Aegean Origin of Greek Reincarnation Immorality Doctrines Corr

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The Aegean origin and early history of Greek reincarnation & immorality of
soul doctrines. Epimenides, Pherecydes, Pythagoras and Onomacritus'
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National Research University
Higher School of Economics
Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies
VI (LXXVII)
III (LXXIV)
Natalia Yu. Chalisova

MYTH,
OF PERSIAN
RITUAL,
BEAUTY
LITERATURE
The Lovers’ Companion
by Šaraf ad-Dīn Rāmī
Higher School of Economics

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2022
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Национальный исследовательский университет
Высшая школа экономики
Институт классического Востока и античности
VI (LXXVII)
III (LXXIV)
Н.Ю. Чалисова
МИФ,
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В.И. Брагинский (SOAS, London), Мицуёси Нумано (Tokyo Univ., Japan),

Ли Чжунжэнь (Beijing Normal Univ., China), А.Н. Мещеряков (ИКВИА НИУ ВШЭ),
А.Г. Сторожук (Востфак СПбГУ), Н.В. Козлова (Государственный Эрмитаж),
А.И. Иванчик (ИКВИА НИУ ВШЭ / Univ. of Bordeaux, France), И.С. Архипов
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Alexander Treiger (Dalhousie University, Canada), Маргалит Финкельберг
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к.филол.н., А.В. Белоусов
Миф, ритуал, литература [Текст] / отв. ред. Ю.В. Иванова,

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Contents
J.V. Ivanova.
Editor’s Introduction ........................................................................................ 10
XENIA ET APOPHORETA
I.S. Smirnov.
Vivat, Nina! ........................................................................................................ 31
A.I. Shmaina-Velikanova.
About Nina Braginskaya .................................................................................. 32
O.A. Sedakova.
Flora: The music of touching. To Nina Braginskaya ..................................... 42
N.Yu. Kostenko.
“The Race of Life”: to the interpretation
of the title of the memoirs of O.M. Freidenberg ........................................... 45
ORIENTALIA
G. Bohak.
Power in Absence:
Two Notes on the Jewish High Priestly Vestments ....................................... 55
M.G. Seleznev.
“The city Asedek (πόλις ασεδεκ)“ ................................................................... 68
S.V. Babkina.
The skull of Araunah and the grave of Adam:
an attempt to reconstruct the history of the tradition................................... 84
M.V. Yurovitskaya.
Isaiah 6 in the Septuagint: Translation and Commentary ........................... 97
E.V. Aleksandrova.
What do Egyptian tombs say, and how do they say it? .............................. 113
A.M. Dubyanskiy
On some bodily motifs in the religious culture of India ............................ 132
Contents 581
CLASSICA ET PALEOCHRISTIANA
N.N. Kazansky.
Some “rudimentary motifs” in Greek epic poetry
(the Pylos Combat Agate and the Iliad 3, 369 sq.) ...................................... 149
R.P. Martin.
Three Moments in the Sun ............................................................................. 172
E.L. Bowie.
Mythology in archaic and classical Greek sympotic poetry ...................... 186
A.V. Podossinov.
The geography of myth and mythical geography
in ancient literature (some general observations) ...................................... 218
A.V. Lebedev.
The Aegean origin and early history of the Greek doctrine
of reincarnation and immortality of the soul: Epimenides,
Pherecydes, Pythagoras, and Onomacritus’ Orphica ................................. 240
B. Maslov.
Aristotle and Freidenberg on tragic character ............................................ 302
L. Athanassaki.
Ritual, Communication, and Characterization
in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias .............................................................................. 316
Motherhood and martyrdom: Thoughts on the Passion
of Saints Perpetua and Felicity and The 19th Ode of Solomon .................. 330
P.V. Lebedev.
Views on Exorcism in Christian Apologetics of the 2nd century ............. 349
T.F. Teperik.
Reception of myth and reception of the image: cinematography ............. 359
MEDIOEVALIA
D.S. Penskaya.
The Narration of Agapius as a symbolic story ............................................. 369
A.Ju. Vinogradov.
The Life of John the Calybite as a novel outside of genres .......................... 396
582 Contents
I.G. Matjushina.
Ekphrasis in skaldic poetry ............................................................................ 411
T.A. Mikhailova
“Happy omens” or the magic of the formula
in the saga The Fosterage of the House of Two Goblets ................................ 426
PORTENTA AC MONSTRA
S.Yu. Neklyudov.
Phantoms of demon-making: the ‘third strategy’ ....................................... 441
J.V. Ivanova, P.V. Sokolov.
Witches, Patricians and lazzaroni: The Oxymoronic Heroes
of Giambattista Vico and His Contemporaries ........................................... 458
T.Al. Mikhailova.
Head, platter, and dangerous women ........................................................... 473
JOCOSERIA
I.A. Protopopova.
Plato and fairy tales ......................................................................................... 485
APPENDIX
A Bibliography of Nina Braginskaya’s Publications.
Compiled by Nina V. Braginskaya, Natalia Ju. Kostenko ....................................... 493
Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... 524
General bibliography .................................................................................................. 530
Authors .......................................................................................................................... 561
J.V. Ivanova.
Overview .......................................................................................................... 564
Contents ........................................................................................................................ 580
Contents
J.V. Ivanova.
Editor’s Introduction ........................................................................................ 10
XENIA ET APOPHORETA
I.S. Smirnov.
Vivat, Nina! ........................................................................................................ 31
About Nina Braginskaya .................................................................................. 32
O.A. Sedakova.
Flora: The music of touching. To Nina Braginskaya ..................................... 42
N.Yu. Kostenko.
“The Race of Life”: to the interpretation
of the title of the memoirs of O.M. Freidenberg ........................................... 45
ORIENTALIA
G. Bohak.
Power in Absence:
Two Notes on the Jewish High Priestly Vestments ....................................... 55
M.G. Seleznev.
“The city Asedek (πόλις ασεδεκ)“ ................................................................... 68
S.V. Babkina.
The skull of Araunah and the grave of Adam:
an attempt to reconstruct the history of the tradition................................... 84
M.V. Yurovitskaya.
Isaiah 6 in the Septuagint: Translation and Commentary ........................... 97
E.V. Aleksandrova.
What do Egyptian tombs say, and how do they say it? .............................. 113
A.M. Dubyanskiy
On some bodily motifs in the religious culture of India ............................ 132
Contents 581
CLASSICA ET PALEOCHRISTIANA
N.N. Kazansky.
Some “rudimentary motifs” in Greek epic poetry
(the Pylos Combat Agate and the Iliad 3, 369 sq.) ...................................... 149
R.P. Martin.
Three Moments in the Sun ............................................................................. 172
E.L. Bowie.
Mythology in archaic and classical Greek sympotic poetry ...................... 186
A.V. Podossinov.
The geography of myth and mythical geography
in ancient literature (some general observations) ...................................... 218
A.V. Lebedev.
The Aegean origin and early history of the Greek doctrine
of reincarnation and immortality of the soul: Epimenides,
Pherecydes, Pythagoras, and Onomacritus’ Orphica ................................. 240
B. Maslov.
Aristotle and Freidenberg on tragic character ............................................ 302
L. Athanassaki.
Ritual, Communication, and Characterization
in Plutarch’s Life of Nicias .............................................................................. 316
Motherhood and martyrdom: Thoughts on the Passion
of Saints Perpetua and Felicity and The 19th Ode of Solomon .................. 330
P.V. Lebedev.
Views on Exorcism in Christian Apologetics of the 2nd century ............. 349
T.F. Teperik.
Reception of myth and reception of the image: cinematography ............. 359
MEDIOEVALIA
D.S. Penskaya.
The Narration of Agapius as a symbolic story ............................................. 369
A.Ju. Vinogradov.
The Life of John the Calybite as a novel outside of genres .......................... 396
582 Contents
I.G. Matjushina.
Ekphrasis in skaldic poetry ............................................................................ 411
T.A. Mikhailova
“Happy omens” or the magic of the formula
in the saga The Fosterage of the House of Two Goblets ................................ 426
PORTENTA AC MONSTRA
S.Yu. Neklyudov.
Phantoms of demon-making: the ‘third strategy’ ....................................... 441
J.V. Ivanova, P.V. Sokolov.
Witches, Patricians and lazzaroni: The Oxymoronic Heroes
of Giambattista Vico and His Contemporaries ........................................... 458
T.Al. Mikhailova.
Head, platter, and dangerous women ........................................................... 473
JOCOSERIA
I.A. Protopopova.
Plato and fairy tales ......................................................................................... 485
APPENDIX
A Bibliography of Nina Braginskaya’s Publications.
Compiled by Nina V. Braginskaya, Natalia Ju. Kostenko ....................................... 493
Abbreviations ............................................................................................................... 524
General bibliography .................................................................................................. 530
Authors .......................................................................................................................... 561
J.V. Ivanova.
Overview .......................................................................................................... 564
Contents ........................................................................................................................ 580
The Aegean origin and early history
of the Greek doctrines of reincarnation
and immortality of the soul
(Epimenides, Pherecydes, Pythagoras,
and Onomacritus’ Orphica)
A.V. Lebedev
Table of contents
1. Epimenides’ art of divination and Cretan oracular caves. The so-called “Orphic” bone
tablets from Olbia and astragalomancy.
2. Reconstructing the proem and cosmogony of Epimenides’ Theogony.
3. Selene, the lion of Nemea, and Aiakos: former lives of Epimenides.
4. Epimenides, the Orphics (Onomacritus), and Pythagoras: de fontibus.
5. The doctrine of transmigration in Pherecydes of Syros. Ion of Chios on Pherecydes
and Pythagoras’ doctrine of the afterlife.
6. A tentative typology, filiation and chronology of the early versions of the Tr/Re doc-
trine.
7. A hypothesis of the common “Aegean substrate” of the archaic versions of the Tr/Re
doctrine: Epimenides (Crete), Pherecydes (Syros) and Pythagoras (Delos). The Cy-
cladic FAF figurines as possible archeological evidence for the Bronze Age Aegean
roots of the Tr/Re doctrine.
8. A brief reception history of the Tr/Re doctrine in Vth– and IVth–century Athens.
Appendix 1. Revisiting the Pharnabazos graffito from Olbia.

Appendix 2. Some remarks on the relation between Pythagoreanism and Orphism. A re-
ply to Gábor Betegh.
Appendix 3. Aristotle on “Pythagorean myths” of reincarnation in De anima I.
Appendix 4: Confirmatory new evidence from the Sinai palimpsest.
Early Greek doctrines of reincarnation and immortality 241
1. Epimenides’ art of divination and Cretan oracular caves.

