

not known

Table 2.3 GROUP B Lamellae with the child of Earth and starry Heaven formula

ProvenanceDatebce Gender Shape Position in grave Coin Burial and grave-goods

B1 Petelia, Italy iv c. female? rectangularrolled incylinder?

not known not known Not known; the leaf itself was found folded upinside a gold cylindrical case with a chainattached, dated to the iiiii c. ce

B2 Pharsalos,Thessaly

360340 male? rectangular(foldedtwice?)

inside ahydria-urn

no Cremation. A limestone round container in whicha bronze hydria-urn with a representationbelow the neck-handle of the abduction ofOreithyia by Boreas and ivy leaves andanthemia at the base; inside the urn the ashes,

a

small bronze ring and a small skyphosB3 Eleutherna,

Creteiii c. not known rectangular

foldednot known not known not known

B4 Eleutherna,Crete

iii c. not known rectangularfolded

not known not known not known

B5 Eleutherna,Crete

iii c. not known rectangularfolded


B6 Eleutherna,Crete

iii c. not known rectangularfolded?


B7 Eleutherna,Crete

iii c. not known rectangularrolled incylinder?


B8 Eleutherna,Crete

iii c. not known rectangularrolled incylinder?


B9 Thessaly? 350320 not known not known inside a hydria not known Cremation. Bronze hydria-urn

ProvenanceDatebce Gender Shape Position in grave Coin Burial and grave-goods

B10 Hipponion,Italy

ca. 400 female? rectangularfolded fourtimes

on upper part ofchest (hung byperishablematerial?)

Inhumation in tile-covered grave. Outside: a claylamp and two skyphoi, one of them with agrato. Inside: to the right of cranium a smallclay jug and to the left bronze fragments of aring with an incised representation; at the rightelbow a hydria and a bronze semi-sphere with ahole of a bell(?); on the pelvis a skyphos; at theleft hand a gold nger-ring, a clay lamp, ahydria and two clay lekythoi to the left andright of the left thighbone

B11 Entella?,WestSicily

iii c.? not known rectangular not known not known not known

B12 Sfakaki,Crete

iii c. not known rectangularunfolded

not known not known Inhumation in looted tile-grave above no. b 10.Thirty-two clay unguentaria, fragments ofglass, a bronze mirror, small bronze and giltfragments

Table 2.4 GROUP C Lamella with Orphic text

Provenance Date Gender ShapePosition ingrave Coin

Burial andgrave-goods

C1 Thurii,Italy

iv c.bce

male? above no.A4 (table2)

above no.A4 (table2)

above no.A4 (table2)

above no. A4(table 2)


Table 2.5 GROUP D Lamellae with Dionysos and Persephone (and/or Demeter) and other deities

Provenance Date bce Gender ShapePosition ingrave Coin Burial and grave-goods

D1/2 Pelinna,Thessaly

ca. 275 female ivy-leaves two onchest

danake in mouthwithgorgon; coin ofAntigonosGonatas

Inhumation in marble sarcophagus: in thecranium a wreath of lead stem, clay gilt berriesand gilt bronze myrtle leaves with goldornament; near the cranium: a clay aryter, aclay bowl, two gold spirals ending in snake-heads; near the feet clay aryter with a lampinside, clay unguentarium, two bowls, ashallow skyphos; by the feet bronze lebes withbones of a neonate. On the cover slab ofmarble sarcophagus: two clay bowls andfragments of a third, clay feeder and claygurine of comic actor sitting on an altar

D3 Pherai,Thessaly

ca. 300 not known rectangular on chest? not known not known

D4 Amphipolis,Macedonia

320280 female rectangular foldedon chest

silver coin Philip II Inhumation in stone sarcophagus looted. Goldring and nger-ring; stone-constructedexedra for funeral rituals

D5 Pherai,Thessaly

ca. 300 not known rectangular not known not known Cremation? in marble osteotheke cylindrical(?)with few bones and ashes

Table 2.6 GROUP E Lamellae and epistomia with chaire-formula to Plouton and/or Persephone

