From Orpheus to Empedocles

Zeus Y ASS AS A. writings of Plato. In the background of all of them and of Plato himself looms the figure of Orpheus and the institutions and VAL beliefs of Orphism, and it is to these matters that we must now direct our attention. V, FROM ORPHEUS TO EMPEDOCLES . Enthusiastic appreciation of Orphism a generation ago made of it a full-blown religion with a founder, scriptures, creed, ritual, and something like an ecclesiastical organization. The enthusiasm was promoted, if not generated, by admirers of the classics who were made uncomfortable by crudities in other manifestations of religion in Greece and therefore eager to discover a structure universal currency. All of these factors may well have contriinto which ideas more acceptable to modern norms could be projected. So firmly entrenched was the conception of Orphism as an established religion that men like Arnold Toynbee (in Vol. 5 of his A Study of History) could speak of the “historic Orphic Church.” Excess in one direction was answered by excess in the other; a series of critical scholars, including the great Wilamowitz, complained that the elaborate structure was founded mainly on buted to the image of Socrates, but it is of interest to indubious hypotheses. quire whether they may have been brought together to some THE INSTITUTION OF HEROIZATION, we have seen, provided a climate in which the memory of a holy teacher might receive reverent consideration; the attainment of recognition by certain deities who worked for the improvement of the human condition might have supplied a paradigm for the teacher's struggle; and belief in the inspiration of the poet's message had wide if not the effect desired. The predecessors of Socrates are grouped to- There was, to be sure, no Orphic Church; to posit one is anachronism. That some features of the creed ascribed to the Orphics are in apparent contradiction to others is no great matter, for recognized religions exhibit similar inconsistencies; more significant, perhaps, is the circumstance that no individual is ever spoken of as an Orphic. But the allusions collected in Otto Kern’s Orphicorum Fragmenta (1922), even after they are subjected to the searching criticism of Ivan Linforth’s The Arts of Orpheus (1941), do indicate that a reasonably consistent attitude distinguishable from other attitudes prevalent in Greece is gether under the designation of pre-Socratics, which includes specifically associated with Orphism in a number of passages teachers of quite different outlook, The principal ones are the . and may reasonably be associated with Orphism in other passages where the connection is not made explicit. If we may not speak of an Orphic religion, therefore, in our sense of “a religion,’ we may speak of it as a movement, as Martin Nilsson, our most eminent authority on Greek religion, speaks of it. If our extant Orphic literature is late and spurious, if the lost Orphic books listed by Clement of Alexandria are mainly pseudepigraphical, they yet point to a very strong likelidegree before Plato to adumbrate that image. Socrates marks an epoch in the history of philosophy as his image does in the history of aretalogy; there were philosophers before Socrates, and some of them are reported to have behaved in ways at least as odd. The actual Socrates, therefore, however strange his conduct or novel his doctrine, belonged in a tradition, and a contrived image of Socrates would be likely to exploit that tradition, choosing traits from one source or another to produce so-called Ionian physicists like Anaximander and Anaximenes and the atomists like Democritus and Leucippus, all definitely rationalist; but the term is also applied to mystics like Pythagoras and to men like Empedocles who were at once mystic and rationalist. With the physicists and their congeners we shall have little concern, for the Platonic Socrates deliberately turned away from them. The others have left a perceptible precipitate in the

hood that a genuine Orphic literature did exist. There can be Of more concern in our present context is the individual regarded as the founder of Orphism and believed to have promulgated its doctrines in poems that he sang. Whether Orpheus was a real personage or mythical or merely the projection of the Orphic sect—all of these views have been maintained—is of no real consequence, as it is of no real consequence whether the Lycurgus who established the Spartan system was historical or an invention; whether real or imagined, our sources speak of him little doubt that the cosmogony by which the chorus justifies the primacy of birds in Aristophanes (Birds 685ff.) is a parody of Orphic doctrine. The Hippolytus of Euripides’ play may not be an Orphic, as has often been alleged, because it is hard to reconcile a devoted huntsman with vegetarianism, but his father Theseus thought he had grounds for reviling him as one (lines 952ff.) : “You are temperate and uncontaminated by evil? Your high claims will never convince me; I won't be such a fool as to attribute’ to the gods such a lack of discernment. Go then and brag, cry up your vegetarian diet like a quack. Hold Orpheus your master, rant away, revere the vaporings of your many screeds.” What a rationalist knew of devotees of Orphism, then, was that they pretended to special purity, followed a vegetarian diet, paid special reverence to Orpheus as their master, and regarded his writings as sacred. It is clear