The so-called “Orphic” bone tablets from Olbia and as-
tragalomancy
Epimenides was the most famous Cretan sage; he was also ranked among the
“Seven Sages” of Greece as an alternative to the Corinthian tyrant Periander. There
is no reason to doubt either that he was a historical figure, or that, according to the
testimony of Aristotle and Plutarch, at the end of the VIIth century he was invited to
Athens as an authoritative expert on “purifications” (καθαρμοί) to stop the epidem-
ic, which the people considered a consequence of the “Kylonian pollution”, and that
he completed his task successfully. In the Diels-Kranz edition of the The Fragments
of the Presocratics, in which the chapters are ordered chronologically, the Epimenides
chapter is numbered (3) and comes after Orpheus (1) and Mousaios (2). In fact, the
Epimenides chapter should be (1), since his Theogony, as will be shown below, was
composed at least a century or so earlier than the Theogony by Pseudo-Orpheus, com-
posed by Onomacritus in the late VIth century, and also earlier than the Theogony by
“Mousaios”. In terms of his variety of talents and skills (τέχναι), he surpasses all the
Greek sages. He was in one person a “priest of Zeus and Rhea” associated with the
sacred and oracular caves of Crete, a soothsayer (mantis) who was consulted on im-
portant religious and political issues by various poleis, an epic poet and author of the
epic Theogony, a healer and the founder of Greek herbal medicine (ῥιζοτόμος), a reli-
gious authority whose recommendations were taken into account when founding new
sanctuaries and cults, and the most respected specialist in the archaic era on “purifi-
cations” (καθαρμοί) during epidemics, which included not only ritual, but also sani-
tary and hygienic measures based on the use of medicinal herbs1. He is also present-
ed as a diplomat who helped Solon with his legislation and established a symmachia
between Athens and Cnossus. According to Plutarch, Epimenides possessed the gift
of collective psychotherapy: by his propitiations and regulations of cult and funerary
rites he calmed people down, relieved their fears, and made them more civilized and
willing to uphold law and order. The name of Epimenides appears not only in lists of
the Seven Sages (mainly political figures), but also in lists of thaumaturges or “divine
men” (θεῖος ἀνήρ) of the archaic era, such as Aristaeus of Proconnesus, Abaris the
Hyperborean, Hermotimus of Clazomenae, Pherecydes of Syros and others. His bi-
ography is replete with incredible miracle tales: he died and came back to life many
times; his soul could leave his body and return to it; he lived 157 years (299 according
to the Cretan version), for 57 of which he slept in a cave; he had a revelation dream in
which he communicated with Truth (Aletheia) and Justice (Dike); he invented a herb-
al remedy for hunger; no one saw him eat or visit the latrine; he predicted an earth-
quake in Sparta; and after his death, his skin was found covered in mysterious letters
1
On Epimenides’ herbal medicine and the use of squill (Urginea maritima) as rat-poison, employed, we
hypothesize, by Epimenides to disinfect the city during his “purification” of Athens, see [Lebedev, 2015, p. 564–
570]. On the use and supposed properties of squill in Greek and Roman medicine, religion, magic ad folklore see
the invaluable study of [Chase, 2015].
242 A.V. Lebedev
(the origin of the expression “Epimenides’ skin”, meaning something arcane, mysteri-
ous, etc.). The proponents of the diffusionist Meuli-Dodds-Burkert hypothesis of the
northern “shamanistic” origin of the Orphic-Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation
used to call archaic Greek thaumaturges or miracle workers “shamans”, and so Epi-
menides received this label too [Dodds, 1951; Burkert, 1972, p. 122 ff.; West, 1983,
p. 146 ff]2. But how often do shamans compose cosmogonic epic poems in Homeric
hexameters? Τhis hypothesis has been repeatedly subjected to convincing criticism,
especially by Jan Bremmer [Bremmer, 1983; 2016]. Summing up the results of many
years of discussion in a recent survey, Bremmer speaks of the “dismantling of the sha-
manic paradigm” in modern classical scholarship [2016, p. 69].
We do not know anything about the belief in the immortal divine soul of the
Pythagorean-Platonic type or reincarnation among the Scythians, next to whom the
Greeks lived on the Black Sea. The story of the Scythian king Skyles, who married
a Greek woman, built himself a house in Olbia and was initiated into the mysteries of
Dionysos Bakkheios (Herod. 4.78–80), and for this reason was killed by the Scythi-
ans, gives us an example of the influence of Greek ecstatic cults on the Scythians, but
not vice versa.
The attempt to trace the influence of “northern shamanism” in the so-called “Or-
phic” Vth-century BC graffiti from Olbia is equally untenable. These bone tablets are
divinatory devices related to Greek cleromancy (astragalomancy), which has ancient
roots in Apollonian mantike and has nothing to do with Pontic Scythians, let alone
with Siberian shamans3. Astragalomancy, divination by dice (cubes or knucklebones),
dates back at least to the archaic period: astragali were found in the archaic strata of
the Apollo temples in Ionia [Seipel, 2008, S. 185; Nollé, 2007, S. 11 ff.]. The cleroman-
tic character and purpose of these bone tablets is firmly established by their structur-
al similarity to the IInd–IIIrd-century dice oracles from South-Western Asia Minor ed-
ited by Johannes Nollé (2007)4. The Olbian bone tablets and the monumental dice or-
acles from Asia Minor share three common elements. (1) Isolated letters/numbers or
combinations of numbers obtained by a throw of the astragali (kleros). (2) An oracu-
lar response (chresmos) corresponding to this number or combination. In Anatolian
dice oracles the chresmos is set in hexameters; in the Olbian tablets it takes the form of
ambiguous pairs of opposites. (3) The name of the god to pray or sacrifice to in order
to achieve one’s desire. In Anatolian dice oracles the name of the god is given in the
2
See also [Ustinova, 2018, p. 337–341]. Zhmud’ rightly objected to Burkert’s view of Pythagoras as a “shaman”
[Zhmud’, 2012, p. 207 ff.]. However, his attempt to distinguish between an allegedly non-religious Pythagorean
version of the doctrine of reincarnation and a religious Orphic one (Ibid., p. 229) is far-fetched: in Empedocles,
who came from the Pythagorean school, the wandering soul is called δαίμων (B 115), and this is a religious term
and concept. Philolaus explicitly attributes the Pythagorean version of the doctrine of reincarnation to the “ancient
theologians”, that is, to Orpheus (B 14). On the authenticity of B 14 see note 64 below. Ion of Chios in one the earliest
testimonies on Pythagoras’ doctrine of afterlife attributes to him a strongly ethicized religious doctrine of the post-
mortem reward for virtuous life: see section (5) below. Zhmud’s similarly biased ‘anti-religious’ characterization of
Pythagorean society as a secular ‘school’ and political party (hetaireia), allegedly different from religious thiasos,
has been persuasively refuted by Harland [2019, p. 216–219].
3
For helpful introductions to Greek astragali and astragalomancy see [Graf, 2005, p. 60 ff.; Nollé, 2007, S. 7 ff.].
4
I am grateful to Johannes Nollé (German Archaeological Institute) for providing me with a copy of this
invaluable definitive edition.
genitive; in Olbian tablets it is abbreviated as ΔΙΟ (OF 463, 465) and ΔΙΟΝ (OF 464).
This should be interpreted not as nominative Διόνυσος (as in ed. pr.), which would
be meaningless, but either as dative Διονύσωι (scil. εὔχεσθαι vel θύειν) or as genitive
Διονύσου (βόλος vel sim.). Nollé convincingly argues against the opinion that the Gen.
refers either to the god who guides the fall of the astragali or the god who gives the an-
swer, since all oracles come from Apollo, while the fall of the astragali is always guid-
ed by Hermes. According to Nollé, the isolated divine name in Gen. can only indicate
the god “in whose hands” is the fullfillment of good fortune5. This is generally correct,
but we understand it more precisely as advice to pray for help and sacrifice to the spe-
cific god. The Dative Ὀρφικῶι in OF 463 is unambiguous.
The Olbian plates contain an additional fourth element not found in Anatolian
dice-oracles, a symbolical drawing on the verso of plate, while the latter contain an ad-
ditional fourth element not found in Olbian plates: a verse inserted between the kle-
ros (1) and chresmos (2) and enumerating the numerical values of separate “throws”
of five astragali the sum of which constitutes the “lot” of a corresponding oracle. These
“Würfelverse”, in Nollé’ terminology, are collected on pp. 110–118 of his edition. In the
original Anatolian “dice-verses” the integral sum is called κλῆρος (see [Nollé, 2007,
S. 313, Index of words, s.v. κλῆρος]) in grammarians the name of a combination is dis-
tinguished from the name of a singular throw as πτῶσις from βόλος. Since the sym-
bolical drawings are just graphic elements of a chresmos, while the “dice-verses” are
just explications of the composition of a kleros, these are insignificant differences that
do not affect the essential triadic structure (kleros — chresmos — name of god) com-
mon to both groups.
Although separated in time by some five centuries or more, the graffiti on the Olbi-
an tablets and the oracles inscribed on monumental pillars from Asia Minor are based
on the same method of divination (astragalomancy), which points either to a continu-
ous common Anatolian tradition or rather to the archaizing revival of an ancient div-
inatory technique in the context of the general revival of ancient inspired shrines like
Delphi, Klaros and Didyma in Imperial times. Nollé describes this process as “Die Re-
naissance des Orakelwesens im griechischen Osten” [Op. cit., S. 285], Robin Lane Fox
as a trend for making “prophecy, divination and oracles a major industry” [Lane Fox,
1986, p. 210]. The Olbian tablets also contain an additional fourth element: a symbol-
ic drawing semantically connected with the graffito. The drawing on tablet 2 (OF 464)
can be interpreted as seven astragali on a game board divided by six lines (cf. pesseia
games like πέντε γραμμαί), or else on a divinatory table (ἱερὰ τράπεζα). In the Orphic
myth astragali appear in the list of the toys with which the Titans deceived the child
Dionysus6. The drawing is probably a sacred symbol of the diamelismos of Dionysus
into seven parts in the Orphic sparagmos myth7. Seven astragali were used in a group
5
[Nollé, 2007, S. 108], contra [Graf, 2005, p. 63].
6
OF 306.1 Bern.: κῶνος και ῥόμβος καὶ παίγνια καμπεσίγυια… (“a pine cone, a spinning top and curved-body
toys…”) (unlike the flat sides of a cube, the astragalus has curved sides). Clement calls the toys τῆς τελετῆς σύμβολα.
7
OF 311 Bern. The connection of the drawing with the sparagmos was correctly suggested earlier, by [Руся-
ева, 1978, с. 77], but without reference to astragali. However, the interpretation of the zigzag symbol as a number
7 (Z) is problematic since this is a later shape for zeta; even if this symbol next to the alpha in OF 463 is a zeta, its
value should be 6 rather 7, since a throw of one astragalus cannot exceed 6.
244 A.V. Lebedev
of astragalomantic dice oracles from Roman Asia Minor (see note 16 below). The tab-
lets combine Orphic-Bacchic mythopoetic symbolism with Pythagorean conceptual
(metaphysical) symbolism: the unfinished square with diagonals on tablet 3 (OF 365)
can be interpreted as the Pythagorean symbol of the immortal soul. The tetragonon
and heteromekes in the Pythagorean Table of Opposites are geometrical symbols of the
self-identical divine substance of the soul and ever-changing mortal body respective-
ly8. The two pairs of opposites on the other side of the same tablet follow the typically
Pythagorean method of systoikhiai or correlation of opposites in two parallel columns:
ΨΥΧΗ is written under ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ, and ΣΩΜΑ under ΨΕΥΔΟΣ. Exactly as in the
contemporaneous evidence from Herodotus (2.81), we find Orphica, Bacchica and Py-
thagorica all together, with Aegyptia to be added to this trio in the final sections below.
The photograph of the ΒΙΟΣ ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ tablet (OF 463 Bern. = [Русяева, 2010:
Nr.29]) published by Vinogradov in his Pontische Studien [Vinogradov, 1997, Plate
IV] has a higher resolution and provides more detail than the 1978 photo in the editio
princeps (see figure 1 , inset). Using this 1997 photo, we read and interpret the bottom
line of the recto of OF 463 as follows: Διο[νύσωι] Ὀρφικῶ[ι] λ (scil. τριακάδι θύειν
vel εὔχεσθαι) “Sacrifice (or pray) to Dionysos Orphikos on the thirtieth day”9. In this
photo the letter after kappa is omega rather than omicron: it lacks a closed low curve,
instead having tiny “spreading legs” with a narrow low opening. Admirably, Martin
West saw this back in 1983 from the old VDI photo, admitting the possibility of read-
ing Ὀρφικῶι (or Ὀρφικῶν meaning “Orphic rites”, not “Orphics”). The omega is fol-
lowed by a perfectly legible lambda with a horizontal stroke right above it, i.e. by a num-
ber 30. The graffito is not a dedication of “Orphics to Dionysus” (pace Rusjaeva [1978,
с. 88]), but a prescription to sacrifice or pray to Dionysos Orphikos, i.e. to the chtho-
nian Dionysos of the Orphic theogony, the son of Persephone, and not the traditional
Dionysos, the son of Semele. Both in literary and epigraphical sources, the purpose of
the inquiry and the question submitted to the oracular god are often formulated as: “To
which god should I pray or sacrifice [to be rich, for health, to have children, etc.]?”10,
“On the thirtieth day” admits two interpretations: (1) the 30th day of the month which
was dedicated to the memory of the dead and chthonian divinities like Hekate-Perse-
phone (νεκύσια ἱερά)11; (2) the commemoration of the deceased on the 30th day after
his/her death, which corresponds to the 40th day in the tradition of the Eastern Ortho-
dox church12. Contrary to the widespread view, the cleromantic tablets under discus-
8
Arist. Metaph. 986a26 = 58 B 5 DK. Lydus Mens. 2.9: ψυχὰ ἀνθρώπου, ὡς Πυθαγόρας ἔφη, ἔστι τετράγωνον
ὀρθογώνιον. The source of this underestimated quote is probably Archytas, cited in the next line, and not a Doric
Hieros logos of Pseudo-Pythagoras.
9
I discuss this reading and interpretation in more detail in my forthcoming article “Orphica, Bacchica,
Pythagorica in the cleromantic bone tablets from Olbia”. In this section I present a summary of this study.
10
E.g. Aesch. PV 600: θεοπρόπους ἴαλλεν, ὡς μάθοι τί χρὴ δρῶντ᾽ ἢ λέγοντα δαίμοσι πράσσειν φίλα.
Herod. 1.67: πέμψαντες θεοπρόπους ἐς Δελφοὺς ἐπειρώτων τίνα ἂν θεῶν ἱλασάμενοι κτλ. In Pindar Pyth.: 4.190 the
seer Mopsos prophesizes to the Argonauts in Iolkos by ornithoscopia and astragalomancy: ὀρνίχεσσι καὶ κλάροισι
θεοπροπέων ἱεροῖς. The formula “To which god should I pray and sacrifice…” seems to be standard in Dodona oracles:
see, e.g., Nr. 1, 7, 16 in [Eidinow, 2007, p. 75 ff.].
11
Plut. De proverbiis Alexandrinorum, fr. 8: τὰς ἐν Ἅιδου τριακάδας· τιμᾶται ἡ τριακὰς ἐν Ἅιδου διὰ τὴν
Ἑκάτην μυστικώτερον, ἧι καὶ τρίγλη ἐπιθύεται… τὸ γοῦν μυστικὸν Ἑκάτη ἡ Φερσεφόνεια καλεῖται, τῶν ὑποχθονίων
δεσπότις. ὅθεν …καὶ τὰ νεκύσια τῆι τριακάδι ἄγεται. Hekate was offered a red mullet (τρίγλη) on this day.
12
E.g. Pollux Onom. 8.146: προθέσεις, ἐκφοραί, τρίτα, ἔνατα, τριακάδες, ἐναγίσματα, χοαί, τὰ νενομισμένα.
sion do not provide any evidence for the existence of a Vth-century thiasos of “Orphics”
(Orphikoi) in Olbia13. The use of οἱ Ὀρφικοί as the name of a hairesis (philosophical
school or religious sect) is attested for the first time in Jamblichus some 750 years lat-
er14. The conjectural restoration of Ὀρφ[ικοί by [Henrichs, 2011, p. 63] in Philodemus,
De piet. 247.III.11 is unlikely; I modify the reading of Schober and read [ὁ] δ᾽ Ὀρφ[εὺς
κάτω] / καὶ παντα[χῆι] / ἐνδιατρε[ίβειν φησί, i.e. according to Orpheus Dionysus is not
just dying and being reborn, but is a permanent resident of Hades, which is an utter
absurdity for Epicureans, who conceive of a god as a “blessed and indestructible be-
ing”. In the grammarians, this word simply means “authors of poems attributed to Or-
pheus”, i.e., it expresses doubts about the authorship of Orpheus. The owners of gold
tablets called themselves bakkhoi and mystai, not Orphikoi. At the same time, the graf-
fiti and drawings prove the pre-Platonic origin of radical body/soul dualism and sup-
port the Platonic anthropogonic interpretation of the sparagmos myth15, as well as pro-
vide evidence on the spread and circulation of Onomacritus’ Holy Words of Orpheus in
the late Vth century BC. The conventional modern term “Orphic theogony”, conceived
as a poem, is, strictly speaking, imprecise, as the “holy words” uttered by the mantis or
theopropos Orpheus are conceived as oracles (χρησμοί, cf. θεοπροπίας OF 810, 1 and
OF 1–2) and as a secret doctrine. The Derveni papyrus col. IV, 6 gives us reason to be-
lieve (whether we read ἱερῶι λόγωι or ἱερολόγωι) that the Orphic theogony was al-
ready known under the title Ἱεροὶ λόγοι in the Vth century BC. This explains why, un-
like the Theogony of Hesiod, it was rarely quoted until Imperial times. In classical Ath-
ens one could be charged with asebeia for divulging a hieros logos.
It is not immediately clear which cleromantic technique was employed by the own-
er of these tablets: the standard method of astragalomancy, based on the correspon-
dence of the number obtained by a throw of the astragali to the number of a prepared
answer in a pinax, or the alphabetic method, involving the random selection of a letter
of the alphabet that corresponds with a letter which conveys the oracular response16.
Isolated alphas inscribed on all three tablets OF 463–465 point to the alphabetic meth-
13
In a recent study Trzcionkowski develops this view on a grand scale [Trzcionkowski, 2013]. Thanks are due
to Marek Wecowski and the Polish publishing house “Sub Lupa” for supplying me with a copy of this hard-to-find
monograph. Although the author recognizes the superiority of Vinogradov’s 1997 photo, he ascribes the reading
Ὀρφικοί from the editio princeps to the “lamella” (p. 139). However, this is not supported by Vinogradov’s 1997
photograph, which has ΩΛ, not ΟΙ after kappa.
14
Iambl. VP 28.147; 28.151; De an. 25. Not yet in Plotinus or Porphyrius! Most instances come from Proclus
in the Vth century AD.
15
Pace [Edmonds, 2013]. However, Edmonds’ skepticism is to some degree justified when it comes to
attempts by some to reconstruct a whole Orphic church from the Neoplatonic use of the word Ὀρφικοί and two
misread letters in OF 463.
16
All Anatolian dice oracles are divided into two groups: the standard group based on the use of five astragali
(systematic treatment in [Nollé, 2007, S. 103–211]) and a more marginal group that employs seven astragali [Op.
cit., S. 211–221]. The standard system admits 56 different throws of five astragali which correspond to 56 responses
attributed to 56 different divinities (list in [Op. cit., S. 106]). After the throw of the astragali the consultant could read
the answer from a pinax inscribed on a pillar nearby. Both types are distinct from the alphabetic system based on
the 24 letters of the alphabet and consisting of 24 prepared answers marked by the letters Α–Ω [Op. cit., S. 223–279].
Reconstructing the divination method in this group is more problematic. Nollé [Op. cit., S. 224] points to (as one of
three possibilities) use of a polyhedron with 24 sides, each inscribed with one letter of alphabet, and refers to the unique
sample from the Collection Canellopoulos (XVII). On the divinatory dodecahedron made of crystal rock (c. Ist cent.)
from the Idaean cave see p.247 below. In this case the answer was obtained by rolling only one artificial “astragalos”.
246 A.V. Lebedev
od of divination. This explains why all three recommend one and the same god, Dio-
nysos, to sacrifice and pray to in order to obtain one’s desire. In this case the three ex-
tant tablets come from a “deck of cards” containing many more divinities (up to 23)17.
In the editio princeps ΔΙΟΝ in OF 364 and ΔΙΟ in OF 365 have been interpreted as
Nom. Διόνυσος. However, comparison with OF 363 suggests rather Dat. Διονύσωι (scil.
θύειν or εὔχεσθαι), while comparison with Anatolian astragalomantic oracles suggests
Gen. Διονύσου, scil. βόλος (of a single astragalos) or πτῶσις (a combination of astrag-
ali), “throw of Dionysos”18. On the other hand, a possible combination of two letters/
numbers in OF 563, A and Ζ (if this is indeed a zeta), might be interpreted as a throw
(πτῶσις) of two astragali, one Χῖος (1) and one Κῶιος (6), and this would point to clas-
sical astragalomancy. However, this is uncertain, since this shape of zeta in the Vth cen-
tury is problematic, and the zeta would have to have the rare value of 6 (as in the num-
bering of Homer’s rhapsodies) rather than the more common 7. In any case the pres-
ence of isolated letters points to the cleromantic purpose of the tablets. This is further
supported by the discovery in Olbia of numerous other (probably unfinished) “blank”
plates, as well as by two bone tablets with isolated alphas hidden in the sail of a ship
and the mane of a horse19. These may come from different “decks” of divinatory cards
owned by other fortune-tellers. If our chresmologue used the alphabetic system of
cleromancy, the tablets may have been drawn like a lottery ticket from a chest which
contained 24 tablets, each with the name of a different god and its own letter. Alterna-
tively, he may have used a mantic polyhedron, each face of which was marked by a dif-
ferent letter (examples in note 16 above). If he employed the standard method for as-
tragalomancy, he may have drawn the corresponding tablet from a bunch of tablets af-
ter the astragali were thrown, like a playing card from a deck. Both hypotheses explain
the signs of heavy use and scratches noted in the editio princeps [Русяева, 1978, с. 79].
The owner of these tablets and the author of the graffiti was most probably “Pharn-
abazos, the diviner of Hermes” (Φαρνάβαζος, θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ) mentioned in anoth-
er Vth-century graffito from Olbia. He may have been a wandering street soothsayer
coming from Asia Minor, i.e. from the southern regions20. Hermes was the patron of
the popular dice divination (a gift from his brother Apollo) that was practiced by street
diviners and accessible to the masses, unlike the services of grand oracles of Apollo
like Delphi that required expensive gifts and theoriai accessible to poleis and the rich
only. Pharnabazos probably made his living by charging the people in the agora who
17
One may wonder whether ΔΙΟ in OF 465 stands for Διός (scil. βόλος) rather than Διονύσου; the tablets
were found not far from the temple of Zeus. Graf makes an important observation that in Anatolian dice oracles the
throw 1 (A) is associated with Zeus since he is the beginning (alpha) of everything [Graf, 2005, p. 63].
18
Ancient cleromantic terminology distinguished βόλος (a throw of a single astragalos) and πτῶσις
(a combination of several astragali), Schol. Plat. Lys. 206e, cf. [Lamer, 1927, Sp. 1945]. Nollé is right to criticize the
view which takes the genitive as attributing responses to different gods (contra [Graf, 2005, p. 66]), since the source
of all responses is Apollo Pythius, whereas Hermes is a mediator who guides the fall of the astragali. However, if
ΔΙΟΝ/ΔΙΟ in OF 364–365 is an abbreviated genitive, it is conceivable that βόλος or πτῶσις is meant, not in the
sense that Dionysus is the source of the response, but as an indication of the god who will help, and to whom one
should pray and sacrifice. If this is the case, the genitive would have essentially the same meaning as the dative
[Nollé, 2007, S. 108].
19
Rusjaeva in the [1978] editio princeps connected them with OF 463–465, but in Graffiti of Olbia (2010)
reinterprets them as magical amulets (Plate 49, nr.1–2).
20
[Lebedev, Pharnabazos, 1996, p. 268 ff.]. On Pharnabazos graffito see Appendix 1 at the end.
consulted him a small fee. This enables the striking similarities between Olbian graffi-
ti and some fragments of Heraclitus, noticed by many scholars, to be easily explained
not by the hard-to-prove hypothesis that Pharnabazos read Heraclitus, but by the com-
mon language of popular Greek astragalomancy. In our commentary on Heraclitus
[Лебедев, 2014, с. 332–333] we have argued that three out of the four symbolic names
of the phases of the cosmic cycle in Heraclitus, Πόλεμος, Εἰρήνη, Κόρος Χρησμοσύνη
(λιμός in 43L/B67 is Hippolytus’ trivializing koine substitute for the rare Ionic and po-
etic word χρησμοσύνη, which he quotes precisely in 41L/B65), are metaphors from
astragalomancy that acrophonically correspond to the names of the sides or “throws”
(βόλοι) of astragalos: Πρανής (=4), Ὕπτιος (=3), Κῶιος (=6), Χῖος(=1). “Koos” has
highest value (6) and therefore predicts “abundance, wealth” (Koros), “Chios” has low-
est value (1) and therefore predicts “need, poverty” (Chresmosyne). Τhe Questions like
“Life (βίος) or death (θάνατος)?”, “War (πόλεμος) or peace (εἰρήνη)?”, “Wealth (κόρος)
or poverty (χρησμοσύνη)?” were among the most frequently asked by those consulting
oracles or astragalomancy. In Heraclitus, the time god Aion throws astragali that were
part of the pesseia game21, a metaphor for alternation and cyclical change (ἀμοιβαί) in
the life and death of mortals and elements, cf. βίος θάνατος βίος in plate (1).
The cleromantic bone tablets from Olbia can be typologically compared with div-
inatory Tarot cards and playing cards (the origin of both is obscure), as well as with
ancient Chinese oracle bone inscriptions and especially with parallels from the “Book
of Changes” (I Ching). In China the original divinatory manual from the Zhou period
(roughly contemporaneous with the Greek Dark Ages) evolved in subsequent periods
into a sophisticated philosophical text loaded with elaborate metaphysical, cosmolog-
ical and ethical doctrines. Following a similar pattern of development, the art of the
Olbian chresmologue combines an ancient divinatory technique with a new sophisti-
cated metaphysics and an esoteric doctrine of reincarnation. This parallelism is rein-
forced by the striking similarities between the philosophy of Yin and Yang on the one
hand, and the Pythagorean Table of Opposites on the other, which have been noted by
both Western and Chinese scholars. We do not need diffusionist hypotheses to explain
this parallel development. The new Ionian science of nature (ἡ περὶ φύσεως ἱστορία),
which, unlike the archaic doctrines of immortality, afterlife, and reincarnation, was in-
deed new, the result of an unparalleled scientific revolution in Miletus, rejected divina-
tion together with mythopoetic cosmogonies and replaced it with scientific prediction
(such as Thales’ prediction of the solar eclipse), based on knowledge of the immutable
laws of nature. This new picture of the world was objective, axiologically neutral, and
therefore ethically and politically irrelevant (pace J.P. Vernant). The naturalistic tra-
dition of dismissing divination as antiquated nonsense was continued by the Ionian
sophists and Epicurus. However, ethically and theologically minded philosophers, like
Heraclitus (followed by the Stoics) and the Pythagoreans (followed by Plato), who be-
lieved in divine providence, took a different stance and admitted in their systems a phil-
osophically refined mantike. Heraclitus’ theory of the cosmic logos was a semiotic art
of reading the book of nature: it was a restoration, in a refined and sophisticated form,
21
See note 72 below and our commentary to fr. 33 Leb/B 52.
248 A.V. Lebedev
of the mantic worldview that the Milesians had dismantled, but without the anthropo-
morphic gods of Homer [Lebedev, The Metaphor of Liber Naturae…, 2017]. Pythago-
ras’ theory of cosmic harmonia was also ethically, politically, and theologically relevant.
In a sense, it too was a restoration of the mantic world-view in a refined, quasi-scien-
tific, “mathematical” form. The Pythagorean Table of Opposites, ascribed by Aristotle
to Pythagoras himself [Lebedev, Alcmaeon of Croton…, 2017], consists of two paral-
lel columns (στοῖχος), each containing 10 terms. The left column is positively marked
(ἀγαθόν), the right one negatively (κακόν). Each term stands horizontally across from
a term in the parallel column, and vertically in a relation of similarity with the nine
other terms from the same column (σύστοιχα). Aristotle’s designation of these as “ten
principles” is misleading. Each column contains rather ten types of manifestation or
ten “powers” (δυνάμεις) of one and the same fundamental principle, so there are only
two fundamental principles: “limited” (source of good) and “unlimited” (source of evil).
The elements in each column are interchangeable: the limited is also odd, one, right,
male etc.; the unlimited is also even, multiple, left etc. The Divine (immortal) nature
consists of unadulterated peras (which is why in Parmenides’ Aletheia Dike holds the
sphere of divine being in the “bonds of limit”, πείρατος ἐν δεσμοῖσιν ἔχει), and the hu-
man (mortal) nature is a mixture of peras and apeiron, of body and soul. Such a meth-
od of universal binary classification, of correlation and opposition, appears very archa-
ic. Our guess is that Pythagoras appropriated the method involving binary systoikhi-
ai from the technique used by Greek manteis and applied it to the new metaphysical
content. Some of the pairs of opposites may have been borrowed from mantic pinakes
unchanged: looking at Pythagoras’ table, a Greek mantis could predict that the flight
of a bird from the left is a bad omen since “left” (ἀριστερόν) is “in the same column”
(σύστοιχον) as “evil” (κακόν). Pharnabazos’ bone tablets were probably called in his
time (and by him) πίνακες, dim. πινάκια (less common terms were δέλτοι or σανίδες).
In the Olbian pinakes we see the mantic systoikhiai at work. In his list of treacherous
divination techniques that he rejects as fraudulent, Artemidorus (2.69) puts Pythago-
ristai and astragalomanteis close to each other: ὅσα γὰρ ἂν λέγωσι Πυθαγορισταί,
φυσιογνωμονικοί, ἀστραγαλομάντεις… ψευδῆ πάντα… χρὴ νομίζειν. Plutarch reports
that Pythagorean food taboos included abstinence from red mullet (τρίγλη) and sea
anemone22. The reason was probably the association of τρίγλη with the dead and ritu-
al offerings to Hekate on the 30th day, as alluded to in OF 463. The owner of the Olbi-
an cleromantic tablets (Pharnabazos) may be the earliest known Pythagoristes. In his
comparison of the successful high-ranking descendants of Cato with the ill-fated de-
scendants of the great Aristides, Plutarch recounts that utter poverty threw them down
“into beggar’s tablets” (εἰς ἀγυρτικοὺς πίνακες)23, i.e. they became fortunetellers using
“tablets” with pre-prepared auguries. Aristides died in 467, so these ἀγυρτικοὶ πίνακες
may date to approximately the same time as those from Olbia. Pharnabazos perfectly
fits Plato’s portrait of begging priests and fortunetellers (ἀγύρται καὶ μάντεις) who car-
ry in their bags a “a bunch of books by Orpheus and Mousaios” (Resp. 364e). Now we
see how erroneous was Vinogradov’s [Vinogradov, 1997, p. 242–249] attempt to pres-
22
Plut. Quaest. conv. 670D: Τοὺς Πυθαγορικοὺς ἱστοροῦσι τῶν θαλαττίων μάλιστα τρίγλης… ἀπέχεσθαι.
23
Plut. Comparatio Aristidis et Catonis 3.5.
ent the “Orphic community” (which never existed) as an elite group of aristocrats that
allegedly served as the ideological bulwark of “tyranny” in the Vth century, which also
never existed in Olbia: on the mistaken interpretation of the epigram to the tyranni-
cides, see [Lebedev, A New Epigram…, 1996]. Street fortune-tellers were of an even
lower social status than farmers and artisans: in fact, they were déclassés, like beggars
and βωμολόχοι, and their influence on the political life of the city was zero.
It is also conceivable that the Διόνυσος Ὀρφικός is just another name of Iakkhos
who was identified in literature and iconography with Dionysos-Zagreus already in
the Vth century [Graf, 1974]. The cult of the Eleusinian triad Demeter — Kore — Iak-
khos, worshipped in the sanctuary “Demetrion”, is attested in the Olbian dedicatory
graffito of Xanthippus Ξάνθιππος Δήμητρι Περσεφόνηι Ἰάκχωι Δημήτριον [Русяева,
2010, с. 104 and plate 38, 2].
Pythagoras’ mentalist mathematical metaphysics is inextricably linked with his
doctrine of the soul. Ιt was Pythagoras of Samos who gave the most significant impetus
to the spread of the philosophical version of the doctrine of the immortal soul and re-
incarnation. He did not invent it, but he gave this archaic belief a new conceptual form
and made it philosophically acceptable to thinkers like Plato, but not to Aristotle or the
naturalists, let alone Democritus or the Epicureans. The biographical tradition tells us
nothing of Pythagoras’ travels to the northern Black Sea area, but it speaks of his travels
to Egypt and Babylon, as well as to Crete and Delos. We therefore believe that the ori-
gins of this allegedly new doctrine should be sought not in the north, but in the south,
and in particular in Crete and the Cyclades. Our approach has been to some extent an-
ticipated by the French scholar Louis Gernet (1882–1962), a member of the Durkheim
school, who, unlike the diffusionists, postulated an internal development and regard-
ed archaic Greek thaumaturges as heirs to a very ancient local tradition [Gernet, 1981
(1968), chapter 17, “The Origins of Greek Philosophy”]24. The personal meeting be-
tween Pythagoras and Epimenides mentioned in later tradition is chronologically im-
possible: Epimenides lived mostly in the VIIth century, and was some 100 years older
than Pythagoras. However, it is very likely that the Pythagoreans were acquainted with
Epimenides’ Theogony. It is in this text, as well as in the legend of Epimenides, that the
earliest traces of the doctrine of “new birth” can be found. The legend of Epimenides’
sleep and dream reflects certain ritual practices connected with Cretan caves that were
places of worship from the Bronze Age on; Burkert suggested the initiation rites of a se-
cret mystery cult performed by a “purifier” (kathartes, [Burkert, 1972, p. 151]). The Py-
thagoreans believed that Pythagoras was initiated by Epimenides in the Idaean cave. In
the lost drama Cretans, Euripides mentioned the “mystai of Idaean Zeus” (Διὸς Ἰδαίου
24
I owe the reference to this article to Bremmer [Bremmer, 2016, p. 68–69]. Gernet himself speaks not of thau-
maturges, charismatics, or shamans, but of “mystic sects”, divine inspiration (enthousiasmos), magicians, theios aner,
and “religious associations that have been inherited by the gene of the nobility, and these gene last into the historical pe-
riod” [Gernet, 1981, p. 362]. This theory of Gernet’s fits well with our thesis that Epimenides inherited his wisdom from
the oral hieratic tradition of his genos and that he may have been of “royal” origin himself, since he regarded Aiakos,
the progenitor of various basileis including Achilles, as his ancestor. The following observation by Gernet is also illumi-
nating: “The cave allegory of the Republic owes something to reminiscences of sacred grottoes where great prophets ex-
perienced revelations. Pythagoras began his mission in a cave on Mount Ida, and not unlike him, Epimenides received
divine instruction during a miraculously long sleep in another Cretan cave” [Op. cit., p. 358].
250 A.V. Lebedev
μύστης), who are initiated into the mysteries of Zagreus, which are similar to the Orphic
mysteries (Eurip. Cretes fr. 472 TrGF). In our opinion, the legend of Epimenides’ “dream”
points to a ritual incubation conceived as a mantic session. Since Epimenides was the
“priest of Zeus and Rhea” (Epimen. fr. 13T Bern.), it can be assumed that the Diktae-
an and Idaean caves functioned as oracles in the archaic period, and that Epimenides
himself served as an appointed prophet (mantis) in the cave of Zeus and predicted the
future, relying primarily on the interpretation of dreams. The existence of cave oracles
in Greece has been firmly established by archeology, and is a widespread phenomenon
which is also well illustrated by literary and documentary sources25. Some historians and
archeologists have also suggested that the Cretan sacred caves could function as oracles.
On the possible evidence for astragalomancy in the Idaean cave in Roman times, see
the important work of Chaniotis [Chaniotis, 2006]. In ancient times, the Cretans were
famed as the most skillful interpreters of dreams, ὀνειροκριταί. In Hellenistic Alexan-
dria in the IInd century BC, an anonymous interpreter of dreams advertised his art as
follows: ἐνύπνια κρίνω, τοῦ θεοῦ πρόσταγμα ἔχων· τύχ ’ ἀγαθᾶι· Κρής ἐστιν ὁ κρίνων
τάδε (“I interpret dreams on the orders of god. Good luck! The interpreter of dreams is
a Cretan”) [Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunde aus Ägypten, 1915, S. 65, #685].
The reference to the Cretan origin of the interpreter (also confirmed by the Dorian
form ἀγαθᾶι) serves as a guarantee of the utmost reliability of his readings. The refer-
ence to the “order” of the god, that is, the god-healer Sarapis, indicates that the onei-
rokrites had official status at the temple, and that he was appointed to this position and
was not simply engaged in private business (contra [Renberg, 2010, p. 650–651]). In
the complex hierarchy of the priests of Sarapis there were official ὀνειροκριταί [Dig-
nas, 2008, p. 80]. This, in turn, increases the likelihood that the dreams he interpret-
ed were primarily the dreams patients had during incubations in Sarapeion. The in-
terpretation of dreams was, for the ancients, primarily a form of divination (μαντική).
Epimenides combined the functions of soothsayer (mantis) and healer (“purifier”):
he was a ἰατρομάντις. Just as the Cretan oneirocrites in Alexandria served as an inter-
preter of dreams at the temple of Sarapis, so Epimenides may have served as a priest/
soothsayer attached to the Cretan “cave of Zeus”. It is significant that the Cretans called
Epimenides “a new Kouretes” (Diog.Laert. 1.115). This sobriquet refers to a divine-
ly-inspired soothsayer. The Idaean Dactyls and Kouretes possessed a prophetic gift;
the Greek proverb “the mouth of Kοuretes” (Κουρήτων στόμα) indicates the ability
to predict the future26. At the same time, Kouretes in the myth are almost exclusively
linked with the Idaean cave in Crete. Direct literary evidence that the sacred Cretan
caves (or some of them) were also used for therapeutic incubations, like the sanctu-
aries of Asclepius, is lacking, but this may be due to chance.
Archaeological finds in caves such as figurines and nude human figures could be
interpreted as votive offerings (ἀναθήματα) made in thanks for recovery, like mod-
ern Greek τάματα (silver plates depicting a healed organ), which are hung under the
25
On this topic see especially [Ustinova, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind, 2009 and Cave Experiences,
2009; Friese, 2013].
26
Zenob. Paroemiogr. 4.61: Κουρήτων στόμα: ἐδόκουν γὰρ εἶναι οὗτοι μάντεις· οἷον, Θεσπιῳδὸν στόμα.
[Blakely, 2006, p. 14, 19].
healing icon in the church. The fact that the caves of Zeus were oracles, and that Epi-
menides could play the role of a local Pythia, receiving revelations during mantic in-
cubation, is also indicated by his invective against the Delphic oracle, in which the
very existence of the “navel of the earth” (omphalos) is polemically denied27. The Del-
phic legend of the “navel of the earth” places the Delphic oracle above all others. His
denial of this is most probably due to the religious rivalry and competition between
the two oracles (on the topic of competition between oracles see [Eidinow, 2014]).
The verses of Epimenides’ Theogony that expose the Delphic legend as a lie are sting-
ing: Epimenides makes it clear that his mantic art is not inferior to that of Pythia. Ac-
cording to some sources, Epimenides not only questioned the Delphic legend, but also
countered it with a local Cretan version preserved by Diodorus of Sicily:
φερομένου μὲν γὰρ ὑπὸ τῶν Κουρήτων αὐτοῦ νηπίου φασὶν ἀποπεσεῖν τὸν ὀμφαλὸν περὶ τὸν
ποταμὸν τὸν καλούμενον Τρίτωνα, καὶ τὸ χωρίον τε τοῦτο καθιερωθὲν ἀπὸ τοῦ τότε συμβάντος
Ὀμφαλὸν προσαγορευθῆναι καὶ τὸ περικείμενον πεδίον ὁμοίως Ὀμφάλειον.
When the Kouretes carried the infant Zeus, the umbilical cord fell off near the river with the
name Triton, and since then this place has been sacred and in memory of what happened then
was called Omphalos, and the plain around it Omphalian28.
However, the verses of the Theogony explicitly state that even if the omphalos of the
earth exists, it is unknown to mortals.
2. Reconstructing the proem and cosmogony of Epimenides’