ProvenanceDatebce Gender Shape

Position ingrave Coin Burial and grave-goods

E1 Agios Athanasios,Macedonia

iii c. female rectangular not known not known Not known if Macedonian tomb looted. Trapezoidconstruction at the entrance for the funeral supper; goldearrings, Illyrian type pin, clay gurines

E2 Eleutherna,Crete

iii c. not known rectangular not known not known

not knownE3 Aigai (Vergina),

Macedoniaiiii c. female not known not known not known Cremation under tumulus looted? Hellenistic pottery

E4 Pella, Macedonia ca. 300 male myrtle?(laurel)

on bench ofthegravesW side

no Many glass and bone fragments from the decoration of thewooden bier and its legs with incised representation ofgrin tearing a deer; iron fragments from bier or small box;part of iron strigil, iron pin; gilt clay myrtle-berries from awreath. On the bench of the graves W side: forty-one giltclay pebbles in the shape of acorn; forty-six bone astragaloiand a bone pebble; fragment of alabaster, and a clayfragment of female gurine

E5 Sfakaki, Crete 20 bce40 ce

male(?) mouth mouth bronzeon chest

Inhumation in cist-grave. Clay and bronze prochous, clayunguentarium, lekythion, two glass phialae, a bronze strigil,obsidian ake

Table 2.7 GROUP F Lamellae and epistomia with only the deceaseds name or the word mystes


F1 Elis,Peloponnese

300275 female leaf not known not known Inhumation in pithos. Clay vases?, gold necklace, goldearrings, fragments of gold foils from a diadem

F2 Aigeion,Peloponnese

iiii c. male myrtle?(laurel)

not known gold danake Inhumation in cist-grave looted. Iron strigil, two goldnger-rings, two gold Nike-earrings, fragments ofsilver and clay vase

F3 Methone,Pieria

ca. 300 female rectangular on the body no Inhumation in cist-grave looted. Ivory fragments ofbiers decoration of oral patterns and of guresfrom the Dionysiac cycle; two gold earrings, two goldnger-rings, seven clay vessels, bronze phiale, ironscissors, a bronze gilt wreath


iiii c. male leaf not known gold danake(two)

Inhumation in cist-grave. Six clay vases, iron strigil, twofragments of bronze objects


iiii c. male myrtle?(almond)

not known gold danake Inhumation in cist-grave. Three craniums and anumber of bones; twelve gold lance-shape leaves, goldnger-ring for burial use, two silver bowls, twounguentaria

F6 Pella,Macedonia

ca. 300 female myrtle?(laurel)

not known no Inhumation in cist-grave. Clay myrtle-berries from awreath; fragments of bone gilt small chous; bronzegilt leaves; forty-three bronze nail-heads; two smallbronze rings; three pieces of bone tool; eight glasseyes; two small clay skyphoi; clay lamp; inscribed clayplate; gold nger-ring; gold earrings

F7 Elis,Peloponnese

iii c. female myrtle under thecranium

leaf asdanake

Inhumation in cist-grave. Gold nger-ring, goldearrings, clay pyxis to the left of cranium; smallskyphos between the legs, small amphora, four clayunguentaria, clay cup, lamp; bronze, iron, silver, and

Table 2.7 (cont.)


bone fragments from a small wooden box in whichbronze folding mirror, iron tweezers, iron scissors,clay unguentarium, clay pyxis

F8 Pydna, Pieria 336300 female gold coin ofPhilip II

in themouth

gold coin ofPhilip II

Inhumation in cist-grave with pit-grave (F9)immediately to the S: ivory fragments from the bier,bronze ladle, bronze bell, a lead pyxis and seven clayvases

F9 Pydna, Pieria 336300 male gold coin ofPhilip II

in themouth

gold coin ofPhilip II

Inhumation in pit-grave immediately to the N of cist-grave (F8): ivory fragments from the bier, twobronze-gilt wreaths and four clay vessels

