AN EXAMPLE OF INDO-EUROPEAN STRUCTURES

Let it suffice here to grapple with two examples. Hesiod’s intriguing story of the five human races, the golden race, the silver race, the bronze race, the heroic race and the iron race, has been interpreted from various points of view; some relate each of the races to historical periods (e.g.

The fact that this article has not dealt sufficiently with any of the large areas of cultural interest, be it mythology, literature, art, cult or politics, is due to the necessary limitations of a short introduction. The main objective has been to give an overview of problems and issues pertaining to the study of ancient Greek religion as one of the significant European cultures.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to George Hinge for numerous helpful critical remarks allowing me to improve the chapter.

NOTES

1. Porphyry passes on a testimony by Draco from 620 BCE informing us that the Athenians were obliged to honour the gods and the local heroes with praise and sacrificial cakes of the first fruit “according to paternal law” (nomois patriots; Porphyry De abstinentia [On Abstinence] 4.22, corrections by Meursius), but even if this is extrapolated to describe the conditions of archaic traditions in general, it does not indicate any coherent world-view other than the authority of paternal law and the worship prescribed by it, a statement which may be just as basic as it is uninformative in any detailed sense.

2. It is debated whether this dispute is fact or fiction: cf. West (1997: 306-32). Nagy (1990a: 36-82), for instance, claims that Perses is a poetic invention. Although Hesiod’s poem shows remarkable similarities with the Semitic Wisdom literature, I do not see why a real instance of arbitration should change our appreciation of this literary form in any way.

3. Kirk et al. (1983 ad loc.) translate empsuchon with “besouled” in order to emphasize the meaning of inhabiting a “soul” (psuche).

4. Hippias rendered the chain of succession as Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, Homer: cf. Orphicorum Testimonia 252 (Kern 1922), but his testimony probably tells us more about “the ideology of Orphism” than of real historical origins. Still, the opinion that Orpheus was an ancestor of Homer was quite widespread in Hellenistic times: see Orphicorum Testimonia 7-9 (Kern 1922); Gorgias B 25 DK.

5. See especially Burkert (1993: 259-75); Graf (1993: 239-58); Graf & Iles Johnston (2007).

6. The Derveni papyrus presents us with a commentary on what seem to be Orphic verses from the Rhapsodies and Hymns of pre-Platonic origin. For a specific study of the Derveni text, see Laks & Most (1997).

7. See, for instance, Susan Guettel Cole’s analysis (1993: 276-96) of the Olbia findings, including the interesting bone tablets (on which we find the inscription “life, death, life, truth... Dio, Orphikoi”, ibid. 277); cf. also Albinus (2000: 124-5). Bohme (1986) is notoriously famous for arguing that a literary tradition as well as a cult around Orpheus was far older than the Homeric tradition.

8. Cf. West (1983: 249-50); Bohme (1986: 22-3); Albinus (2000: 101-2).

9. In the series Poetae Epici Graeci, a new updated compilation has come to replace Kern’s, though with a different notation of the same fragments. In this article, Orphic fragments (as well as testimonies) are referred to according to Kern’s notation, w^rhile I acknowledge that PEG, II: Orphicorum et orphicis similium testimonia et fragmenta, fasc. 1-3, ed. A. Bernabe (Teubner, 2004-2007) currently seems to be the authoritative edition.

10. Take, for instance, studies as diverse as Gregory Nagy’s Pindar’s Homer (1990b) and G. E. R. Lloyd’s Demystifying Mentalities (1990) for agreeing on this point of departure.

11. Cf. Clement Protrepticus 2.14; see also J.

12. Cronus is not to be confused with the Orphic god of time, Chronus, until Hellenistic times when the two tend to fuse into one.