Theogony
In ancient times many texts with religious, mythological and historical con-
tent circulated under the name of Epimenides. The most important and oldest of
them is the Theogony. The following titles are also known: Cretan History (Κρητικά),
History of Telkhins, Oracles, The Birth of Kouretes and Korybantes, Purifications
(Καθαρμοί), Genealogies, The Building of the Ship Argo, Jason’s Departure to Col-
chis, and the prose works On Sacrifices, On Minos and Radamanthys, and Letters.
All these works are commonly recognized by philologists as pseudepigrapha [West,
1983, p. 47; Mele, 2001, p. 227–278]. The inauthenticity of the letters to Solon had al-
ready been noted in antiquity (Diog. Laert. 1.112 = [Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci, 2007,
p. 109]). Epimenides was the most famous Cretan sage and soothsayer, so there is lit-
tle wonder that he was credited with collections of ancient myths relating to the histo-
ry and mythology of Crete and collections of oracles. However, the problem of the dat-
ing and authenticity of the Theogony is not so simple, and requires careful investiga-
27
Epimen. fr. 43 B. οὐκ ἄρ ἔην γαίης μέσος ὀμφαλὸς οὐδὲ θαλάσσης· / εἰ δέ τις ἔστιν, θεοῖς δῆλος, θνητοῖσι
δ’ ἄφαντος.
28
Diod. Sic. 5.70.4. Cook supposed that the common source of Diodorus and Callimachus (Hymn. 1.42)
was Epimenides [Cook, 1925, p. 191].
252 A.V. Lebedev
tion. The origin of the world according to Epimenides’ Theogony is known only in the
summary exposition by the Neoplatonist Damascius, which is based on the History of
Theology by the Peripatetic Eudemus29. According to Damascius/Eudemus, Epimenides
recognized as two “first principles” (ἀρχαί) Aer (Mist) and Night; Tartarus is born from
them; next, from them (all?) a pair of Titans is born; from their coupling a cosmogon-
ic egg is born; and from the egg a new generation of gods appears. Night as a primor-
dial being and the cosmogonic egg are two specific elements that Epimenides’ Theogo-
ny shares with the Orphic theogony known to Eudemus in the IVth century and to the
Derveni author (Prodicus of Ceos, see [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Pa-
pyrus, 2019]) in the Vth. The versions of Eudemus and the Derveni author seem to be
identical; their common source should be dated to the late VIth century BC. However,
it does not follow that the fake theogony of “Orpheus”, a mythical poet, was the source
of the genuine theogony of Epimenides, a historical person30. There is no significant
similarity to Hesiod: Hesiod has a completely different trio of “beginnings” (Chaos,
Gaia, Eros), and the later Tartarus is the only element shared with Epimenides’ theog-
ony. In Hesiod the Titans are the descendants of Uranos and Gaia; in Epimenides, they
are the ancestors (?) of Uranos and Gaia, who may have been born as two halves of the
split cosmogonic egg. Epimenides appears to follow a local Cretan tradition accord-
ing to which the Titans are positive, not negative characters, as in Hesiod. The identity
of the two Titans remains the subject of controversy. Some researchers identify them
with Kronos and Rhea, others with Ocean and Tethys; recent scholarship affirms that
the two Titans in the poem by Epimenides were anonymous, as in Damascius’ exposi-
tion31. It remains unclear whether Epimenides had a demiurgos coming out of the egg,
similar to the Orphic Phanes-Protogonos. In the primordial Ἀήρ some scholars saw
the influence of Anaximenes’ cosmogony and concluded that the terminus post quem
is the late VIth / early Vth century BC, which has been cited as proof of the later origin
and inauthenticity of Epimenides’ Theogony.
This is a false conclusion. When paired with “Night”, Ἀήρ can only have the archa-
ic meaning that goes back to Homer: ‘mist, haze’. The standard designation of the trans-
parent element of the air by the word ἀήρ became common only in the second half of
the Vth century. The association of Aer with Tartarus can be explained by the influence
of Hesiod and the archaic epic (i.e. pre-philosophical) usage of this word: in Hesiod the
phrase Τάρταρα ἠερόεντα means “misty Tartarus”, not “aerial Tartarus”, and has nothing
to do with Anaximenes. Skeptics also attempted to justify the late dating of Epimenides’
Theogony (V–IV centuries BC) by referring to a fragment about the Nemean lion (33
F) which Selene “shook off ”. If the author of the Theogony believed that the Nemean
lion originally lived on the Moon, he must have shared the concept of the Moon as the
“other earth” borrowing its light from the sun, and this idea, according to West, could
not have arisen long before 500 BC. Indeed, the idea of the Moon as “another Earth” is
not attested before Anaxagoras, i.e. before c. 450 BC, in which case Epimenides’ Theog-
29
Damasc. De princ. 124 = Eudem. fr. 150 Wehrli = Epimen. fr. 46F Bern.
30
Contra Fowler [Fowler, 2013, p. 7 ff.]
31
Kronos and Rhea: [Kirk, Raven, Schofield, 1983, p. 29]; Okeanos and Tethys: [Jaeger, 1947, p. 219];
anonymous: [Fowler, 2013, p. 8; Bernabé, 2001, p. 206].
ony would have to be dated to the second half of the Vth century or later. But note that
in Anaxagoras the Moon is a lifeless earthen body with mountains and ravines, where-
as the author of the Theogony conceives of her as a mythological creature, the beauti-
ful-haired Selene, who “shuddered awfully”.
Neither in the language nor in the doctrinal content of the surviving fragments of
the Theogony do we find any signs of its putative late origin. Aristotle, who did not be-
lieve the poetry of Orpheus and Musaios to be authentic32, quotes Epimenides without
reservation as the actual author of the words he quotes. Diels considered the title Ora-
cles (Χρησμοί) to be a variant title of the Theogony, while Bernabé distinguishes them
as two different works. Diels’ point of view accords with Aristotle’s testimony that Epi-
menides prophesized “about the past, not about the future”33. The “unclear” (ἄδηλα)
events of the past about which Epimenides prophesized most probably refer to the or-
igin of the world and of the gods, i.e. to theogony. In all probability, the legend of Epi-
menides’ dream in the cave and the famous verse Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται (“Cretans are al-
ways liars”) derives from the proem of the Theogony. This assumption is based on the
unique testimony of the IInd century Platonist Maximus Tyrius:
Ἀφίκετό ποτε Ἀθήναζε Κρὴς ἀνήρ, ὄνομα Ἐπιμενίδης, κομίζων λόγον οὑτωσὶ ῥηθέντα
πιστεύεσθαι χαλεπόν · ἐν τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ Δικταίου τῷ ἄντρῳ κείμενος ὕπνῳ βαθεῖ ἔτη συχνά, ὄναρ
ἔφη ἐντυχεῖν αὐτοῖς θεοῖς καὶ θεῶν λόγοις καὶ Ἀληθείᾳ καὶ Δίκῃ. τοιαῦτα ἄττα διαμυθολογῶν
ᾐνίττετο, οἶμαι, ὁ Ἐπιμενίδης ὡς ἄρα ὁ ἐν γῇ βίος ταῖς τῶν ἀνθρώπων ψυχαῖς ὀνείρατι ἔοικεν
μακρῷ καὶ πολυετεῖ.
Once a Cretan citizen named Epimenides came to Athens, carrying a story hard to believe: ly-
ing in the cave of Dictaean Zeus for many years in a deep sleep, he, in his words, met with the gods
in a dream, listened to the teachings of the gods and communicated with Truth (Aletheia) and Jus-
tice (Dike). I think that, while relating it in the form of a myth, Epimenides hinted that the earth-
ly life of human souls is like a long and long-lasting dream, etc. (Maxim. Tyr. Diss. 10, 1 = Epimen.
fr. 6T Bern.).
This version of the legend of Epimenides’ dream differs from all the others in that
it is presented not as a “biography” of Epimenides (as, e.g., in Diogenes Laertius), and
not as an objective story about an episode in the life of Epimenides, but as Epimenides’
own story (logos) about himself, which he “carried” with him to Athens. Logos in such
a context can mean not only an oral narrative, but also a written text. Actually, Maxi-
mus first relates the logos (i.e. paraphrases or quotes the text) of Epimenides, and then,
as a commentator, presents his own Platonizing allegorical interpretation of this lo-
gos: the earthly life of the soul is a long sleep. The logos of Epimenides here is a prose
paraphrase of the proem of his Theogony, and therefore should be considered not as
biographical evidence, but as a fragment of the Theogony34. Epimenides’ sleep in the
32
Arist. Hist. anim. 563a 18 = Musaios B 3 DK = 98 F Bern.: ἐν τοῖς Μουσαίου λεγομένοις ἔπεσι. Arist. Gen.
anim. 734a 18: ἐν τοῖς καλουμένοις Ὀρφέως ἔπεσι.
33
Arist. Rhet. 1418a 21 = Epimen. fr. 42F Bern. Diels was followed by Mele and West [Mele, 2001, p. 232;
West, 1983, p. 47].
34
Contra Bernabé fr. 6T, correctly Diels-Kranz 3 DK B 1, [Fowler, 2013, p. 4], [West, 1983, loc.cit.].
254 A.V. Lebedev
cave, his prophetic dream, the encounter with Aletheia and Dike in the abode of the
gods, with divine names quoted verbatim: the personification of abstract concepts is
a characteristic feature of the theology attributed to Epimenides35. An exact parallel to
this can be found in the proem to the poem by Parmenides: Kouros enters the celestial
abode of the gods through the “Gates of Day and Night”, which are guarded by Dike,
and then the goddess Truth (Aletheia) reveals to him the nature both of the invisible
divine being and of the visible universe (on the identity of the goddess who does the re-
vealing with Aletheia in Parmenides see [Lebedev, Parmenides the Pythagorean, 2017,
p. 503 et passim]). Supporters of a later date for Epimenides’ Theogony will probably
tell us that if this parallelism is due to a genetic connection, the author of the Theogony
is dependent on Parmenides, and was therefore writing after 480 BC. We believe that
exactly the opposite is true: Parmenides was familiar with the Theogony of Epimenides,
and this once again confirms its antiquity. Parmenides was a Pythagorean [Lebedev,
Parmenides the Pythagorean, 2017], and the Pythagoreans held Epimenides in high
regard as one of the forerunners of Pythagoras. According to the Pythagorean legend,
Pythagoras visited Crete and, together with Epimenides, performed katabasis into the
Idaean cave36. The Kouros of Parmenides’ proem (an Apollonian image resembling Py-
thagoras himself) flies to the celestial temple of the gods, conceived as an oracle (Ale-
theia being his philosophical Pythia); therefore the “logos” of the revealing goddess
(and the doctrine of being and Doxa) is presented as an oracle (χρησμός). The “logos”
of Epimenides, i.e. his theogony, is also “heard” by him from the gods in a prophetic
dream in the “cave of Zeus”. At the same time, the Cretans called Epimenides a “Neos
Kouretes”. For all the similarities, one difference is obvious: if Apollo and the Delphic
oracle (or its celestial analogue) were the source of wisdom for Pythagoras and the Ele-
atic Pythagoreans, Epimenides follows the local Cretan tradition and positions him-
self as a prophet of the Cretan Zeus, not of Apollo. This can be explained as a polem-
ic with Hesiod: Epimenides received his inspiration and prophetic gift not from Apol-
lo and the Muses (again, an Apollonian source), but from Zeus. That is why he was
called “Kouretes”, i.e. the servant of Zeus, associated with the Cretan sacred cave, and
not “Kouros”, like Pythagoras (an Apollonian image). In this context, Epimenides’ in-
vective directed at the exclusive authority of the Delphic oracle is clear: Delphi is not
at all the “navel of the earth”. The hyponoia of this assertion is that Crete is not inferior
to Delphi as an oracular center, and therefore the revelation received by Epimenides
in the Cretan cave of Zeus and exposed in his Theogony is not inferior to the prophe-
cies of the Delphic Pythia. The best-known verse by Epimenides in antiquity, and the
most often referred to, is preserved in the verbatim quotation by the Apostle Paul in
the Epistle to Titus: εἶπέν τις ἐξ αὐτῶν (scil. Κρητῶν), ἴδιος αὐτῶν προφήτης· Κρῆτες
ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, κακὰ θηρία, γαστέρες ἀργαί (“One of them [= Cretans] said, their own
prophet: ‘Cretans are always liars, lousy beasts, idle bellies!’”)37. Callimachus, in his
Hymn to Zeus, quotes the beginning of the verse and understands it as disputing the
Cretan myth about the death of Zeus, reflected in the “tomb of Zeus” in Crete with the
35
Correctly DK, contra Bernabé who prints ἀληθείαι καὶ δίκηι as appelativa, not as personal names.
36
Epimenides and Pythagoras as teacher and pupil or vice versa: Epimen. fr. 22–26T Bern.
37
Titus 1:12 = Epimen. fr. 41F Bern. = fr. 3 B 1 DK.
inscription “Zeus is buried here”38. Such an allusion is conceivable, but it is unlikely that
in the original poem it was a slander that Epimenides himself directed at the Cretans.
The verse about the lying Cretans is cited as an “oracle” (χρησμός, λόγιον)39. Therefore,
in Epimenides’ original text, these words were pronounced by a deity, and not by Epi-
menides himself in the first person40. The verse undoubtedly contains a hidden quote
from Hesiod’s Theogony, and at the same time a polemic with Hesiod, as we shall see:
ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ ’ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον
Shepherds of the countryside, lousy scoundrels, just belly and nothing else! (Hes. Theog. 26)
Hesiod’s verse comes from the proem to his Theogony and is taken from the scene
of the ritual “initiation into poetry”. It is pronounced by the Muses and is addressed
to Hesiod the shepherd. What we have here is a ritual vituperation as the first, ini-
tial stage of a transitional rite (rite of passage): separation of the initiate from the old
group before he enters the new one. The shepherd who is being admitted to the group
of poets must first renounce his “bestial” past, and the subsequent delivery of the lau-
rel branch to him completes the ceremony: he is now accepted into the guild of aoi-
doi. Let us note two more parallels: Hesiod is subjected to ritual abuse, receives the po-
etic gift and “hears” his Theogony from the Muses while grazing sheep on the moun-
tain Helikon, and Epimenides receives his revelation (recounted in his Theogony) in
a dream while searching for a sheep in the mountains and falling asleep in a moun-
tain cave (Diktaean or Idaean). After his purification of Athens, Epimenides refuses
money and takes only a branch from a sacred olive tree with him. Epimenides’ “Mus-
es”, however, are not the Helikonian virgins, associated with Apollo, but the “compan-
ions” of Cretan Zeus, the nymphs Aletheia and Dike, with whom he conversed in his
prophetic dream. In Parmenides’ proem the nymphs that lead him to the celestial or-
acle of Aletheia are called Heliades. The words “Cretans are always liars” in the proem
of Epimenides’ Theogony were most likely uttered by Aletheia herself. The imitation of
Hesiod at the same time contains a polemic with him: whereas the Muses of Hesiod
“can deceive” and “can speak the truth”, the muse of Epimenides always speaks only
the truth. Thus, Epimenides’ Theogony is disguised as an oracular logos, like the reve-
lation of Aletheia herself: Epimenides does not speak for himself, but reproduces what
he “heard” from the gods. According to the Pythagorean legend, Pythagoras is initiat-
ed into the mysteries of Orpheus by Aglaophamus in Leibethra, at the foot of Mount
Olympus. Heraclitus breaks with this archaic tradition. He does not need an oracular
medium anymore: he “has inquired himself (ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν)” and has “heard
(ἤκουσε)”, i.e. has read the divine logos directly in the book of nature written in the sky.
The later so-called “liar’s paradox” has nothing to do with the authentic context of the
verse about the Cretans. The paradox is based on the assumption that the Cretan Epi-
38
Callim. Hymn. 1.8: Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται· καὶ γὰρ τάφον, ὦ ἄνα, σεῖο / Κρῆτες ἐτεκτήναντο· σὺ δ ’οὐ θάνες,
ἐσσὶ γὰρ αἰεί.
39
See the testimonia to Epimen. fr. 41 Bern.; the word προφήτης in St. Paul also alludes to this.
40
Correctly Diels-Kranz I.32, adn. 20–21. Huxley ap. Bernabé: 43 is mistaken to hold that this is one of the
Delphic oracle’s replies included in the collection of sayings of Epimenides.
256 A.V. Lebedev
menides says “Cretans are always liars” on his own behalf, but this is not so. The par-
adox was invented by the expert in logical paradoxes and philosopher of the Megari-
an school Eubulides of Miletus, a contemporary of Aristotle. The use of Epimenides’
verse for this purpose may have been a deliberate joke.
3. Selene, the Lion of Nemea and Aiakos: the former lives