F10 Europos ca. 300 male rectangular not known not known Inhumation? in cist-grave looted. Glass eyes, bonefragments and bronze nails from biers decoration;clay vases, alabasters, Phoenician vase, iron strigils,bronze gilt wreath with berries. Outside to the NE:trapezoid construction for funeral supper withpottery fragments and fragment of kantharos, bones,and shells; traces of enagismos in later times NW ofthe construction, bronze gilt wreath with clay giltberries, bronze coin badly worn, red-gure pelikewith amazon, grin, and youths in gymnasium

F11 Pella,Macedonia

ca. 300 smallgirl

leaf not known not known Inhumation in cist-grave. Gold nger-ring with incisedanimal; gold earrings of Cupids

F12 Dion ca. 300? male small disc not known small disc? Not known from Macedonian tomb V.F13 Daphniotissa,

ElisLate iv, early

iii c.? olive leaf not known not known Inhumation in rectangular cist-grave, near a funerary

monument, with gold ring, bronze mirror, severalclay pots, one with pine resin and beeswax residueinside.

p r i nc i p a l ed i t i on s and abb r e v i a t i on s

OF refers to Orphic Fragments in A. Bernab, Poetae Epici Graeci.Testimonia et Fragmenta. Pars ii: Orphicorum et Orphicis similium testimoniaet fragmenta. 3 vols. Munich and Leipzig, 200407.

BJ Bernab, A. and Jimnez San Cristbal, A. I. (2008) Instructions for theNetherworld. The Orphic Gold Tablets. Leiden, Boston MA, and Cologne.

Breslin, J. (1977) A Greek Prayer. Pasadena CA.Cassio, A. C. (1994) e il modello ionico della laminetta di Hipponion,

in A. C. Cassio and P. Poccetti (eds.), Forme di religiosit e tradizionisapienziali in Magna Grecia, AION 16. Pisa and Rome: 183205.

Colli, G. (1977) La sapienza greca, vol. i. Milan.Comparetti, D. (1910) Laminette orche. Florence.DK Diels, H. (1907) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 2. Au. Berlin, ii:

480482.Dieterich, A. (1891) De hymnis orphicis capitula quinque. Marburg.Feyerabend, B. (1984) Zur Wegmetaphorik beim Goldblttchen aus Hipponion

und dem Promium des Parmenides, RhM 127: 122.Franz, G. (1836) Epigrafe greca sopra lamina doro spettante al Sg. Millingen,

Bullettino dellInstituto di Correspondenza archeologica: 149150.Frel, J. (1994) Una nuova laminella orca, Eirene 30: 183184.Gallavotti, C. (197879) Il documento orco di Hipponion e altri testi ani,

MCr 1314: 337359.Gavrilaki, I. and Tzifopoulos, Y. Z. (1998) An OrphicDionysiac gold epistomion

from Sfakaki near Rethymno, BCH 122: 343355.Giangrande, G. (1991) Zu zwei Goldlamellen aus Thessalien, Minerva 5: 8183.Goettling, C. (1843) Narratio de oraculo Trophonii. Jena.GJ Graf, F. and Johnston, S. I. (2007) Ritual Texts for the Afterlife. Orpheus and

the Bacchic Gold Tablets. London and New York.Guarducci, M. (1985) Nuove riessioni sulla laminetta orca di Hipponion,

RFIC 113: 385397.Hatzopoulos, M. B. (2008) q

( p ) , in Sverkos (ed.), p. Thessaloniki: 237253.

Hordern, J. (2000) Notes on the Orphic papyrus from Gurb (P. Gurb 1; Pack2

2464), ZPE 129: 131140.Janko, R. (1984) Forgetfulness in the golden tablets of memory, CQ 34: 89100.Kaibel, G. (1878) Epigrammata Graeca ex lapidibus collecta. Berlin.Kern, O. (1922) Orphicorum Fragmenta. Berlin.Lazaridis, A. (1981) 36: 151.Lazzarini, M. L. (1987) Sulla laminetta di Hipponion, ASNP, ser. iii vol. 17(2):

329332 (addendum A. C. Cassio: 333334).