that the Orphics possessed a characteristic cosmogony 39 as a man. His date would be two generations before the Trojan War, for he is regularly represented as participating in the Argonautic expedition, and his place of origin is Thrace. Always, among the Argonauts and elsewhere, he is represented as a singer, with lyre in hand; Aeschylus and Euripides say that he could attract trees and beasts and even stones by his music and could charm whomever he would. He is said to have descended to the underworld to recover his wife Eurydice, who had been bitten to death by a snake. His power survived his death; he was killed and dismembered by a band of Thracian maenads, but his and anthropogony, adapted from elsewhere, it may be, but associsevered head floated on to Lesbos, singing as it went. ated in the popular mind with their movement. It is also clear that they avoided the use of meat and of wool; when Herodotus An hypothesis which fits all the traits ascribed to Orpheus, suggested by the Swiss scholar K. Meuli and elaborated in E. R. (2.81) says that the Egyptians allowed no wool to be taken into Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational, is that Orpheus was a their temples or buried with them, he notes that “here their practice resembles the rites called Orphic and Bacchic.” But the shaman. Shamanism was prevalent in Thrace, and other mysterisalient teachings of Orphism have to do with ethics and eschatous Thracian figures known to the Greeks, Abaris and Aristeas, were clearly shamans. Dodds summarizes his arguments as ology. These rest upon the dualism of body and soul, with the follows (p. 147) : notion that the one is good and enduring and the other transitory and evil, and that one should be suppressed in the interest of the other. Perhaps it was because physical bodies are unclean that Orphics avoided slaughter and eating of flesh; more likely it was because of a belief in transmigration of souls. The corollary of the dichotomy between soul and body is a system of rewards and punishments in an after life. The motivation for proper conduct, including ritual purifications, was to ensure a desirable lot in a future existence. The system was capable of high spirituality, but it also involved elements of crudeness, and it was susceptible of abuse in the hands of self-seeking priests and charlatans. Orpheus’ home is in Thrace, and in Thrace he is the worshipper or companion of a god whom the Grecks identified with Apollo. He combines the professions of poet, magician, religious teacher, and oraclegiver. Like certain legendary shamans in Siberia, he can by his music summon birds and beasts to listen to him. Like shamans everywhere, he pays a visit to the underworld, and his motive is one very common among shamans—to recover a stolen soul. Finally, his magical self lives on as a singing head, which continues to give oracles for many years after his death. That too suggests the North: such mantic heads appear in Norse mythology and in Irish tradition. I conclude that Orpheusisa Thracian figure of much the same character as Zalmoxis— a mythical shaman or prototype of shamans.

Some of these traits Orpheus shares with other figures, and it is therefore pertinent to ask why he in particular became the in the Alcestis (357ff.) Admetus wishes he possessed “the tongue and tunefulness” of Orpheus so that he might charm Persephone and her husband and so bring Alcestis back. Here, of course, the object of the desired skill is still for a purpose like Orpheus’ own, central figure in a religious movement. The Thracian Abaris, Herodotus (4.36) tells us, “is said to have gone with his arrow all round the world without once eating”; in Siberia souls are still said to ride on arrows. Later writers preserve the tradition that he banished pestilences, predicted earthquakes, and composed religious poems. Of Aristeas, Herodotus (4.13-15) tells even more wonderful stories: he travelled through the north in a trance; he was seen dead in a fuller’s shop in Proconnesus, was simultaneously seen on the road to Cyzicus, and seven years later reappeared in Proconnesus, where he wrote a poem and again disappeared; and many years later he appeared to the Metapontines in Italy and bade them set up an altar to Apollo, saying that Apollo had once visited their country, with himself in attendance in the shape of a crow. Hermotimus of Clazomenae was 41 but in the Medea Jason says, “Let me not possess gold in my house nor the power of singing more beautifully than Orpheus unless it makes me famous.” If Orpheus shared his wonderworking powers with others, then, it was as a singer that he was most eminent. Among Greeks of all periods, we must remember, a high reputation as a singer implied not virtuoso performance but superlative content. Connected with the gift of song, that others possessed, is one distinction that others did not, and that is the reputation for having introduced secret mysteries. This is alluded to as early as Herodotus but made most specific in Euripides’ Rhesus 9436. to them without citing names: when Orestes in the Electra (62ff.) is troubled by the possible omen in feigning his own death, The reason that Orpheus, and not others of his class, was honored for his spiritual gifts and by critical minds may be the quite simple fact that his doctrine was spiritually superior, or lent itself to spiritual elaboration. The latter is the more probable alternative, and we may surmise that