of Epimenides
The most mysterious of the fragments of Epimenides is preserved by Aelian
(fr. 33 B.):
καὶ μέντοι καὶ τὸν Νεμεαῖον λέοντα τῆς σελήνης ἐκπεσεῖν φασι. λέγει γοῦν καὶ τὰ Ἐπιμενίδου
ἔπη ·
καὶ γὰρ ἐγὼ γένος εἰμὶ Σελήνης ἠυκόμοιο,
ἣ δεινὸν φρίξασ’ ἀπεσείσατο θῆρα λέοντα,
ἐν Νεμέαι δ ’ ἄγχουσ ’ αὐτὸν διὰ πότνιαν Ἥραν ...
They say that the Nemean lion fell from the moon. This is also what the verses by Epimenides
state: “For I am also a scion of the beautiful-haired Selene, who, after shuddering awfully, shook
off the lion-beast, and then in Nemea he was strangled <by Heracles> through the guidance of
reverend Hera”.
According to Karl Robert, Epimenides here was writing of Mousaios, the son of
Selene, who utters these verses. Diels suspected that Aelian accidentally quotes the
theogony ascribed to Mousaios, and not the theogony by Epimenides41. Nowadays,
most researchers rightly recognize that in these verses Epimenides is speaking of him-
self, and consequently claims that he is a descendant of Selene. Martin West even sug-
gested that Epimenides not only claimed that he was the son of the goddess Selene, but
also claimed that he actually came to earth from the moon and referred to the arrival
of the Nemean lion from the moon as a precedent for this kind of space travel [West
1983, p. 48; Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci, 2007, p.134–135; Mele, 2001, p. 241; Breg-
lia Pulci Doria, 2001, p. 295 ff.]. However, the word γένος does not necessarily mean
“offspring” in the sense of “son”: it can mean “descendant”, and in this case the au-
thor of these verses is simply tracing his genealogy back to Selene, and does not claim
that he came from the moon. It is also worth pondering whether the word “shook out
(from herself)” (ἀπεσείσατο) here means simply “gave birth” (laid an egg) rather than
“dropped down (scil. from the moon to the earth)”, and whether the phrase “shud-
dered awfully (δεινὸν φρίξασα)” refers to the shaking of wings rather than to a kind
of “moon-quake” that allegedly caused the lion to fall down from the moon. L. Breg-
lia Pulci Doria pointed out that in Aristotle (Hist. anim. 560b) the very same words in
41
Diels-Kranz I.33, n. 1. fragments of the Theogony of Mousaios in Bernabé fr. 79–91. Fragment 81F (from
Philodemus) describes the beginning of the cosmogony of Mousaios in terms very similar to the report by Damascius
on the first “beginnings” of Epimenides: Tartaros, Night, Mist (Aer).
the very same order describe the way birds give birth by laying eggs; from this we can
infer that Epimenides imagined Selene as a winged creature (as in the Homeric hymn
to Selene) with a woman’s “beautiful-haired” head, that is, as a bird-woman [Breglia
Pulci Doria, 2001, p. 295–300]. In this case, there can be no talk of the Nemean li-
on’s “space flight” from the Moon to the Earth. The poets who called Kirke the daugh-
ter of Helios, and Mousaios the son of Selene, hardly meant that Kirke flew down from
the Sun, and Mousaios fell from the Moon. Consequently, the reference to the Nemean
lion suggests a belief in the reincarnation of souls: the subsequent verses most prob-
ably contained the story of the reincarnations of the soul of the Nemean lion after it
was released from the lion’s body by Heracles in Nemea and before it entered the nar-
rator’s body42. It is no accident that the biographical tradition links Epimenides with
Pythagoras: the doctrine of reincarnation provides the most important link between
them. The belief in the “memory of ancestors” attributed to Pythagoras finds an ex-
act parallel in the Theogony by Epimenides: Pythagoras “remembered” that he was
the son of Hermes Aithalides, then Euphorbos, and then Hermotimos and Pyrrhus in
previous incarnations43. Empedocles remembered being a boy, a girl, a bush and a fish
(Emped. Fr. B 117 DK). Epimenides remembered being the Nemean lion and then, in
human form, “first born as Aiakos”; his subsequent incarnations are not preserved in
our sources. The second important piece of evidence that the author of the Epimenide-
an Theogony believed in the reincarnation of souls was preserved by Diogenes Laerti-
us: Epimenides πρῶτος αὑτὸν Αἰακὸν λέγοι (Diog. Laert. 1.114 = Epimen. fr. 1 Bern.).
The MSS. text is obviously corrupted and does not make sense: what does “Epimenides
was the first to call himself Aiakos” mean? The correction of πρῶτος to πρῶτον (Ca-
saubon) gives a satisfactory and clear meaning: Epimenides “said that he was Aiakos
first”, that is, the first human incarnation of his soul was Aiakos, son of Zeus, broth-
er of Minos and Radamanthys44. The word λέγοι indicates a quote, most probably also
from the Theogony. Since Epimenides could not narrate two different genealogies for
himself, it is reasonable to assume that in his previous lives Aiakos was his first incar-
nation in human form, and that the soul of the lion killed by Hercules was reincarnated
in the body of Aiakos. The διογενεῖς (born of Zeus) kings (βασιλεῖς), such as Achilles
and the kings of Epirus and Macedonia, traced their lineage back to Aiakos. Whether
Epimenides was also of royal stock, and how many intermediate incarnations he list-
ed between Aiakos and himself, we do not know. In any case, “first” (πρῶτον) implies
at least one “second” (δεύτερον) incarnation in a human body.
Later reports that Epimenides died many times and many times “came back to
life” (ἀναβεβιωκέναι), as Gigante notes, have Theopompus as their source45. Note that
42
сf. Mazzarino ap. [Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci, 2007, p. 135, note to fr. 33, 1].
43
Diog. Laert. 8.4 = Heraclid. Pont. fr. 89 Wehrli. In Dicaearchus (fr. 36 W.) and Clearchus (fr. 10 W.) we
find another version: Euphorbus, Pyrandros, Aethalides, a beautiful hetaira Alko, and Pythagoras [Burkert, 1972,
p. 138]. [Herda, 2012] hypothesizes that Menelaos’ dedication of the shield of Euphorbos in Didyma was mentioned
in the Nostoi, and that an ancient “shield of Menelaos” was indeed on display in VIIth century Didymaion, which
afterwards in 6th century was connected with the legend of Puthagoras’ former lives.
44
The correct interpretation is given by Gigante, who with good reason rejects the emendation of Αἰακόν to
σεληνιακόν proposed by Martin West [Gigante, 2001, p. 18–19].
45
[Gigante, 2001, p. 19]; Epimen. fr. 8T Bern.
258 A.V. Lebedev
ἀναβιόω is the earliest term for reincarnation, attested in the classical period along
with the phrase πάλιν γίνεσθαι (in Plato); the term παλιγγενεσία occurs for the first
time in Chrysippus; and finally, the terms μετενσωμάτωσις (hence reincarnatio) and
μετεμψύχωσις appear only in imperial times and late antiquity (aliter [Kalogerakos,
1996, S. 18 ff.]).
According to Plutarch (Vit. Sol. 12), Epimenides was the son of the nymph Balta
(Βάλτη). Whether she also appeared in the text of Epimenides’ Theogony, or derived
from later folklore that sought to connect Epimenides with some local Cretan cult,
we do not know. Whether the similarity of the nymph Balta’s name to the name of
the Canaan-Ugaritic goddess, which was rendered in Greek as Βααλτίς, is significant
or accidental, remains unclear46. Herennius Philo “translates” the name Baaltis into
Greek as “Dione” (Διώνη), presumably because the masculine Baal was equivalent to
Zeus/Dia. In Homer (Il. 5.370, cf. Hes. Theog. 17) Dione is the mother of Aphrodite,
whose father is Zeus, and later a matronymic for Aphrodite herself47. If the name is
of Greek or of indigenous Cretan origin, a more promising route would be compar-
ison of the name Balta with Hesychius’ gloss βλάτταν· χόρτος ἢ λάχανον (Hesychius
680 Latte). The name of the nymph may be a personification of a Cretan plant with
therapeutic or gastronomic use. The variant Βλάστα in the Suda lexicon is also asso-
ciated with vegetation.
4. Epimenides, the Orphics (Onomacritus), and Pythagoras:

de fontibus
It is commonly assumed, after Diels, that Epimenides’ Theogony falls into the
category of pseudepigrapha and was composed by an unknown author after 500 BC,
since it allegedly displays the influence of the Orphic theogony (primordial Night,
the cosmogonic egg), the physics of Anaximenes (ἀήρ as arche), Anaxagoras’ astron-
omy, and the Orphic-Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation. We have tried to show
above, primarily on the basis of reconstruction of the proem, that the Theogony was,
on the contrary, composed in the late VIIth century or circa 600 BC and, therefore, is
authentic or at least contains an authentic core that goes back to the historical Epi-
menides. In particular, the controversy with Hesiod and the rivalry with the Delphic
oracle is easier to understand in a work of the late VIIth or early VIth century, when
Hesiod’s Theogony was a relatively recent novelty, rather than in classical times, when
Hesiod was already a classical textbook author and the authority of the Delphic or-
acle was undisputed. The theogonies attributed to mythical singers (Orpheus, Mou-
saios, Linos) were undoubtedly pseudepigrapha, and their authors were Pythago-
reans and soothsayers wishing to give their works an aura of divinely inspired an-
46
Βααλτίς: Herennius Philo, FGrHist 790 F2. Βλάττα: Lydus De mens., 1, 21. The Near-Eastern origin is
supported by Poljakov [Poljakov, 1987, p. 410 ff]. Βλάττα is “the name of Aphrodite among Phoenicians”, according
to John Lydus.
47
Il. 5.370, cf. Hes. Theog. 17.
cient wisdom. Epimenides, though, was a historical figure. Aristotle had no doubt
that the purification of Athens by Epimenides of Crete was a historical event (c. 600
BC), and although he did not recognize the authenticity of the poems by Orpheus
and Mousaios — when quoting them he uses such expressions as ἐν τοῖς Ὀρφικοῖς
λεγομένοις ἔπεσι — he quotes Epimenides without reservation as the real author of
the verses he cites48. The supposed influence on Epimenides’ Theogony of the phys-
ical theory of Anaximenes (second half of the VIth century) should be rejected on
three grounds. First, Epimenides’ Theogony, despite some glimpses of critical thought
and personifications of abstract concepts, generally remains in line with prescientif-
ic thought and the mythopoetic tradition of genealogical theogony. It does not re-
veal any traces of the VIth-century scientific revolution and therefore belongs to the
pre-philosophical era. Epimenides does not touch on the Milesian concept of “na-
ture” (physis); he does not deal with the etiology of natural phenomena, like Anaxi-
mander and Anaximenes. Secondly, Damascius’ report that “Night and Aer” are the
“first principles” (ἀρχαί) of all things according to Epimenides does not reproduce
the authentic wording in Epimenides: this is Damascius’ own Neoplatonic phraseol-
ogy, which follows the Peripatetic terminology of his source Eudemus. The original
verses by Epimenides most likely stated that the Night and the Mist came into be-
ing first (πρῶτ , ἐγένοντο Νύξ και Ἀήρ), and after them the misty Tartarus (Tάρταρα
ἠερόεντα γείνατο...). Night, Mist and the Abyss are not physical elements and sub-
stances, but a poetic description of primordial chaos. Thirdly, as we have already in-
dicated, in the language of epic, ἀήρ means ‘mist, haze’; only in the late Vth centu-
ry BC did this word become a standard philosophical term for the invisible element
of air. In the original poetic context of the Theogony the reference to night and mist
was simply expressive imagery indicating that before the emergence of the sky, the
earth and the luminaries nothing could be seen and nothing could be distinguished;
the shapelessness of chaos was amplified by the absence of the “limit” (πεῖραρ) of the
abyss (on this see [Bernabé, 2001, p. 205–206]). We are dealing here not with a phys-
ical theory of elements, but with mythopoetic phenomenology. If the term ἀήρ, be-
sides indistinguishability and darkness, contained any additional cosmogonic con-
notation, it was not Anaximenes’ mechanism of condensation and rarefaction of air,
but the folkloric idea of the fertilizing force of the wind: in the Aristophanian qua-
si-Orphic comic ornithogony (Aristoph. Aves, 695) the cosmogonic egg is described
as ὑπηνέμιον “impregnated by the wind”.
If this is so, Epimenides did not borrow from Orphic poems and Pythagore-
ans. On the contrary, his Theogony was the most likely source of the Orphic Theog-
ony (i.e. Onomacritus) and of the Orphic-Pythagorean doctrine of the immortal-
ity of the soul and reincarnation. The Derveni papyrus has proved that the Orphic
Theogony was not a late product of Hellenistic syncretism, as skeptics like Wila-
mowitz and Linforth believed, but it does not prove that the Orphic Theogony was
composed by Orpheus before the Trojan War, as Neoplatonists and Renaissance
scholars believed. We see no reason to doubt the only serious historical evidence
48
Aristotle’s meticulous approach to such questions is demonstrated by his critique of “inconsiderate”
chronology in Pol. 1274a22 ss. = Orph. fr. 1108 Bern. Cf. 1274a 30 ...ἀσκεπτότερον τῶν χρόνων λέγοντες.
260 A.V. Lebedev
on the chronology and authorship of the Orphic Theogony, the evidence of Aristot-
le, who considered the Orphic Theogony in his lost Περὶ φιλοσοφίας as a composi-
tion by Onomacritus the chresmologue49. Aristotle is followed by a number of an-
cient authors who quote the Orphic Theogony as a work by Onomacritus, not “Or-
pheus”, among them such historians as Pausanias and the critically-minded Sextus
Empiricus, who were very discerning in this respect50. Onomacritus (c. 560 – after
480 BC) was a younger contemporary of Pythagoras, and the influence of the doc-
trines of Pythagoras on him cannot be excluded. Moreover, if the Onomacritus of
Locri Epizephyrii in Calabria mentioned by Aristotle is identical with Onomacri-
tus the official diviner (chresmologos) at the court of the Peisistratids, he may have
come from Pythagorean circles himself; he must at least have had strong ties with
the Pythagoreans of Magna Graecia.
According to Pausanias 8.37, παρὰ Ὁμήρου Ὀνομάκριτος παραλαβὼν τῶν
Τιτάνων τὸ ὄνομα Διονύσωι τε συνέθηκε ὄργια καὶ εἶναι τοὺς Τιτάνας τῶι Διονύσωι
τῶν παθημάτων ἐποίησεν αὐτουργούς (“Having adopted the name of the Titans from
Homer, Onomacritus established secret rites in honor of Dionysus and made the Ti-
tans the culprits of the passions of Dionysus”). Pausanias follows the sceptical view of
Aristotle on the antiquity of Orphic theogony and therefore probably relies here on
a Peripatetic IVth century or some other classical source the importance of which has
been underestimated. The uniqueness of this testimony is that it connects the inven-
tion of the central Orphic myth of sparagmos of Dionysus by evil Titans with a cult
innovation, the establishment of new rituals, in other words it testifies that the Orphic
Theogony of Onomacritus was a liturgical text (ἱερὸς λόγος or λεγόμενα) linked to
certain rites (ὄργια or δρώμενα). Onomacritus could not introduce new rites in the
cult of Dionysus in Athens after his expulsion by Hipparchus. Although the exact year
of expulsion is unknown, the assassination of Hipparchus by Harmodios and Aristo-
geiton in 514 BC provides a firm terminus ante quem for the composition of the an-
cient “Attic version” (as we term it) of Orphic Theogony which is most likely identi-
cal with the version quoted by the Derveni author (Prodicus of Ceos), Aristophanes,
and Peripatetics Eudemus and Aristotle. This accords with one of the earliest possi-
ble allusions to the Orphic Theogony in Heraclitus fr. 148Leb/B15 which identifies
Dionysus and Hades circa 490 BC.
More complicated is the question of what was the gole set by Onomacritus’ in-
novations. Was it a project of grand-scale reform of the traditional polis cult of Di-
onysus (as [Casadiegos, 2012] thinks), or a restricted thiasos for elite, i.e. the tyrant
an his philoi. It is unlikely that his Theogony was connected with the attempt to re-
49
Arist. fr. 26–27 Gigon (7A–B Rose) = Io. Philopon. Ad Arist. De anima (1.5.1410b 28 ἐν τοῖς Ὀρφικοῖς
καλουμένοις ἔπεσι): λεγομένοις εἶπεν ἐπειδὴ μὴ δοκεῖ Ὀρφέως εἶναι τὰ ἔπη, ὡς καὶ αὐτὸς ἐν τοῖς περὶ φιλοσοφίας
λέγει· αὐτοῦ μὲν γάρ εἰσι τὰ δόγματα, ταῦτα δέ φησιν Ὀνομάκριτον ἐν ἔπεσι κατατεῖναι. Cic. De nat. deor. 1.38:
“Orpheum poetam docet Aristoteles numquam fuisse et hoc Orphicum carmen Pythagorei ferunt cuiusdam fuisse
Cercopis”. The scepticism of [Burkert, 1972, p. 139 n.58] and [West, 1983, p. 8, 249 ff.] goes too far. A more balanced
treatment of the role of Onomacritus in Peisistratus’ recension of Homer and the Orphic Theogony is found in Nagy
[Nagy, 2010, p. 348 ff.] and [Guthrie, 1993, p. 113 ff.].
50
Paus. 8.37.5; Sext. Emp. Math. 9.361. The Orphic Theogony is also quoted as a work by Onomacritus by
the Christian apologists (Tatian, Clemens Alexandrinus) and the scholiasts. See the testimonia on Onomacritus
collected in OF 1109–1119 Bern.
form the public cult of Dionysus. Ancient (VIth-century) tyrants are well known for
their support and promotion of the “demotic” cult of Dionysus. It is hard to imagine
that the Peisistratids ever considered to deprive the Attic demos of its beloved festi-
vals of Greater Dionysia and Lenaea and to replace the buoyant son of Semele with
the infernal son of Persephone. The cult of Dionysus was a polis cult open to all cit-
izens, whereas the text that we call the Orphic Theogony was actually a hieros logos,
i.e. a secret discourse for the ears of the initiated (mystai) only. This is confirmed by
the introductory verse (OF 1), which excludes from his audience those who are not
initiated; on the private houses of wealthy Athenians like the Lykomidai as a possi-
ble setting for the performance of Orphic poems see [Obbink, 1994] and [Bremmer,
2011]. This thiasos may have been based on a Pythagorean model, a suggestion fa-
voured by the possible Pythagorean connections of Onomacritus and by the total si-
lence of all possible sources on any “Orphic” activity in Athens until the outbreak
of Peloponnesian war (see last section below). If Onomacritus mentioned in Aris-
totle’s Politics 1274a is identical with the chresmologue, he may have been native of
Locri (Λοκρὸν ὄντα, ἐπιδημεῖν) who was granted Athenian citizenship by Pisistratids.
Locri Epizephyrii were the birthplace of Timaeus and 10 other Pythagoreans listed in
the catalogue of Iamblichus, VP 267. The oldest and one of the most important gold
leaves was found in Hipponion, colony of Locri Epizephyrii. Locri was the center of
unusual cult of Persephone as a goddess of marriage that has been linked with the
gold leaves and the Orphic-Pythagorean idea of rebirth. In the late VIth century BC
the influence of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism on the politics in Magna Graecia
and Sicily reached its zenith. A late sixth century graffito on a drinking cup (kylix)
found in the acropolis of Gela in Sicily reads: Παντάρεός εἰμι καὶ τῶν φίλων qοινά
εἰμι (“I am the kylix of Pantares and the common kylix of friends”) [Jeffery, 1961,
p. 273, 278, Plate 53, Nr. 50]. Pantares, the owner of this drinking cup, was Olym-
pionikes and the father of two tyrants of Gela, Kleandros (from 505 BC) and Hip-
pocrates (7 years later) who sustained their power with the help of their philoi and
symposiotai (cf. [Vinogradov, 1997, S. 247]). Here we see the influence of Pythago-
rean political philosophy on the ideology of tyrannical regime virtually contempo-
rary with Hipparchus and Onomacritus in Athens: the famous Pythagorean slogan
κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων (“friends have everything in common”) (Plato Resp. 424a, Ti-
maeus ap. Diog. Laert. 8.10 etc.) anticipated the “way of life” (bios) of philosopher
kings in Plato’s utopia.
The fact that the early Pythagoreans (possibly including Pythagoras himself)
published their poems under the name of Orpheus is firmly attested in reliable ear-
ly sources51. Attention should be paid to the fact that one of the most ancient and
51
Ion of Chios B 2 DK = Diog.Laert. 8.8; Herod. 2.81 (cf. note 60 below); Suda, s.v. Ὀρφεύς. “Orpheus of
Croton” and “Orpheus of Kamarina” are obviously not the authors’ genuine personal names, but conventional ti-
tles for versions of Orphic poems invented by grammarians who, like Aristotle, did not believe in the historicity
of Orpheus. “Orpheus of Croton” means “Orphic poem(s) in a manuscript which comes from Croton,” etc. Suda
quotes the grammarian Asclepiades as saying that “Orpheus from Croton” lived at the court of the tyrant Peisis-
tratos (Πεισιστράτωι συνεῖναι τῶι τυράννωι). Once we admit that Κροτωνιάτης is not a genuine ethnikon, but the
source of the origin of the manuscript, we should seriously consider the possibility that the reference is to Onomac-
ritus, the compiler of the Orphic Theogony, who lived at the court of Peisistratos.
262 A.V. Lebedev
uniquely complete Orphic-Dionysian gold tablets was found in Hipponion, the col-
ony of Locri Epizephyrii (OF 474). However, even if Onomacritus, the compiler
of the Orphic Theogony, was a Pythagorean, this does not mean that he might not
also have known the doctrine of reincarnation from the more ancient Theogony by
Epimenides. According to Aristotle’s unique testimony, Onomacritus was “trained”,
i.e. received professional training in the art of divination, in Crete: γυμνασθῆναι
δ’αὐτὸν ἐν Κρήτηι ... κατὰ τέχνην μαντικήν (Politica 1274 a 26 ss.). Aristotle quotes
an unknown author who tried to prove that Sparta’s laws were borrowed from Crete,
not the other way around: Onomacritus was “trained” in Crete, and his disciple was
the lawmaker Thaletas, on whom Lycurgus depends. Onomacritus of Locri in Ar-
istotle’s text is likely the same Onomacritus who was active in Athens, first because
Aristotle calls him a diviner, and secondly because, if this was some other, more an-
cient Onomacritus of the VIIth century BC, Aristotle would not have pointed out the
chronological incongruity. Aristotle does not dispute that Onomacritus “was edu-
cated” in Crete in the art of divination; he simply questions that Onomacritus the
diviner who lived in the second half of the VIth – early Vth century BC could be the
teacher of the lawgiver Thaletas in the VIIth century BC. We propose the following
hypothesis: during his “training” in the art of divination in Crete in the VIth centu-
ry, when Epimenides’ fame resounded all over Hellas, Onomacritus was educated in
the Epimenidean school and became acquainted not only with the Cretan technique
of divination, but also with its cosmological and theological basis, that is, with Epi-
menides’ ideas about the origin of the world and the nature of the human psyche
set out in his Theogony. It was from this source that Onomacritus borrowed “Night”
as a primordial deity, the cosmogonic egg, and the doctrine of the immortality of
the soul and reincarnation, which Epimenides supposedly knew from the oral tra-
dition of his hieratic genos. We emphasize once again that this oral tradition must
have had ancient local roots (possibly going back to the late Bronze Age), and was
not borrowed from Oriental or “northern” lands. Our sources tell us nothing about
Epimenides’ travels outside the Hellenic world and it is hard to imagine him learn-
ing Akkadian or Egyptian (although this is in principle conceivable, e.g., in the case
of Pythagoras or Democritus). Plato admired Crete for its cultural conservatism,
as a place not subject to any outside influences. As the Cretan Kleinias says in the
Laws, even Homer is a “foreign poet” for the Cretans, which is why he is little read
there: οὐ γὰρ σφόδρα χρώμεθα οἱ Κρῆτες τοῖς ξενικοῖς ποιήμασι (Plat. Leg. 680c).
Hesiod’s Theogony was also “alien poetry” for Epimenides, which is why he rejected
it and composed a theogony of his own based on local Cretan lore.
The most important evidence for the genetic connection of mystery rites of the
Orphic type with Crete, namely with the cults connected with the Idaean cave, can be
found in the famous fragment of Euripides’ lost drama Cretans, where the choir-lead-
er of the mystai of “Idaean Zeus” addresses King Minos (in an earlier passage it is
mentioned that the procession of mystai is coming from a cypress temple). We pro-
pose the following text with a new reading in line 3:
ἁγνὸν δὲ βίον τείνων ἐξ οὗ
Διὸς Ἰδαίου μύστης γενόμην,
καὶ νυκτιπόλου Ζαγρέως βoρὰς 52