Lloyd-Jones, H. (1985) Pindar and the after-life, in Pindare. Entretienssur lAntiquit Classique 31, Vandoeuvres/ Geneva (Fondation Hardt):245279.

Luppe, W. (1978) Abermals das goldblttchen von Hipponion, ZPE 30:2326.

Marcovich, M. (1976) The gold leaf from Hipponion, ZPE 23: 221224.Merkelbach, R. (1975) Bakchisches goldtfelchen aus Hipponion, ZPE 17:

89.Murray, G. (1908) Critical appendix on the Orphic tablets, in J. E. Harrison,

Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd edn. (1908): 659673.O Olivieri, A. (1915) Lamellae aureae orphicae. Edidit, commentario instruxit A.

Olivieri. Bonn.PS Parker, R. and Stamatopoulou, M. (2004) A new funerary gold leaf from

Pherai, AE 143: 132.Pugliese Carratelli, G. (1974) Un sepolcro di Hipponion e un nuovo testo orco,

Parola del Passato 29: 1926.PC Pugliese Carratelli, G. (1993, rev. edn. 2001) Lamine doro Orche. Milan.Ricciardelli Apicella G. (1992) Le lamelle di Pelinna, Studi e Materiali di Storia

delle Religioni 58: 2739.Riedweg, C. (1998) Initiation Tod Unterwelt: Beobachtungen zur

Kommunikationssituation und narrativen Technik der orphisch-bakchischenGoldblttchen, in Fritz Graf (ed.), Ansichten griechischer Rituale:Geburtstags-Symposium fr Walter Burkert. Stuttgart and Leipzig: 359398.

Sacco, G. (2001) . Sul v. 10 della laminetta di Hipponion, ZPE137: 2733.

Torjussen, S. (2008) An inscribed gold leaf from Daphniotissa, near Elis, ZPE166: 151152.

TG Tortorelli Ghidini, M. (2006) Figli della Terra e del Cielo stellato. Testi orcicon traduzione e commento. Naples.

TP Tsantsanoglou K. and Parssoglou, G.M. (1987) Two gold lamellae fromThessaly, Hellenika 38: 316.

Tzifopoulos, Y. (2010) Paradise Earned: The BacchicOrphic Gold Lamellae ofCrete. With contributions on the archaeological context by Irene Gavrilaki,Stella Kalogeraki and Niki Tsatsaki, Popi Galanaki and GiorgosRethemiotakis, Matthaios Bessios. Center for Hellenic Studies, HellenicSeries 23. Washington DC and Cambridge MA.

Verdelis, N.M. (195051) , AE8990: 80105.

West, M. L. (1975) Zum neuen goldblttchen aus Hipponion, ZPE 18:229236.

Wieten, J. H. (1915) De tribus laminis aureis quae in sepulcris Thurinis suntinventae, Diss.phil. Leiden. Amsterdam.

Z Zuntz, G. (1971) Persephone: Three Essays on Religion and Thought in MagnaGraecia. Oxford.


part i i

Texts and contexts

chapter 3

Text and ritualThe Corpus Eschatologicum of the Orphics

Fritz Graf

i n t roduct i on

The books ascribed to Orpheus must have been legion already in the fthcentury. The Euripidean Hippolytus, whom his father regards as a vegetarianand an ecstatic, is said to have Orpheus as a Lord, to rave and to follow thesmoke of manywritings;1 and Plato knows religious specialists whomade useof a hubbub of books by Orpheus and Musaeus.2 Much later, in theprologue of his own Argonautika, Orpheus gives an impressive list of whathe is about to sing a theogony, starting from Chaos, Nyx, and Phanes,followed by the narrations about Demeter and Persephone, her relationshipto Zeus and her , about the myths and the cults of Cybele, theCorybants and the Cabiri, of Praxidice, Aphrodite and Adonis, Isis andOsiris, and the oracles of Nyx about Bacchus,3 but also about divinationthrough dreams and signs, purication, supplications of gods and gifts to thedead;4 nally a report of what he himself had seen in his travels, his descentinto Hades and his visit to EgyptianMemphis, whichmustmean eschatologyon the one hand,magic or theurgy on the other.5This sounds impressive, andin some respects enigmatic and that is just Orpheus intention: all these, hesays, are frightful songs for mortal men, secrets without fear only to theinitiates:6 Orpheus is the Great Initiator. The list sketches what the ImperialEpoch knew as the most salient topics of Orpheus poems mythology,