Orpheus’ high reputation was further enhanced in order to give higher authority to the he consoles himself with the reflection, “Often before now have doctrine attributed to him. Whether he was historical or a myth I seen wise men die in vain report,.and then, when they return quickened into life, it is clear that the personality of Orpheus was an object of esteem amounting to reverence, and that this esteem served to document the validity of teachings ascribed to him. It is highly probable that he was the first such figure in the western tradition, for the antecedent religious atmosphere, whether Cretan or Achaean, did not lend itself to such development; in any case he is the first such known to western tradition. similarly able to travel and observe far-off events while his apparently dead body remained at home. Stories like these were familiar enough in fifth-century Athens for Sophocles to allude home, they are held in more abiding honor.” But Orpheus was held in higher and more abiding honor than the others. Even in the sixth century the epithet “of renowned name” (onomaklyton: Ibycus, frg. 17) was applied to him. The several references to him in Plato (e.g., Symposium 179D; Republic 10, 6204) sound as if a real person, not a mythological figure, were spoken of. When Isocrates (Busiris 11.38) objects to blasphemous things said of the gods by the poets, he says that Orpheus was particularly liable to the charge and so died by being pulled to pieces. Others of his class, as we noticed, also composed poems, but none attained such high fame as a singer as Orpheus. Many passages praise his singing for its specifically magic power, but sometimes it is the quality of the singing, rather than wizardry, that seems to receive the greater emphasis. So Socrates, as we have observed, however extraordinary he may have been, was not so extraordinary as Plato portrayed him, and Plato enhanced Socrates’ personality in order to give greater authority to the teachings ascribed to Socrates. Plato was as aware as any modern that well-intentioned people might manipulate religious sentiments for a desirable end, as the Laws amply shows, and he was as capable of analyzing the history of the Orpheus myth as any modern. To say that he consciously took

GODS FROM the Orpheus complex as his model for fashioning his own holy ORPHEUS TO EMPEDOCLES 43 tivation of purity, which may involve study of natural science; teacher is to indulge in fantasy, though it is not beyond the range study thus becomes a of possibility. gorean teaching that opened the way for attributing mathemati- But we need not insist that Plato had a single model for his religious duty. It is this aspect of Pythacal and other sciences to him. As important as his doctrine is there were other the society Pythagoras established to preserve and promulgate it. teachers for whom special sanctity was claimed. Pythagoras, in The society was a closed body, apparently graded into divisions of particular, was a more tangible figure, was credited with a more “auditors” and “students” and subject to a very strict communal sophisticated and better articulated doctrine, and so was nearer discipline. The spiritual exercises were directed to the achieveto Plato in outlook as well as in time. Indeed Pythagoras himself ment enterprise. Between Orpheus and Socrates of purity and entailed silence, constant self-scrutiny became the subject of a legend that both borrowed from and (“where did I go astray, what have I done, what that I should contributed to the Socratic legend and ultimately swallowed and have done have I failed to do”), and the observance of certain sophisticated and better articulated doctrine, and so was nearer ancient precepts that were given a symbolic meaning. gorean legend ultimately assumed will be presented in the latter It is obvious that Pythagoras was a highly gifted personality part of this book. What concerns us at present are the aspects of who deserved the respect given him; Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism that may have helped shape it was inevitable that a religious society should endow its founder but even if he had not been, Plato’s portrait of Socrates. with special sanctity, and increasingly so as the foundation re- Our extant biographies of Pythagoras date to the third and ceded into the past. There were of course mockers, in comedy fourth centuries A.D. and are so heavily incrusted with legend New and Old and among hard rationalists. Contemporaries of that the historical Pythagoras is hard to isolate. Indeed, some Plato who were not in sympathy with Platonism took a critical extreme critics have thought him a syndicate rather than an view of Pythagoreanism also. Here, for example, is a comment of individual, and some have regarded him as a newcomer from Isocrates (Busiris 28) : India and his name as a hellenization of the Sanskrit pitta gurü, or Father Teacher. But there is no sufficient reason to doubt the tradition that he was one man and a Greek, the son of Mnesarchus of Samos, and that about 531 B.c. he emigrated thence to Croton, in southern Italy. In regard to the doctrine attributed to Pythagoras, there is again great uncertainty. Many scholars are convinced that the mathematical and musical contributions attributed to him are not in fact his but for various reasons came to be associated with his name late in the fifth century. On a visit to Egypt Pythagoras became a student of the religion