τάς τ᾽ ὠμοφάγους δαίτας τελέσας
Μητρί τ’ Ὀρείαι δᾷδας ἀνασχὼν
καὶ Κουρήτων
βάκχος ἐκλήθην ὁσιωθείς.
πάλλευκα δ’ ἔχων εἵματα φεύγω
γένεσίν τε βροτῶν καὶ νεκροθήκας
οὐ χριμπτόμενος τήν τ’ ἐμψύχων
βρῶσιν ἐδεστῶν πεφύλαγμαι53.
I lead a holy life since I became an initiate of the mysteries of Idaean Zeus, and after I per-
formed tastings and raw-eating feasts of the wandering-at-night Zagreus, and raised torches to the
Mountain Mother with (?) Kouretes, I was consecrated and Ι was proclaimed “Bakkhos”. Wearing all-
white dress, I avoid the birth of mortals, Ι do not touch coffins, and I am wary of eating animal food.
Zagreus is another name for the chthonian Dionysus, Dionysos Orphikos of the
Olbian graffiti, the son of Persephone (not of Semele), torn apart by the Titans in an
act that became the mythical prototype of the ritual of omophagia. Mystai and Bakk-
hoi54 called themselves the owners of the gold tablets, eschatological “passports to en-
ter paradise” (Delatte), who were initiated into “the rites of Orpheus” (τὰ Ὀρφικά)55. In
the soul’s wanderings in the afterlife, according to the gold tablets, the “white cypress”
is a kind of road sign next to which the sources of Memory (Mnemosyne) and Oblivi-
on (Lethe) flow. Vegetarianism in the Vth century was unequivocally associated with the
“rites of Orpheus” and implied belief in the reincarnation of souls (Eur. Hipp. 952 ff.).
“Avoiding birth and coffins” probably has not only a narrow meaning, referring to the
taboo that prohibited contact with women in labor and the dead, but also an eschato-
logical meaning: one who has ascended to the highest level of initiation and has been
proclaimed and become “Bakkhos” thereby escapes from the circle of birth and death,
i.e. from the cycle of reincarnations, and goes to paradise. “White clothes” in all likeli-
hood are not just white in color, but linen. Herodotus regarded the prohibition against
burying the dead in woolen clothes a peculiar feature of the “Orphic and Bacchic rites”,
52
βοράς scripsi: βροτάς cod. Lips.: βροντάς cet. libri, acc. Nauck, West, Bernabé alii: βιοτάς editio Valentin-
iana (1655): βούτaς “pastor” Diels: βούτης Wilamowitz, acc. Kannicht: σπονδάς Lobeck. Βοραί here means “feasts”
or “tastings”. Such use in the plural, synonymous with δαῖτας, is attested in Moschion fr.6, 14: βοραὶ δὲ σαρκοβρῶτες
ἀλληλοκτόνους / παρεῖχον αὐτοῖς δαῖτας κτλ., of cannibalism among primitive humans. The whole description of
the primitive life in Moschion fr.6 is based on the Sophistic history of the origin of civilization (Protagoras, Prodi-
cus). Unlike the trivial βορά, the plural βοραί is a very rare poetic form. That is why βοράς was corrupted into more
common βροτάς, and βροτάς, in turn, was corrupted into βροντάς. The chain of corruptions ended with Diels’ fan-
ciful “emendation” of βροντάς into βούτας (“herdsman”) (= βουκόλος), surprisingly accepted by Kannicht. One can-
not “perform thunders” (τελέσας βροντάς) except in Aristophanes’ comedy, but one can “perform” or accomplish
“feasts” (τελέσας βοράς) in a tragedy. Harrison’s attempt to interpret “thunders” metonymically as rituals accompa-
nied by the sound of tympans is far-fetched.
53
Eurip. Cretes, fr. 472, 9–19 TrGF, Kannicht = OF 567 Bern. cf. [Bernabé, Two Orphic images in Euripides, 2016].
54
Tablet from Hipponion (Vth century BC) B10 Edmonds = OF 474 Bern. = No 1, 16 Graf, Johnston.
55
Graf and Johnston are right to call the tablets “Bacchic” rather than “Orphic”, since those initiated into this
mystery cult called themselves Βάκχοι, but not Ὀρφικοί. However, this does not exclude the possibility that the very
same texts were regarded by the same initiates as “prophecies” (χρησμοί) or “incantations” (ἐπωιδαί) of Orpheus. Simi-
larly, the phrase ,Ορφέως τελεταί “the initiations of (= established by) Orpheus” refers to the mystery cult of Dionysus.
264 A.V. Lebedev
which “are in fact Egyptian and Pythagorean”56. Erwin Rohde and Jane Harrison rightly
saw this fragment as evidence on the connection of Orphic initiations with the cults of
the Idaean cave, while other scholars were skeptical57. In the present context, this con-
troversy is not crucial. Even if at the time of Euripides Knossos boasted neither a cy-
press temple nor a procession of singing Orphics dressed in white, Euripides may have
speculated on the origin of the “rites of Orpheus” in the mythical time of Minos, re-
lying on mythological tradition and historical and literary sources (in particular Epi-
menides’ Theogony) and knowing of the “Cretan connections” of the compiler of the
Orphic Theogony, Onomacritus. In any case, the connection between the Idaean cave,
on the one hand, and Orphic rites and belief in reincarnation (vegetarianism), on the
other, in Euripides’ Cretans must have been somehow motivated by tradition, otherwise
the Athenian public in the theater would have been perplexed [cf. West, 1983, p. 170].
Let us not forget that Epimenides’ first incarnation was as Aiakos, the brother of
Minos. Moreover, Euripides is not the only author who believed in such a connection.
Quite independently from Euripides, the historian Ephorus (quoted by Diodorus) con-
nects the origin of Orphic initiation rites with Idaean cults and Idaean Daktyloi and
Kouretes58. One important archaeological and epigraphic complex of evidence on the
connection of funeral rites and the corresponding eschatology of the Orphic-Diony-
sian persuasion with central Crete, namely with the region around Mount Ida and the
Idaean cave, is the texts on gold tablets from Eleutherna and the epistomia from Sfaka-
ki, a suburb of Rethymno59. Research by Yannis Tzifopoulos convincingly demonstrates
that, despite all their similarities to the common Greek type, the Cretan tablets reveal
a specific connection with local beliefs, toponymy and landscape [Tzifopoulos, 2011,
p. 165–199; Tzifopoulos, 2010].
[Tzifopoulos, 2011, p. 182] makes an interesting attempt to establish a connection
between the cults of Idaean cave, the “Orphic” epistomia from Eleutherna, and the cult
of Magna Mater in Phaistos, taking them as integral parts of the same regional complex
and comparing this complex with the parodos of Euripides’ Cretans.
Bernabé is right to see in the “Orphic” passages of Euripides, the choir of mystai
in Cretans, and Theseus’ speech in Hippolytus, 952–957, allusions to a certain Orphic
circle or community in Athens at the time (from the late thirties to the early twenties).
56
Herod. 2.81. The long version is undoubtedly the original one. “Orphics” as a term for the religious sect
is almost entirely a modern term. The word Ὀρφικοί appears in the later grammarians in the sense of authors of
poems under the name of Orpheus; only in Jamblichus it is used as a name of a hairesis, for the first time. In the Vth
century BC this usage would have been unthinkable. Zhmud’, Betegh and many other scholars have been misled
by the old photos and mistaken reading in the editio princeps [Zhmud’, 2012, p. 224–225; Betegh, 2014, p. 150].
57
E.g. [Allan, 2004, p. 132, n. 84] with a reference to Parker. A conclusion made on the grounds of only
one passage from Euripides (Hipp. 952) that Orphics were deviant intellectuals whereas Pythagoreans lived in
communities is not a serious conclusion. There were different Pythagoreans and different “Orphics”. On the historical
and polemical context of this anti-Orphic invective in “Hippolytus” see [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni
Papyrus, 2019, p. 548, 575].
58
Diod. Sic. 5.64.4 = Ephorus FGrHist 70 F 104. In Ephorus the Idaean Dactyls originally come from
Phrygia, from where they migrate to Samothrake and Crete. On the typology of the related daimones Dactyls,
Kouretes, Corybants, Telchines, and Cabiri see [Blakely, 2006, p. 13–31]. One of the mythographical works ascribed
to Epimenides was a Τελχινιακὴ ἱστορία, fr.39 Bern.
59
B3–B8, E1; E5, B12, G2–G4 Edmonds; L5 A–F, L6A, L15 Bernabé, Jiménes; 10–18 Graf, Johnston.
[Tzifopoulos, 2011, p. 165–199].
His explication of the anti-Orphic message in Hippolytus is also persuasive. However,

his attempt to trace a positive attitude towards the Orphics in Euripides’ Cretans and to
contrast it with a negative one in Hippolytus is unconvincing. First, such a contradiction
cannot be explained away by an alleged reflection of conflicting views in contemporary
Athenian society: Euripides was not a detached sociologist. The “sacred words” (hieroi
logoi) of the inspired ancient mantis Orpheus, admired by Vth-century religious conser-
vatives and manteis like Diopeithes, were being dismissed and ridiculed at precisely that
time by the Athenian liberal intelligentsia, a prominent leader of whom was Euripides
himself (see the evidence cited below in section 7). He could not attack himself, praising
“Orphics” like Diopeithes, and he could not betray close friends like his teacher Anaxag-
oras, who could have been on trial or in prison charged with asebeia for his astrophysics
at the time. Euripides does not applaud the choir of mystai in Cretans. Their exaggerated
self-praise and their inflated “holiness” is similar to the vaunting (κόμποι) of which The-
seus accuses Hippolytus. The “extraordinary man” (ἀνὴρ περισσός) in Hippolytus aligns
perfectly with “becoming Bakkhos”, i.e. achieving a superhuman status, in Cretans. The
two passages are absolutely similar in intent: to expose the hypocrisy and religious big-
otry of those who pretend “to obey Orpheus as their Lord”. Their proclaimed vegetar-
ianism is incompatible with omophagia, just as Hippolytus’ boast of his chastity is re-
futed by his lust. Our emendation of the meaningless βροντάς to βοράς reinforces the
parallelism between the two passages and makes the allusive invective against ancient
Cretan mystai (or, in fact, against the contemporaneous Athenian μύσται of Zagreus
who relied on Orpheus’ theogony as their hieros logos) even more caustic. Βορά occurs
in Euripides 25 times. In most cases (15) it is used of cannibalism, exposing corpses or
babies to wild beasts and other disgraceful deeds60, and is employed only 10 times in the
neutral sense of satisfying hunger at a banquet, providing everyday food, etc.61. In two
other instances βορά likewise occurs in proximity with the synonymous δαίς62. Note
that in phrases like μήλων βορά (Cycl. 122) or παιδὸς βορά (Iph. Taur. 338) it means
‘tasting of ’ rather than ‘food of ’, and the genitive is Gen. objectivus rather than poses-
sivus (“feasts of Zagreus”) or subjectivus (as in πυρὸς βορά, of wood which is “eaten
by fire”)63. Therefore Ζαγρέως βοράς is ambiguous: it can be interpreted both as “feasts
of Zagreus” (with Gen. subj.), and as “tastings of Zagreus” (with Gen. obj.), i.e. the dis-
membering and eating of the divine child symbolically reenacted in omophagia. That
the Pythagoreans in the Vth century BC may have been influenced by the Orphic Theog-
ony compiled by Onomacritus cannot be ruled out: Philolaus refers to “ancient theo-
logians and diviners (manteis)” who prohibit suicide as a crime and a violation of cer-
tain logoi that are “stronger than we”, logoi that cast life on earth as punishment and re-
incarnation. Λόγοι may well be a cryptic quotation of Ἱεροὶ λόγοι. It is conceivable that
Philolaus is referring not only to Orpheus (primarily), but also to those who, according
to Aristotle, “expounded his doctrine in verse”, that is, the chresmologue Onomacri-
60
6 instances in Cyclops: 127 βορᾶι χαίρειν ἀνθρωποκτόνωι, 249 ἀνθρώπων βορᾶς, 289 βορᾶν δυσσεβῆ,
367 ξενικῶν κρεῶν, 409 ἑταίρων βορᾶς, 411 ἀνασχυντοῦ βορᾶς. Suppl. 46 and Phoeniss. 1607 θηρσὶν βοράν. Child
eating: Iph. Taur. 338 παιδὸς ἡσθῆναι βορᾶι etc.
61
Iph. Aul. 423, Or. 189, Hel. 502, Ion 1169, Iph. Taur. 973, El. 429, Supp. 865, Hipp. 112.
62
Ion 1168–1169 and Electra 423–425.
63
γαστρὸς βορά Supp. 865 is an exception.
266 A.V. Lebedev
tus64. However, it does not follow from this that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans were
not familiar with Onomacritus’ more ancient source, Epimenides’ Theogony.
Epimenides (along with “Orpheus”) was revered in the Pythagorean school with the
same devotion as Pythagoras would later be in Plato’s Academy, as a keeper of ancient
esoteric knowledge — a role which, unlike the mythical Orpheus, Epimenides genu-
inely played65. If our interpretations of the fragments of the Theogony of Epimenides, as
well as our reconsideration of its authenticity and dating, are correct, it must be admit-
ted that its role and significance in the intellectual history of the Greeks have been seri-
ously underestimated. We mean first of all the problem of the origins of philosophical
idealism (mentalism) (on this problem see [Lebedev, Idealism, 2019]) and of the Py-
thagorean-Platonic doctrine of the immortality of soul. Epimenides’ influence on the
Pythagoreans was not limited to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and rein-
carnation. First, the Pythagoreans, as the Platonists would later, considered Epimenides
an authority on political philosophy, philosophy of law, and legislation. Whether they
relied on oral tradition or on written sources, we do not know, but let us not forget that
in the proem of his Theogony, in the “recollection” of his prophetic dream, Epimenides
said that he spoke not only with Aletheia, but also with Dike. It is significant that Plato
mentions Epimenides in Laws 642d–e. The Middle Platonist Plutarch emphasizes not
only the religious, but also the political aspect of Epimenides’ activities in Athens and
believes that these activities contributed to the success of Solon’s reforms (Plut. Vit. Sol.
12 = Epimen. fr. 3T Bern.). The Corpus Epimenideum in antiquity included a Cretan
politeia (Diog. Laert. 1.112). Aristotle in Politics 1252b 15 quotes a hapax from an un-
known work by Epimenides, ὁμόκαποι (“messmates”) designating the members of one
family and synonymous with ὁμοσίπυοι (“eating from the same meal-tub”) in the laws of
Charondas. The source may be some late prose work like Cretan politeia or On sacrifices
(Περὶ θυσιῶν, Diog. Laert. 1.111), and its original context some regulations of sacrifice
to ancestors, cf. hομοσεπύος in the Lex sacra of Selinous, col. A, 1. Secondly, the Pythag-
oreans and Platonists quoted and elaborated on the herbal medicine of Epimenides66.
Thirdly, mention must be made of a unique find from the Idaean cave: a dodeca-
hedron made of rock crystal with the numbers 1–10, 15, and 20 inscribed on its 12 fac-
ets [Chaniotis, 2006, p. 205–216]. The dodecahedron is obviously a device for divina-
64
Philolaus 44 B 14 DK. The authenticity of this fragment has been denied on insufficient grounds by
Burkert, Huffman and Zhmud’ [Burkert, 1972, p. 248; Huffman, 1993, p. 404 ff.; Zhmud’, 2012, p. 230]. There is
nothing specifically “Platonic” in the semantics of ψυχή in B 14. Even in Heraclitus, some 100 years before Plato,
ψυχή is a carrier of moral and intellectual qualities and virtues: fr. 19, 73–74 Leb. = B 107, 117–118 DK. The
variability of usage in Heraclitus also demonstrates (contra Huffman) that one and the same philosopher could
use the term ψυχή both in this allegedly “Platonic” sense (ψυχὴ σοφωτάτη καὶ ἀρίστη) and in the old Homeric
sense of “life” (ψυχῆς ὠνεῖται fr. 89 Leb. = B 85 DK). Philolaus’ fragment B 14 sets out grounds for the prohibition
of suicide in B16 and explains the meaning of the words λόγους κρείττους ἡμῶν (“doctrines that are stronger than
we”), i.e. divine commands that are superior to human considerations (e.g. committing suicide in order to avoid
unbearable suffering). Philolaus’ fragment B 14, like many other genuine pre-Platonic texts, has fallen victim to
Platonocentrism and pseudo-historical evolutionism as well as to the myth of the Presocratics as physicalists.
65
Epimenides and Pythagoras: Epimen. fr. 22T–26T Bern.
66
See the texts collected in Bernabé Epimen. fr. 27T–30T. Strataridaki recognizes the important influence of
Epimenides on Pythagorean botany, contra Bernabé [Strataridaki, 1991, p. 212; Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci, 2007,
p. 126]. Alcmaeon of Croton, who had strong connections with the Pythagoreans, proposed the first theory of the
origin of plants [Lebedev, 1993, p. 456 ff.].
tion, probably a kind of sophisticated astragalomancy: it was probably rolled in a con-