Originally published as Fritz Graf, Text and Ritual: The Corpus Eschatologicum of the Orphics, inGiovanni Cerri (ed.), La letteratura pseudepigrafa nella cultura greca e romana, Atti di un incontro di studiNapoli, 1517 gennaio 1998, Naples, 2000: 5977. [For this second printing, I added the fragmentnumbers in Bernab 200407 and some more recent bibliography, besides changing minor stylisticmatters; the bibliographical additions are in square brackets. FG]1 Eur. Hipp. 952954; 953f. .2 Pl. Resp. 364a .3 Orph. Arg. 1235. See on the prooemium Luiselli 1993.4 Orph. Arg. 3540. 5 Orph. Arg. 4046.6 Orph. Arg. 1011. , , .

53

especially theogonicmyths, mystery cults and their myths, fromEleusis to Isisand Adonis, divination and other crisis rituals, including the ritual address tothe spirits in the grave. Specic book titles are attested only in late sources Clement of Alexandria gives six, four of which (Katabasis into Hades, HierosLogos, Peplos, and Physika), he says, were mentioned already by a certainEpigenes, an author who wrote on Ion of Chios and is referred to byCallimachus, which indicates limits for his date.7 Much later, the LexiconSuda gives no less than twenty-three titles,8 although most of them rathershadowy and no more than a title to us. It is impossible to deal with all ofthem in the space of a paper: here, I shall concentrate on the early texts, onwhat I call the corpus eschatologicum of the Orphics.

t e s t imon i e s o f the f i f th centur y

To talk about Orphics involves a conscious choice. It is not somethingwhich one would have done a while ago: according to the communis opinioto which I too have been adhering for a long time, there were no Orphics,there were only poems by Orpheus. This has been the status quaestionisagreed upon after the masterly works of Ivan M. Linforth (1941) and EricR. Dodds (1951) and which had not substantially changed, a generationlater, in the studies ofWalter Burkert or the most comprehensive and recentbook of Martin L. West on The Orphic Poems (1983 it still is the key study,despite some of its shortcomings).9 This might have changed by now, in thesense that as a term of self-reference for a distinct group of humanbeings existed in classical Greece: it all depends on the last two letters in agrato from one of the bone tablets from Olbia.10

7 Clem. Al. Strom. 1.21.131.5 = T 222Kern. For Epigenes see F 1128 Bernab who not unreasonably dateshim to the fourth century; he could of course be somewhat later.

8 Suda. s.v. = T 223d Kern = F 1018 iv Bernab.9 Linforth 1941; Dodds 1951: 135178; Burkert 1977b: 110; Burkert 1982, West 1983 (see the review byL. Brisson, RHR 202 1985, 389420, repr. in Brisson 1995, and my own in Gnomon 57 1985, 585591.) [Addition 2007: This is still true almost a decade later. The nal publication of the DerveniPapyrus and Beteghs impressive analysis (see below n. 46) have not yet resulted in a new synthesis;Radclie Edmonds arguments against an early Orphic anthropogony seem, to me, as hypercritical aswas Linforths book but necessitate the same useful rethinking of the evidence (Edmonds 1999 and2004, Linforth 1941). And they both highlight a fundamental methodological problem: whenconfronted with a wealth of evidence spread out over almost a millennium and a master narrativethat comes at the very end of this long period, how legitimate is it to retroject this master narrative ifvery early texts such as Pind. fr. 133 seem ambiguous? Linforth and Edmonds argue against thehindsight that helps create a uniform picture; the Derveni Papyrus and the history of the GoldTablets have shown that Linforth vastly overstated his case.]

10 [F 464 Bernab: do we read , , or even? See below, n. 15.]