13. Yet, the Odyssey also speaks of the subterranean rivers, Acheron (River of Woe), Pyriphlegethon (River of Blazing Fire) and Cocytus (River of Wailing), which together with the Lethe (River of Forgetfulness)

26. As a divine child, identified with Dionysus, at least from classical times, lacchus allegedly parallels the position of the initiate, and it is highly probable that the role of the initiate is pictured in the terracotta figurine of Persephone found at Karamina in Italy (cf. Albinus 2000: plate 7), where we see a small person stepping out of the circle [of life], receiving the “crown” (stephanos) [of initiation], in the bosom of the queen of the underworld. The “clarifications” in square brackets indicate my interpretation; see also ibid., 177-91, for further discussion and comparison of the available source material.

27. See especially in this regard, Price (1978: 171-2, 199ff.); for sources, see Diogenes Laertius 1.114-15; cf. Porphyry On the Cave of the Nymphs 60.6; On Abstinence 4.16; Orphic Hymns 51-3 (Athanassakis 1977).

28. The mysteries were about pathein (to “experience”) rather than mathein (to “learn”), cf. Aristotle Fragment 15, contrary to later sources, Cicero De legibus [On the Laws] 2.36; Epictetus 3.21.15, which might indicate some intellectualization of the events.

29. Mikalson has done an admirable job in showing that Hellenistic culture was not the individualistic and rootless sowing field for Christianity as has often been, more or less implicitly, supposed (cf. Gehrke 1990: 185-92). Nevertheless, he may have overemphasized the degree of traditional continuity (Mikalson 1998: 288ff); for arguments, see Albinus (2001: 315-19).

30. Apart from considerations of cultural diffusion, Arbman’s erratic notion of a “free soul”, Freiseele, as pertaining to the archaic notion of psukhe (Arbman 1926: 92ff.) and the work of Jan Bremmer (1983: 14ff.) have been partly responsible for this phenomenological misadventure.

31. There were many others making such comparisons, but mostly historians, philosophers, logographers and mythographers of later date, for example Plato, Plutarch, Strabo, Diogenes Laertius, Pausanias, Diodorus and Apollodorus, to name but a few.

32. Constantinople was founded by Constantine in 330 CE as the great colony of the eastern Greeks which thus became the centre of the Byzantine Empire (but the city of Byzantium had been there long before Constantine). An intriguing, yet difficult, topic is defining a Greek cultural identity, if it is at all possible. It may be equally correct to say that modern Greeks would want to find a criterion for cultural identity in Homer and Plato as well as in the glory of Byzantium, whereas Woodhouse (1991: 12) may have a point in arguing that an ideological conflict of “Hellenism versus Byzantism” was crucial to the criteria of cultural belonging and identification in late antiquity. Furthermore, the linguistic criterion of distinguishing Romanic-speaking peoples from Hellenic-speaking peoples was occasionally applied to settlers who understood themselves to be Greeks, rendering the linguistic criterion less than unifying in Roman times (ibid.).

33. Martin L. West, a great philologist and a close friend of Burkert, has also contributed considerably to the assessment of oriental influence on Greek culture, cf. West (1966, 1971, 1997).

34. See, for instance, Vernant (1965); Detienne (1967, 1977); Vernant & Vidal-Naquet (1988) for some of the most crucial works.

35. The works of Nagy himself (1979, 1990b), as well as the articles collected in 1990a, may probably still be the most ground-breaking. Also worth mentioning, however, are Bernard Sergent (1998) and, from a different angle to Dumezil’s, Calvert Watkins (1995) and Martin L. West (2007).

SUGGESTED READING

Albinus, L. 2000. The House of Hades: Studies in Ancient Greek Eschatology. Aarhus.

Burkert, W. 2011. Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche, 2nd edn. Stuttgart. [The first edition is available in English as: Burkert, W. 1985. Greek Religion, John Raffan (trans.). Cambridge, MA.] Carpenter, Th. H. & Ch. A. Faraone (eds) 1993. Masks of Dionysus. Ithaca, NY.

Seaford, R. 1994. Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State. Oxford. Vernant, J.-P. 1983. Myth and Thought Among the Greeks. Janet Lloyd & Jeff Fort (trans.). London. Zaidman, L. B. & P. Schmitt Pantel 1989. Religion in the Greek City. Paul Cartledge (trans.). Cambridge.