tainer, and the number that ended up on top dictated which answer should be chosen
from the complete set of pre-prepared answers. In the scholia on Euclid, the discovery
of three of the five “Platonic bodies” (pyramid, cube, and dodecahedron) is attributed
to the Pythagoreans; in Plato’s Timaeus the dodecahedron is a divine polyhedron, with
the form of which the demiurgos has decorated the Universe (Schol. Euclid. V.654 Hei-
berg). According to our hypothesis, this form of divination was also adopted by wan-
dering Orpheotelests, such as Pharnabazos the “diviner of Hermes” in late Vth-century
BC Olbia Pontica, to whom we attribute the cleromantic bone tablets with the so-called
“Orphic” graffiti from Olbia (on these, see section 1 above). In Heraclitus the cosmic
god of time Aion plays pesseia (a game similar to the modern Greek tavli), in which the
pieces on the board are moved according to rolls of the dice. Aion plays with the fates
of gods and men who alternately and endlessly exchange roles in the same way as black
and white pieces on the board67. Just as white and black pieces (πεσσοί) exchange their
position on the board symbolizing a battlefield, so gods and men exchange their roles
in a perpetual alternation on the way back and forth (ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω) between heav-
en and earth: losers become mortals and slaves, winners become immortals and free
(fr. 32–33, 153–154 Leb. with comm.). Unlike the Orphics and Pythagoreans, Heracli-
tus was not a dualist and did not consider the soul an incorporeal entity from anoth-
er world. Heraclitus, like all Ionian thinkers (and unlike all Italian ones) was a natural-
istic monist and considered the soul to be an “exhalation” or “vapour” (anathymiasis)
from the blood (at the level of the microcosm), similar to evaporation from the sea (at
the level of the macrocosm), on which the sun “feeds” (fr. 67–69A Leb.). Nor did Hera-
clitus believe in classical reincarnation, i.e. transmigration of the soul after death in the
bodies of animals and plants. Nevertheless, Heraclitus’ eschatological doctrine of the
fate of souls has a certain similarity to Orphica and Pythagoreanism. Heraclitus rec-
ognized a cyclical alternation of life and death, similar to the alternation of sleep and
wakefulness68. Although Heraclitus did not recognize animal reincarnation, he accept-
ed elemental transmigration or cosmic circulation of souls, i.e. journeys up and down
between heaven and earth. Being an inseparable part of the cosmic process of cyclical
change, the vaporous soul is involved in the cycle of interchange of the four elements,
the eternal back-and-forth of birth and death, like a race in a stadium69. It is possible
that Heraclitus intentionally proposed an allegorical naturalistic reinterpretation of the
Orphic myth of the palingenesia, and this was noticed by the Derveni author (Prodi-
cus), who in col. IV compares the teachings of Heraclitus with the “sacred word” of Or-
pheus70. In one passage Heraclitus expresses a paradoxical idea, known to Plato and the
67
For the interpretation of the metaphors of pesseia and astragali in Heraclitus see [Лебедев, 2014, с. 79–
80, 308–312, 324, 332–333].
68
Fragment 75 Leb./B26 in our reconstruction, which is strongly supported by Clement’s context and
paraphrase.
69
Fr. 69 Leb., cf. fr. 47, 50, 51, 51А, 52, 55 Leb. By “elements” we mean maxima membra mundi, not the
Empedoclean immutable elements. It is worth noting that in Empedocles’ Katharmoi classical animal reincarnation
and elemental transmigration (migration of the soul from one element and cosmic region to another) coexist: see
Emped. fr. 31 B 115 DK.
70
Pap. Derveni, col. IV.5–10; p.188–191 Bernabé = Heraclit. fr. 56 Leb. For details on our reconstruction and
interpretation of col. IV see [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Papyrus, 2019, p. 532–544].
268 A.V. Lebedev
Pythagoreans, that the earthly life is a dream of the soul, and death is its awakening71.
Nikos Giannadakis put forward an original hypothesis according to which Heracli-
tus’ invectives against the “dreamers” and against the kathartic rites have a concrete ad-
dressee, namely Epimenides of Crete, with his kathartic art and long sleep [Γιανναδάκης,
1989, p. 63–68]. This hypothesis, so boldly presented, did not find many supporters, for
obvious reasons: the name of Epimenides is not mentioned in the surviving fragments
of Heraclitus, and Heraclitus, of course, means by axynetoi (those who fail to under-
stand the divine cosmic logos) not a single person, but the whole non-philosophical
part of humanity and, above all, the poets and myth-makers (Homer and Hesiod). Still,
with some modifications, Giannadakis’ proposal is interesting. Although the name of
Epimenides is not attested in the fragments of Heraclitus, he must have known the leg-
end of Epimenides’ “dream” since it was mentioned (and probably ridiculed) by Xeno-
phanes, with whose poetry Heraclitus was familiar72.
According to the legend that goes back to the proem of his Theogony, Epimenides
communicated with the gods in his prophetic dream and heard a tale about the origin of
the world and the gods. Heraclitus could extrapolate the case of the Eimenidean dream
as the source of mythology for all poets, primarily Homer and Hesiod, who “dreamed
out” the whole anthropomorphic mythology of the Greeks. Of course, Heraclitus did
not consider these poetic dreams to be prophetic, but delusional: he contrasts with the
“many” individual doxastic worlds of the poet-dreamers the “one common” “this cos-
mos” of the philosophers, and with the anthropomorphic polytheism of the “many” he
contrasts the one true god (the cosmic Mind, Γνώμη, τὸ Σοφόν), that alone governs
the whole Universe, as perceived by the awakened mind of the philosopher73. A sim-
ilar theory of the origin of Greek mythology and religion from the dreams of primi-
tive men was advanced by Democritus in his Mikros diakosmos (fr. 472–476 Luria), al-
though according to him, the “apparitions” (eidola) that ancients saw in their dreams
and called “gods”, were not imaginary, but had atomic nature and therefore “real”. They
only mistook those atomic effluences for superhuman beings producing thunder, light-
ning, earthquakes etc.
5. The doctrine of transmigration in Pherecydes of Syros.

Ion of Chios on Pherecydes and Pythagoras’ doctrine
of the afterlife
Epimenides is the earliest and best documented proponent of immortality and

reincarnation doctrines before Pythagoras, but he is not the only one. Another ear-
ly biographical tradition dating back to the Vth century BC presents Pherecydes of
Syros as a teacher of Pythagoras. Pherecydes of Syros, we are told, was the “first” to
71
Heraclit. fr. 77 Leb. (21 DK) with comm.
72
Xenophan, B 20 DK = Diog. Laert. 1.111 Xenophanes heard that Epimenides died at the age of 154.
73
Heraclit. fr. 1–10 Leb., 11–13 Leb., 14–20 Leb., fr. 37 (κόσμον τόνδε), fr. 136–141 Leb.
put forward the doctrine of the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, earlier
even than Pythagoras. Schibli has convincingly argued for the reliability of this tradi-
tion74. It would be preposterous to dismiss this tradition a limine and to suspect that
the doctrines of the disciple were ascribed to the teacher by mistake. It seems likely
that in his Pentemychos Pherecydes spoke of the wandering of souls in the “recess-
es” (μυχοί) of the cosmos, separated by “gates” and passages75. In Pherecydes’ text,
Zeus “throws down” into Tartarus the gods who have sinned and those who have
shed blood (Pherecyd. 83 Schibli = B 5 DK). This is a close parallel to the Orphic-Py-
thagorean myth of the expulsion of souls from the heavenly paradise into the earth-
ly world of suffering as a punishment for precisely this crime.
The association of Pherecydes with Pythagoras and eternal life is attested as early
as the Vth century BC by Ion of Chios. The value of Ion’s epigram for the reconstruc-
tion of the ancient Pythagorean (i.e. original) doctrine of the soul and afterlife has
been often underestimated, so we shall take a closer look at it:
36 B 4 DK = fr.92 Leurini ὣς ὁ μὲν ἠνορέηι τε κεκασμένος ἠδὲ καὶ αἰδοῖ / καὶ φθίμενος
ψυχῆι τερπνὸν ἔχει βίοτον, / εἴπερ Πυθαγόρης ἐτύμως ὁ σοφὸς περὶ πάντων / ἀνθρώπων γνώμας
εἶδε καὶ ἐξέμαθεν.
And so, he (=Pherecydes), adorned by courage and a sense of shame (or “reverence, mod-
esty”), even after death enjoys a pleasant life, if Pythagoras the wise truly surpassed all men in
wise insights and knowledge…
Even after death, Pherecydes continues to live by his psyche, if Pythagoras’ doc-
trine of the immortality of soul and afterlife is true. [Quincey, 1963, p. 146] has rightly
pointed out that ἐτύμως means ‘in accordance with his name’ (συμφώνως τῶι ὀνόματι),
i.e. ‘Speaking as Pythia’. The Pythagorean doctrine alluded to by Ion comprises the fol-
lowing tenets: 1) immortality of the soul, which apparently continues to exist after its
separation from the body; 2) judgment of the dead in the other world; 3) eternal bliss
awarded to the virtuous in a kind of paradise. The last tenet contains invaluable and
often neglected evidence not only on Pythagorean eschatology, but also on Pythago-
rean philosophical ethics and the theory of virtues. ᾽Ηνορέη is a poetic synonym for
the standard ἀνδρεία (‘courage’), and αἰδώς (‘shame, reverence, moderation’) is a metri
gratia poetic substitute for the prosaic σωφροσύνη (‘moderation’ or ‘chastity’). Thus,
Ion ascribes to Pythagoras’ ethics two of the four cardinal virtues in Plato’s Republic IV.
The third of the four, wisdom (σοφία), is attributed in lines 3–4 to Pherecydes’ disciple
Pythagoras, whereas in the version of the epitaph from the historian Douris, quoted by
Diogenes Laertius immediately before Ion, supreme wisdom (σοφίης πάσης τέλος) is
explicitly ascribed to Pherecydes himself. Since Plato himself alludes to the Pythagore-
an source of the canon of the four cardinal virtues by assimilating justice (dikaiosyne)
to harmonia and hygieia, a pre-Platonic, namely Pythagorean origin for the Platonic
doctrine of virtues seems very likely: this Apollonian combination of musical and med-
ical analogies, illuminating the nature of arete and the perfection of psyche, corresponds
74
Pherecyd., test. 2, 7, 11, 20, 21 22, 24–31, 37, 43–51a, 56–57 etc. Schibli.
75
Correctly [Schibli, 1990, p. 104 ff., 129]. Dubitanter [Kalogerakos, 1996, S. 368–372].
270 A.V. Lebedev
precisely to Aristoxenus’ report that the Pythagoreans practiced double katharsis: pu-
rification of the soul by mousike, and of the body by iatrike techne76. As we see, Ion of
Chios ascribes to Pythagoras a strongly moralized version of the post-mortem fate of
the soul, but there is no mention of reincarnation: according to the epigram, the soul
(psyche) of Pherecydes goes directly to paradise after judgment. However, it would be
questionable to infer from this that Pythagoras, in the early tradition, is associated only
with the immortality of the soul and judgement in another world. The text’s emphasis
on a virtuous life as the only prerequisite for eternal bliss seems to imply that those who
do not possess the required virtues of moderation, courage, etc., will be condemned to
some kind of hell and punishment. This punishment may well have been another ex-
pulsion from the celestial paradise and a cycle of reincarnations in the sublunar world
conceived as Hades. The evidence of Ion is therefore not incompatible with the vers-
es by Xenophanes that ascribe to Pythagoras a belief in animal reincarnation: Pythag-
oras’ late friend, whose voice he recognized in the yelp of a puppy, may have indulged
in sensual pleasure and been punished for this with a dog’s life on earth. In Greek pop-
ular morality, and even in the Greek language, “dog-like” (κύντερος etc.) was a syn-
onym for “shameless”, i.e. lacking αἰδώς and σωφροσύνη. For the same reason, there is
no contradiction between the animal reincarnation in Xenophanes’ satire and the hu-
man-only reincarnation in Pythagoras’ “remembered” previous lives: his disciple con-
sidered Pythagoras a semi-divine being, so he could have been be a “son of Hermes” in
his previous lives, but not a fish or plant, like Empedocles. Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.
6. A tentative typology, filiation and chronology of the early

versions of the Tr/Re doctrine
In studying the fragmentary and often uncertain early evidence on the doctrine of re-
incarnation and transmigration of the soul, it is methodologically important to try
to construct a typology of its extant versions, and then attempt to establish their fil-
iation and interconnection. Alberto Bernabé made some important observations on
this topic in his 2016 study “Transfer of Afterlife Knowledge in Pythagorean Escha-
tology”. Bernabé has rightly emphasized the importance of taking into account “pa-
rameters”, distinctive features and different models, both in the general study of af-
terlife doctrines and in the study of different versions of the doctrine of metempsy-
chosis in particular [Bernabé, Transfer of Afterlife Knowledge…, 2016; cf. Bernabé,
L’âme après la mort, 2007]. Bernabé’s contrasting of “ritualistic” and “ethical” vari-
ants of the Tr/Re doctrine is important and needs to be taken into account. However,
our approach to the problems of the origin and typology of the versions of the trans-
migration doctrine differs from that of Bernabé. First, we recognize the existence of
pre-Orphic and pre-Pythagorean versions of the transmigration doctrine (Epimenides
76
Aristoxen. Fr. 26 W. = 58 D 1 DK. Cf. Plato Resp. 443d–e (δικαιοσύνη = ἁρμονία τῆς ψυχῆς) and 444d 13
ἀρετή = ὑγίεια τῆς ψυχῆς.
and Pherecydes). Secondly, we introduce a distinction between animal reincarnation

and elemental transmigration (cosmic circulation), and in so doing take into consid-
eration philosophers like Parmenides and Heraclitus who adopted the latter, but not
the former, doctrine. Thirdly, in attempting to distinguish an “Orphic” model based
on the doctrine of original sin (metempsychosis as punishment and expiation) from
the philosophical Pythagorean model, in which metempsychosis is allegedly just part
of the regular cosmic order and the regeneration of life, Bernabé overstates the differ-
ences between the two. His hypothesis is refuted by the early (Vth-century) evidence
of Ion, who clearly ascribes to Pythagoras nominatim a moralized version of the doc-
trine of afterlife, i.e. involving judgement and reward or punishment, and not a “nat-
uralistic” version involving simple regeneration of life: the eternal bliss of Pherecydes
in paradise, according to Pythagoras’ wisdom, is a reward for his virtuous life. With-
out courage and modesty (ἠνορέη καὶ αἰδώς) Pherecydes would probably have been
condemned to live in the body of a timorous deer or a shameless dog. The difference
between the Pythagorean and Orphic versions is not doctrinal: it concerns only the
form of presentation and the audience. The mythopoetic (Orphic) and the conceptu-
al-philosophical (Pythagorean) versions were intended for two different audiences: the
former for hoi polloi, the latter for the intellectual elite: cf. the division of the Pythago-
reans into akousmatikoi and mathematikoi, which must be ancient and authentic. An
anthropogonic myth like that of the sparagmos of Dionysos by the Titans, presented
in the form of an epic narrative, would be unexpected in a metaphysical doctrine of
the substance dualism of the body and the soul formulated in abstract terms of peras
and apeiron or “the same and the other” (and vice versa), but it expresses in mythi-
cal form the same doctrine of the dual nature of man and the same axiological prima-
cy of the soul over the body. The Pythagorizing systoikhiai of the Olbian bone tablets
align the body (σῶμα) with “death”, “war”, and “lie”, or “illusion” (ψεῦδος), and the soul
with “life”, “peace”, and “truth”. In the Pythagorean Table of Opposites, the heteromekes,
i.e. the geometrical symbol of the ever-changing body, is equated with “evil” (κακόν),
which is in the same column as it (i.e. σύστοιχον), and the tetragonon, i.e. the symbol
of the immortal soul that always preserves its form, is equated with “good” (ἀγαθόν).
The following types and varieties of Tr/Re doctrine can be distinguished.