54 fritz graf

There certainly were , initiators according toOrpheus, as early as Theophrastus: they set up shop as religious specialistsfor initiations.11 And there were , things related to Orpheus.The term is attested for the rst time in Herodotus 2.81 a famous,although contested passage where the Father of History postulates theidentity of the so-called Orphika and Bakkhika which, in truth, areEgyptian and Pythagorean, and which he immediately species as mys-tery rites, .12 Orpheus is a poet, the oldest poet of the Greeks in thewidely attested catalogue which names, Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod andHomer and which goes back to Hippias of Elis.13 Thus Orphika ofnecessity must refer to poetry, and to poetry only. And since the sophistCritias thought Orpheus to be the inventor of the hexameter,14 the poemswere in hexameters as all our preserved fragments of Orpheus are, ofcourse.

These poems, according to Herodotus, are connected with Bakkhika: theyhave to do with Dionysos Bacchios, the ecstatic god, and with his rites. Atabout the same time, another text conrms the quasi-identity ofOrphika andBakkhika one of the bone tablets from the agora of Olbia Pontica thatcontains, inter alia, the abbreviated name of Dion(ysos) immediately fol-lowed, in the next line, by .., the last letter but one being eitheromicron or omega and the last one, provided it really is a letter and not rathera meaningless scratch, open to guesswork. In this context, it makes perhapsmore sense to read a form of the singular of as an epiclesis ofDionysos, than to see the plural : thus, one can think of either() [] as the dative of dedication or, perhaps better, thegenitive, ()[], belonging to Dionysos of Orpheus.15

These two testimonies from the fth century point out the essentialconnotations of Orpheus at this time. The Olbia text bears, at its top, the

11 [Theophr. Char. 16 = F 654 Bernab (specialist, especially for initiations); Philodemus,On Poems 1.181Janko = F 655 Bernab (ecstatic cult) ; Plut. Lac. Epiphth. 224e = F 653 Bernab (initiator with aspecic eschatology). These same specialists are attacked by Plato, Resp. 364b (who calls them ), and by the Derveni author col. xx (who describes them in xx 4 as thosewho make craft of the holy rites, ; they perform initiations,, xx 1).]

12 Hdt. 2.81 = F 650 Bernab , . . being obviously what Orphika and Bacchika are. The text presents problems because there aretwo dierent versions; I follow Burkert 1972: 127f.

13 VS 86 B 6 = T 252 Kern = F 1146 Bernab; more in Graf 1974: 9 n. 7.14 VS 88 B 3. Democritus VS 68 B16 named Musaeus instead.15 F 463 Bernab, with ample bibliography. Still the best account is West 1983. [Even in my perhaps

overly cautious reading, it would of course be only a small step to calling the worshippers of thisspecic form of Dionysus .]

Text and ritual: The Corpus Eschatologicum of the Orphics 55

sequence , then in the next line . With WalterBurkert, I read it, not as the rest of two other parallel opposites found in aparallel text, | but as an emphatic conr-mation the sequence from life to death to life: this is the Truth. Life leadsto death, but again to new life. As a recent text has it, a gold tablet in the formof an ivy leaf from Pelinna in Thessaly dated about a century later: Now youhave died and now, thrice happy one, you have been born, on this very day.16

Incidentally, it has been this Pelinna text which conclusively conrmed theDionysiac character of all these gold leaves and thus has given a clearerbackground to the statement of Herodotus: theOrphika (things i.e. poemsand their content which have to do with Orpheus) and Bakkhika, ashe makes clear immediately afterwards, are intimately related to ,mystery rites of Dionysos Bacchios, and those in turn have to do withbeliefs about the afterlife (in this case, the use of woollen garments in burials).17