of the people, and was first to bring to the Greeks all philosophy, and more conspicuously than others he interested himself in sacrifices and in ceremonial purity, since he believed that even if he should gain thereby no greater reward from the gods, among men, at any rate, his reputation would be greatly enhanced. And this indeed happened to him. For so greatly did he surpass others in reputation that all the younger men desired to be his pupils, and their elders were more pleased to see their sons staying in his company than attending to their private affairs, And these reports we cannot disbelieve; for even now But what concerns us is Pythagoras’ ethical and spiritual teachpersons who profess to be followers of his teaching are more admired ings, and here there can be little doubt that they are his own. when silent than are those who have the greatest renown for eloquence. According to these teachings the soul is a fallen divinity incar- The very tone of the pejorative remarks in this passage sugcerated in the body as in a tomb and condemned to a cycle of gests a polemical attitude: reincarnation as man, animal, or plant. This explains Pythagorean abstention from animal food and even from certain Pythagoras as a self-seeker because the generality of people vegetables. The soul can be released from the cycle by the culauthors speak of Pythagoras with varying degrees of respect; the Isocrates sets himself to belittle tended to set too high a value upon him. Other and earlier

FROM ORPHEUS TO EMPEDOCLES 45 list includes such names as Xenophanes and Heraclitus, Herodotus and Ion of Chios, Empedocles, and in particular Plato, In Pythagoras in the institution he could not well claim for himself a number of other authors who do not mention Pythagoras by that he thought a peculiar efficacy should inhere in the head of name the influence of Pythagoreanism is perceptible. The most a school we can see from the autobiographical Seventh Epistle. (or for any contemporary) and so made Socrates his surrogate; telling case is Pindar. His praises of ponos (toil) and his con- But any derivation of Platonic matter from Pythagorean is ception of “harmony” are plausibly thought to derive from subject to the important qualification that the influence may Pythagoreanism, as does much of his religious posture generally actually have operated in the reverse direction, for the image of Pythagoras that prevailed at the turn of the fifth and fourth “It is not mine to wonder,” he says (Pythian 10.48). “When the gods appoint it, nothing is too strange.” But the largest and clearest precipitate of Pythagoreanism is in Plato, who is also the most effective agent for spreading aspects of the doctrine. Plato’s relationship to Pythagoras is different from his relationwere quite aware of what they were doing; surely thinkers ship to Orpheus. Citations of Orpheus are of an almost purely literary nature, which is to say mainly decorative. Pythagoras is known that Pythagoras was used as a convenient vehicle for concited as an authority whom the writer accepts, and often his doctriving, giving authority to, and propagating a particular comcenturies was undoubtedly colored by contemporary philosophic (including Platonic) thought. It is not improbable that philosophers who attributed to Pythagoras doctrine that was not his interested in the progress of speculation, as Plato was, must have trine is presented without his name being mentioned. Materials plex of ideas. If the Platonic image of Socrates is a creation for a in dialogues as diverse as the Republic (especially in the vision similar purpose, then no personality in antecedent history could of Er) and the Timaeus are clearly adaptations of Pythagoreanhave been so suggestive and so perfect a model. The fact that ism. Perhaps there is some connection between the concern for Pythagoras himself subsequently became the subject of the mass mathematics attributed to Pythagoras and the large place that of hagiological writing—of which a specimen will be presented subject occupied in the teaching of the Academy, even if the in the latter part of this book—shows how outstandingly appropriate for the purpose his image was. Plato did not adopt the direction of the movement is toward rather than from Pythagoreanism. Most striking, perhaps, is the very organization of the Academy and Plato’s insistence (in the Seventh Epistle) that model, as later writers did, but mastered and adapted it, and it is a mark of his own high originality and artistry that he did doctrine was to be assimilated not out of books but only by longso. His own creation is more consistent and more credible, and continued therefore more edifying and inspiring. and intimate contact with the master. The later schools of philosophy were all organized as cults, with the teacher as the responsible leader; that apparently was the only means of There remains one other figure in the pre-Socratic group of whom effecting a corporate existence capable of transmitting property it is possible to conceive that his traits contributed to the deand placing it under the legal control of the head. Even the veloped image of the holy teacher, and that is Empedocles of Museum at Alexandria was organized as a cult of the Muses. Agrigentum. In view of the sharp distinction rationalist ages draw Even Epicurus received the honors appropriate to the head of a between wonder-working and philosophy, Empedocles is a puzschool; for example, his birthday continued to be celebrated. So zling phenomenon; far as we can see, the pre-Socratics (with the obvious exception headed, and original thinker who wrote the poem On Nature it is hard to believe that the acute, clearof the Hippocratics) had no such organization. If the Academy (of which about 350 lines are extant) should also have written was a pioneer in this respect, it may be that Plato was consciously On Purifications (of which only about a hundred lines are exadopting an admired Pythagorean institution. The position of tant); but there can be no doubt that he did in fact write both