The Orphics, the Orphikoi, would then be the people who have to dowith Orpheus. To be more precise: they were the people who read andused (and some of them, presumably, who wrote) the poems ascribed toOrpheus, the mythical singer. In the eyes of Herodotus, they at least theauthors of the Orphic poems had an intimate knowledge of Pythagoreandoctrines (which, in turn, he derives from Egypt, as does Isocrates, notmuch later).18 They even might have been Pythagoreans; this at least is whatanother contemporary writer, Ion of Chios, tells us: Pythagoras wrotesome poems and ascribed them to Orpheus.19 Later accounts, beginningwith Epigenes, name specic Italian Pythagoreans as authors of specicworks under the name of Orpheus.20 The most spectacular Pythagoreandoctrine, in the eyes of the Greeks, was reincarnation already Xenophanesmakes fun of it, in some well-known verses.21 The sequence of the Olbiatablet -> -> can be read as the rst step in a longerchain which then would mean just this doctrine; although as it stands, thereis no necessity to assume so. It might mean no more than the promise ofanother life after death, a better one.

16 F 485 Bernab. [There have been several recent editions of the tablets, in addition to their inclusion inBernabs collection: Pugliese Carratelli 1993 (a private edition, dicult to obtain, but with splendidphotographs) has been re-edited (with corrections) as Pugliese Carratelli 2001 (translated as Leslamelles dor orphiques. Instructions pour le voyage doutre-tombe des initis grecs, Paris 2003); Graf andJohnston 2007; see also Edmonds 2004: 29110.]

17 [The Dionysiac character of all leaves has been challenged by a leaf from Pherae published by RobertParker and Maria Stamatopoulou 2004, Graf and Johnston 2007: no. 28 that contains the names ofDemeter and Meter Oreia; but there is space to supplement the name Bacchos.]

18 Busiris 28 (VS 14 A 4). 19 VS 36 B 2 = OT 248 Kern = 1144 i Bernab.20 Brontinus T 173 Kern = F 1100 Bernab; Cercops T 174 Kern = F 1101 Bernab. 21 VS 21 B 7.

56 fritz graf

Thus, the testimonies of several authors before Plato Herodotus,Hippias of Elis, Critias, Ion present a rather coherent picture of whatOrpheus can stand for in the fth and very early fourth century: poems ofeschatological content which must have played a role in the mystery ritesof the ecstatic Dionysos and whose doctrinal content was so close toPythagorean doctrines that some authors assumed that Pythagoras orsome early Pythagoreans were the real authors. If pressed to make aguess about these Pythagorean doctrines, the most plausible one is thedoctrine of reincarnation. Titles are not mentioned at all if again onemight make a plausible guess, there must certainly have been a Katabasisinto Hades. Orpheus descent into Hades is attested in fth centurysources.22 Such an eyewitness account is the most natural vehicle foreschatological contents, as Orpheus explicitly says in the prologue of theArgonautika.23

the t e s t imon i e s o f p l a to

Among the testimonies about Orpheus and his poems, Plato, as we allknow, plays a crucial role: he is the rst preserved author to openly andverbatim cite from them. In Kerns edition, there are nineteen fragmentswhich come from the corpus Platonicum;24 Colli and Bernab, whoseeditions make no distinction between testimonies and fragments, haveconsiderably more,25 underlining even more the crucial importance ofPlato for our knowledge of Orpheus.26

When we try to bring order into these texts, we can distinguish severaltopics. The list comes close to the much longer one at the beginning of theArgonautika:(1) One topic is theogony. Some items of information look rather tradi-

tional in the Cratylus, Plato cites two hexameters which talk aboutOceanus and Tethys as having performed the rst marriage (): the couple is Homeric, new is the emphasis on the rstmarriage.27 Other things are less current; according to another hexam-eter, the Orphic theogony ended with the sixth generation, which gives

22 See my Orpheus: A Poet among Men (Graf 1987). Bernab, in his introduction to F 707711, liststhe sources, starting with Aeschylus Bassaridae; see also West 1983: 12.

23 See above n. 4. 24 F 3F 21.25 Colli 1977: 4 [A 10]4 [A 52] (43 texts). [Bernab, whose unpublished index I could use (for which I

thank its author), has 44 references.]26 See the mise au point by Masaracchia 1993.27 Cra. 402bc = (OF 15 Kern = Colli 4 [A35] = F 22 Bernab), cf. Hom. Il. 14.201.

Text and ritual: The Corpus Eschatologicum

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