FROM ORPHEUS TO EMPEDOCLES 47 poems. If Orpheus is possibly merely a hypostatization, and Pythagoras dim and shadowy, there can be no doubt of the became so after the time of Empedocles; in his day there was no historicity of Empedocles and of the outlines of his career. He was incongruity in a single preternaturally endowed individual pracborn of an aristocratic family in Acragas in Sicily about 493 B.c. tising various arts that were at one in requiring special spiritual and lived for sixty years, so that Socrates was nearly forty when endowment. Perhaps the apparent incongruities in the traditional Empedocles died. As a young man he championed democracy at Acragas, was offered and refused the kingship, was subsequently career of Pythagoras or even of Orpheus are to be similarly exexiled and went to the Peloponnesus, where he recited his Purifications at Olympia. He visited the panhellenic colony of Thurii in 443 R.c., shortly after it was founded by Pericles, There sonages too themselves designed the shape of the legend in which are various miraculous stories of his death, either by translation see that the element of the miraculous, though it persisted as such or in the crater of Etna. and was even elaborated, was at the same time allegorized or Empedocles was philosopher, scientist, poet, orator, statesman, and at the same time mystagogue, miracle worker, healer, and claimant to divine honors. For his high attainments in philosophy we have the unimpeachable evidence of the best ancient critics as well as his own writings; much of his doctrine is incorporated in Aristotle. His eminence as a literary artist is suggested by the fact that his pupil Gorgias is reputed to be the founder of artistic Greek prose style. But stories of his preternatural capacities were that the functions which are differentiated amongst ourselves plained (as E. R. Dodds believes they are); perhaps these perthey are swathed, In all three of the teachers we have glanced at here we can otherwise endowed with rich spiritual meaning. The process is surest in the case of Orpheus; the association of lofty spiritual doctrine with so shadowy a personality suggests a large degree of conscious manipulation. In the case of Pythagoras we know that he himself gave spiritual meaning to primitive tabus, as his devotees centuries later were to give spiritual meaning to neutral acts of his own. We can see the process at its clearest, in a later stage of thought, in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, where rites also much publicized. He is said to have stayed the winds by essentially barbaric are given a purer (and quite alien) significhis magic, to have restored a dead woman to life, to have vanished ance. Where there was no central authority to enforce continued bodily from the mortal world and to have become a god. These observance of outworn ritual, and indeed no single set of obspecific tales may be later embroidery supplied by the credulous; servances exclusively binding, the next logical step would be to what is of particular interest is that in this case we know that promote the spirituality at which the interpretation aimed with- Empedocles himself fashioned his legend and started it on its out the tabus out of which they had been alleged to derive. What way. He himself declared that he could teach his pupils to stay could give the spiritual doctrine a focus and authority was the the winds and revive the dead, he himself declared that he was personality and career of no longer mortal but an immortal god, and he himself described Empedocles went beyond both Orpheus and Pythagoras in dethe throngs who came to him in search of occult knowledge and liberately shaping his career to provide focus and authority and magical cures, perhaps scope for allegorical expansion in a desirable direction. the teacher who promulgated it. We cannot, as some have essayed to do, divide Empedocles If ‘his predecessors are considered in this light, we can see that into two and say that he started either as a magician or as a philo- Socrates is in a direct line of succession, with the miraculous elesopher and was then converted to the other, for the claims to ments suppressed, in keeping with the tastes of a sophisticated wonder-working are found not in Purifications but in On Nature. age, the spiritual emphasized, and enough of the preternatural Nor can we say that his object was to synthesize the two, for there gifts left to produce a figure that could serve as a focus and exis only juxtaposition and no attempt at synthesis, The point is amples. But if it was natural for the image of a Socrates to appear

in succession to his predecessors, his coming into being required the services of a midwife, to use the figure Plato puts into Socrates’ mouth, and the midwife, it would seem, was Plato. Va WER BES GODS VW