1. “Orphic” vs. “Pythagorean” source of origin. Both these groups can be distinguished
from pre-Orphic and pre-Pythagorean varieties.
2. Animal reincarnation vs. trans-elemental transmigration or cosmic circulation.
3. Trans-elemental transmigration vs. elemental transmutation of the soul.
4. Possession or lack of the concept of judgement, reward and punishment (hell or par-
adise) in the afterlife. Varieties involving judgement can in turn be sub-divided into
the following:
a). The ritualistic type: reward and bliss are obtained by ritualistic means, askesis,
abstention from certain foods, etc. The dividing line between religious and med-
ical (dietetic) askesis can be blurred. A case in point is the “cosmic medicine”
and katharsis of wet souls in Heraclitus, a prerequisite for becoming a “com-
mensal of gods” in the celestial symposia.
b). The ethical-philosophical type: reward and bliss (apotheosis) are obtained
by extraordinary knowledge, “care of the soul”, and possession of aretai.
272 A.V. Lebedev
The two types may sometimes be combined: the Pythagoreans combined the
medical katharsis of the body with the “musical” katharsis of the soul. Bloodless
religious sacrifices (ἄπυρα) also contributed to personal “purification”.
5. Reincarnation combined or not combined with anamnesis, the memory of previous
lives.
(1) Epimenides and Pherecydes are both pre-Pythagorean and pre-Orphic. The
distinction between “Orphic” and “Pythagorean” can only be formal, given that Py-
thagoras, according to Ion of Chios, composed some poems under the pseudonym
“Orpheus”. Onomacritus, the compiler of the Orphic Theogony, was probably younger
than Pythagoras and outlived him by some 20 years or more; he therefore cannot be
regarded as “pre-Pythagorean”. The belief in “ancient Orphism”, still shared by some
scholars, goes back to a Pythagorean legend similar to the story about Pythagoras’ “ini-
tiation” into the mysteries of Orpheus in Leibethra by Aglaophamus (Iambl. VP 146),
the alleged source of his divine ancient wisdom. Scientific truth is always presented as
the “newest”, and religious wisdom as the “most ancient”. For the Neoplatonists, who in
their battle with Christian apologists turned the Orphic Theogony into a kind of Hel-
lenic Bible, this story was an equivalent of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.
(2) Some early philosophers adhered to a doctrine which may be termed “elemen-
tal transmigration”, i.e. peregrination or transmigration through different cosmic re-
gions and/or elements. Sources for this type of doctrine do not mention reincarna-
tion in animals, human bodies or plants. We have argued elsewhere for the existence
of such a doctrine in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Empedocles seems to combine both:
his psyche-daimon not only changes bodies, but also peregrinates through the elemen-
tal spheres. Epimenides held the “classical” doctrine of reincarnation both in animal
and human form (the lion, Aiakos). The evidence on Pherecydes is uncertain. Metem-
psychosis is mentioned only in the doxography. In the extant sources we hear only of
wandering and the passage of disembodied souls through “gates” and “doors” leading
to different regions, “portions” (moira) or “recesses” (mychoi) of the cosmos (see notes
79–80 above).
(3) The post-mortem adventures of the soul to some extent depend on the type of
metaphysics. In a world based on the substance dualism of the body and the soul, of the
divine and the mortal (as in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition), a free soul, conceived
as a daimon coming from the divine realm and returning to it like Odysseus to Ithake,
preserves its identity intact while passing through different cosmic regions. But in a cos-
mos constructed according to the paradigm of strict naturalistic monism (like that of
Heraclitus and the Stoics), nothing is alien and nothing comes from another world. In
such a world, the soul is conceived not as something totally different, but as an integral
part or phase of a natural cosmic process, like “exhalation” from water (anathymiasis) in
Heraclitus77. Therefore, traveling to another cosmic region (e.g. to heaven) would nec-
essarily be transmutation rather than transit, an immersion into the flux of elemental
change. The “exhalation” is a transitional phase between liquid and fiery states. We rec-
77
Heraclit. Fr. 67 Leb. (cf. B12 DK), 69 Leb. (B36), 69A Leb. (cf. A15 DK).
ognize in our edition two verbatim quotations from Heraclitus preceding and follow-
ing fr. 67b Leb. (B 12 DK): not only the words ψυχαὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ὑγρῶν ἀναθιμιῶνται with
DK (contra Marcovich), but also a neglected quotation ψυχαὶ ἀναθιμιώμεναι νοτεραὶ
(scripsi, νοεραί codd., edd.) ἀεὶ γίνονται (fr. 67a Leb.). The authenticity of this quota-
tion is proved by the poetic/Ionic word νοτεραί (common ὑγραί) and by the syntactic
ambiguity (hyperbaton) that is typical of Heraclitus’ style (list of 9 instances of hyper-
baton in [Лебедев, 2014, с. 48–49]). Put a comma before νοτεραί, and the text reads
“the souls, being evaporated, always become wet”. Put a comma after νοτεραί, and the
text reads “the souls, being evaporated wet, are always (re)born”, i.e. souls which re-
main “wet” (impure) are subject to eternal rebirth, whereas “dry” (purified) souls es-
cape γίνεσθαι and go the divine region of the Sun. By contrast, Parmenides, according
to the invaluable and surprisingly often neglected paraphrase of some lost verses of Par-
menides in Simplicius, spoke of the cosmic circulation of souls between the “visible” and
“invisible” realms: καὶ τὰς ψυχὰς πέμπειν ποτὲ μὲν ἐκ τοῦ ἐμφανοῦς εἰς τὸ ἀειδές, ποτὲ
δὲ ἀνάπαλίν φησιν (“and the goddess sends the souls now from the invisible realm to
the visible, now the other way around”)78. The goddess (Daimon) who governs this cir-
culation of souls “presides over horrible birth and copulation” in fr. B12. She is a demi-
urgos of the sensible world79 and strikingly resembles both Empedocles’ Philotes-Har-
monia and Philolaus’ Harmonia, the “third” principle that brings together Limited and
Unlimited, which correlate with male and female in the Pythagorean Table of Oppo-
sites. It seems likely that all three have a common Pythagorean source. The same demi-
urgos is probably also alluded to in the Pythagorean oath as “the one who put into our
souls Tetraktys”: in Pythagorean language Tetraktys was synonymous with Harmonia.
Note that “birth” could be characterized as “abhorred” (στυγερός) only by a Pythago-
rean or an “Orphic” who considered life on earth as suffering and punishment. This ep-
ithet means more than “abhorred” or “hated”: it alludes to the infernal river Styx, and
eo ipso to the Orphic doctrine of soma-sema and to the Pythagorean doctrine of the
sublunar world as the Netherworld (Diesseits-Hades) that is apparently intended in the
phrase “the abodes of Night”, the earthly region from which Kouros’ ascent to Heav-
ens starts. The “invisible” realm of Simplicius’ paraphrase refers to the aethereal region
behind the “Gates of Day and Night”, the destination of Kouros’ flight in Parmenides’
proem, conceived as the abode of gods and immortal souls before their fall into gene-
sis and incarnation in a mortal body: Aletheia was a Pythagorean mystical name of the
original abode of immortal souls in the Pythagorean tradition, attested both in Par-
menides’ proem and also in Empedocles and Plato. In Empedocles B 121 the “Mead-
ow of Truth” (᾽Αληθείας λειμών) is the celestial paradise, the original abode of disem-
bodied souls. It is opposed to the “Meadow of Doom” (λειμὼν Ἄτης), the earthly region
conceived as Hell. The “plane of Truth” (Ἀληθείας πεδίον) in Plato’s Phaedrus 248b has
the same eschatological meaning; “meadow” is also mentioned in the next line. There
is no need to suppose that Plato knew of this use of Aletheia from Empedocles alone
78
In Phys. 39.21 = 28B13 DK.
79
Μητίσσατο (“devised”) in B 13 is a creationist, not a genealogical term. Metis is one of the names of the
Orphic “first-born” creator god Protogonos-Phanes attested already in Pap. Derv. col. XV.13 and probably in col.
II.7, see [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Papyrus, 2019, p. 521].
274 A.V. Lebedev
(contra Diels-Kranz v. I.374) or from Parmenides alone. All three of them are either Py-
thagoreans or have a Pythagorean background and therefore follow common Pythago-
rean traditions and sources which may well be inaccessible to us. In all likelihood Par-
menides shares with Empedocles the Pythagorean concept of the soul as an immor-
tal divine δαίμων in exile, but in the extant sources (both fragments and doxography)
there is no trace of animal reincarnation.
We propose the following chronology (in descending order) of instances of the
Greek doctrines of immortality and transmigration of the soul in the VII–V centu-
ries BC.
(1) The Theogony of Epimenides of Crete: second half of or late VIIth century BC. 2)
The Pentemychos of Pherecydes of Syros: first half of the VIth century BC. 3) Pythagoras
of Samos: last third of the VIth century BC (after 532 BC). 4) The Orphic Theogony com-
piled by Onomacritus: late sixth or early Vth century BC. 5) Heraclitus: c. 490 BC. 6) Par-
menides of Elea: c. 480 BC. 7) Empedocles’ Katharmoi: mid-Vth century BC. 8) Philo-
laus of Croton: second half of the Vth century BC. 9) Ion of Chios: late Vth century BC.
It is not feasible to use these instances to construct a stemma indicating a single
“original” source or archetype, since some philosophical versions were innovative and
later versions may have drawn on several preceding versions. The scarcity of the extant
evidence does not allow us to establish the dependence of Pherecydes on Epimenides.
We may be more confident in admitting the dependence of Pythagoras on both of them,
especially on Epimenides, and of Onomacritus on Pythagoras: the myth of the sparag-
mos of Dionysos and the anthropogony of the Orphic theogony seem to be a mythopo-
etic transposition of the conceptual substance dualism of the body and the soul in Py-
thagorean metaphysics, i.e. in the systoikhiai ascribed by Aristotle to Pythagoras nomi-
natim. Parmenides (sic), Empedocles and Philolaus were all Pythagoreans or had a Py-
thagorean background. Heraclitus was influenced by Pythagoras, but also invented his
own quasi-naturalistic and anti-Pythagorean version of transmigration. After Pythag-
oras and Onomacritus the two traditions, philosophical and ritualistic-mythopoetic,
went their separate ways until they were reunited by the Neoplatonists.
7. A hypothesis of the common “Aegean substrate” of the

archaic versions of the Tr/Re doctrine: Epimenides
(Crete), Pherecydes (Syros) and Pythagoras (Delos).
The Cycladic FAF figurines as possible archeological
evidence for the Bronze Age Aegean roots of the Tr/Re
doctrine
The two earliest versions are attested in the Cyclades (Syros) and Crete, i.e. in the
Aegean region. Islands often preserve archaic features and cultural traditions that long
ago changed or vanished on the mainland. Syros is one the main locations of finds of
the so-called Cycladic “idols” dating from c. 3000 to 1900 BC. Most of these figurines
of polished marble are so-called FAFs, female folded-arm figurines in a reclining posi-
tion (disputed by some), with a marked pubic region, some of them “pregnant”. Their
purpose and meaning have been variously interpreted by archeologists, art historians
and historians of Greek religion as a fertility symbol of the “mother goddess”, as an ana-
logue of Egyptian ushabti, as cherished toys of the deceased, etc.80. In our opinion, their
purpose was practical rather than symbolic: they were a kind of “magic dolls”, or rebirth
machines. The function of these magic dolls was to provide the soul of the deceased
with a real new body, i.e. to reincarnate it in this world: that is why the pubic region of
the FAFs is marked81. Of special interest for our purpose are three Cycladic FAFs of the
“mother and daughter” type: they represent a birth scene showing a mother giving birth
to a “daughter”, an exact small copy of herself rising from her head82 (see figure 2 , in-
set). It is not immediately clear whether the small figurine represents a soul in the pro-
cess of rebirth, or a new body for the soul of the deceased, but this “exact reproduction”,
which preserves the identity of the mother in the daughter, in any case points to a regen-
eration, a new life. Let us not forget that metempsychosis and metensomatosis are late
terms; in early tradition reincarnation is referred to as πάλιν γίνεσθαι, παλιγγενεσία,
ἀναβιόω and the like, i.e. as a new birth. Both Epimenides and Pherecydes were high-
ly respected religious experts of their time; they may have been familiar with the rem-
nants of this ancient creed preserved in local Aegean lore. We foresee an obvious ob-
jection to this hypothesis: a skeptic might point to the 1200-year gap between the dis-
appearance of the last Cycladic FAFs and the first attestation of the reincarnation doc-
trine in the VIIth century BC. This objection can be met with two counter-objections.
First, for a religious belief a period of 12 centuries is not a very long time. Just one
example of the persistence of a funerary custom in Greece indicated by Yannis Tzifopou-
los [Tzifopoulos, 2011, p. 167–158]: “The custom of covering the mouth or the whole
face of the diceased did not start with the incised lamellae, nor did it end in late antiquity.
The epistomia date from the end of 5000 BCE until the second and third centuries CE”.
Second, written records from before the VIIth century are virtually non-existent.
Therefore, the very fact that we encounter two adherents of the reincarnation/transmi-
gration doctrine at the dawn of Greek written history actually supports rather than con-
tradicts our hypothesis. As early as 500 BC or so, Xenophanes ridiculed it in his Silloi as
an old-fashioned superstition (B7 DK), while in the IVth century Aristotle dismissed it
with an ironic smile as “Pythagorean myths” (De an. 407b22). Besides Syros and Crete,
there is a third Aegean island, Delos, that merits consideration. Delos appears as an
important religious center comparable with Delphi and a kind of source of divine wis-
dom in the biographies of both Pherecydes and Pythagoras83, Pythagoras visits Delos
to see his teacher Pherecydes, who is suffering from a fatal disease. According to Dio-
80
For a survey of views see [Tzonou-Herbst, 2010, p. 210–222], [Renfrew, 2011, p. 421–426]; for new
discoveries see [Marthari, Renfrew, Boyd, 2017].
81
An alternative interpretation would be what Georgia Petridou [Petridou, 2020] termed “mimetic rebirth”
or “adoption by Persephone” in the gold leaves from Thurii and Thessaly. The connection of Locrian Persephone
with childbirth and marriage is emphasized by Eisenfeld [Eisenfeld, 2016].
82
[Getz-Gentle, 2001, plates 19 and 26]. The best, in terms of both artistry and preservation, is the two-figure
composition on plate 19 (EC I/II). We do not deny that “magic dolls” represent a kind of Persephone. Symbols of
death (folded arms) and regeneration (pregnancy) combine two functions of the Goddess. For Neolithic parallels
see chapter 5 “The womb and the tomb” in [Gimbutas, 2001].
83
Aristoxenus fr. ap. Diog. Laert. 8.118; Diod. Sic. 10.3.4 = DK 7 A 4.
276 A.V. Lebedev
genes Laertius, Pythagoras refused to sacrifice in Delos on any but the oldest altar, that
of Apollo the Progenitor (Γενέτωρ), where only apyra, i.e. bloodless sacrifices like flour,
meal and cakes, were allowed84. Bloodless sacrifices are inextricably linked with the gen-
eral Pythagorean prohibition of bloodshed, which in turn is based on the doctrine of
metempsychosis and the universal kinship of all living beings. Another local tradition
that links Pythagoras with Delos is the temple legend of the Hyperborean Apollo and
the cult of the Hyperborean virgins. According to Aristotle’s lost work on the Pythag-
oreans, the Crotonians used to call Pythagoras “Apollo Hyperboreios”85, the Pythago-
rean legend makes the wonder-maker Abaris the Hyperborean his friend, etc. We have
argued elsewhere that the Kouros of Parmenides’ proem is a poetic image of Pythago-
ras modelled on the Hyperborean Apollo, flying to the celestial Gates, entering Olym-
pus and becoming an immortal god [Lebedev, Parmenides the Pythagorean, 2017]. We
have seen above that the fourth archaic exponent of the Tr/Re doctrine, Onomacritus,
the compiler of the Orphic Theogony, was “trained in divinatory art” in Crete. In other
words, all four of the earliest proponents of the doctrine of the transmigrating immor-
tal soul in the VII–VI centuries BC (Epimenides, Pherecydes, Pythagoras and Onomac-
ritus) are connected with the Cyclades and Crete, i.e. with the Aegean region. Even if
we set aside for a moment the hypothesis of the Bronze Age roots of the doctrine as re-
quiring further evidence of unbroken continuation, the Aegean still remains the earli-
est documented site of its original dissemination. But does the “Hyperborean” complex
that we cite in support of its Aegean origins not lend some support to the “Northern”
hypothesis? No, it does not. To begin with, this complex is exclusively Pythagorean, not
“Orphic”, since the savior god of the Orphics is Dionysus, not Apollo. The temple leg-
end of a flying god, the Hyperborean Apollo, is a Greek legend, not a legend of the “Hy-
perboreans”, and if it points to some geographical site of its own origin, this site is the
island of Delos and, conceivably, Delphi as well. The origins of its Pythagorean adapta-
tion, however, lie in the city of Croton, and its most likely author is Pythagoras, the son
of Mnesarchus himself. The “North” of this legend is a mythopoetic North, not a geo-
graphical North86. Those who think otherwise commit the same mistake as those histo-
rians of Greek religion who took seriously the myth of the northern “Thracian” origin
of Dionysus, a myth that was dispelled by the decipherment of Linear B. We know from
Pindar’s Olympian 2 that in the early Vth century, in an Orphic-Pythagorean milieu, the
fabulous land of the Hyperboreans had already fused with the epic Isles of the Blessed
and acquired an eschatological meaning. The Pythagorean theory of astral immortality
transposed the “Isles of the Blessed” to the heavens. A Pythagorean akousma, answer-
ing the question “What are the Isles of the Blessed?”, says: “The Sun and the Moon”87.
The earlier versions of the Tr/Re doctrine, those of Epimenides and Pherecydes,
are separated from the later “Orphic” and Pythagorean versions by an invisible divid-
ing line: the scientific revolution of around the mid sixth century BC in Miletus, which
84
Diog. Laert. 8.13. Diogenes quotes an excellent source for this information, Aristotle’s Politeia of Delians,
fr. 497, 1 Gigon.
85
Arist. fr. 173 G. = Ael. Var. Hist. II.126; cf. fr. 156.
86
For the history of the “idea of North” see Peter Davidson, who states in his preface: “Everyone carries their
own idea of north within them” [Davidson, 2005].
87
Iambl. VP 82 = DK I.464.6: τί ἐστιν αἱ μακάρων νῆσοι; ἥλιος καὶ σελήνη.
gave birth to rational theoretical thought and naturalistic world-view. The theogonies
of Epimenides and Pherecydes, as well as their views on the transmigrating soul, belong
entirely to the pre-scientific age. The Pythagoreans (long before Plato) replaced mytho-
poetic theogony with creation by divine mind-demiurges; their doctrine of the immor-
tal soul is based not just on revelation and mystical experience (though both may have
played an important role), but on the new theoretical metaphysics of the substance du-
alism of body and soul (peras and apeiron), which employs a highly sophisticated con-
ceptual apparatus and is supported by quasi-mathematical “demonstrations”, like the
thought experiment involving “superimposition of gnomons”88, “empirical” tekmeria
such as the apparition of the ghosts of the deceased in dreams89, and cases of “resurrec-
tion” of the “breathless”90. The case of the Theogony of “Orpheus” (read “Onomacritus”)
is a kind of hybrid. On the one hand, it looks like (and formally is) a mythopoetic theog-
ony involving anthropomorphic gods, incorporating a whole section from Hesiod, ig-
noring the Ionian concept of physis and with no trace of theoretical thought or rational
explanation. On the other hand, it radically transforms the traditional epic theogony by
introducing, in mythopoetic form, precisely the same two doctrines that the Pythagore-
ans introduced in a conceptual philosophical form. The compiler of the Orphic Theog-
ony replaces Hesiod’s genealogical model with creation by the divine mind (Metis) and
inserts into his anthropogony the sparagmos episode, which is an obvious mythopoetic
transposition or “transcription” of the fundamental Pythagorean metaphysical doctrine
of the substance dualism of the “evil” mortal body and the “good” immortal soul. Schol-
ars who still believe in an “ancient”, i.e. pre-Pythagorean, “Orphism” will probably dis-
agree with us and insist that the relation between the Orphic Theogony and Pythagore-
an metaphysics is exactly the reverse: that the Pythagoreans conceptualized the ancient
myth rather than the Orphics mythologized the new philosophical doctrine. Howev-
er, this is unlikely for several reasons. To begin with, the myth of the sparagmos of Dio-
nysus was not ancient: it was invented together with the Orphic theogony, i.e. not ear-
lier than the late VIth century, when Pythagorean metaphysical dualism already exist-
ed91. There is historical evidence on early Pythagoreans (including Pythagoras himself)
as the real authors of works published under the name “Orpheus” [Burkert, 1972, 128
ff. and note 54 above]. Their reason for doing so is clear: they wished to invest the ideas
88
Arist. Phys. 203a 1 ff. DK 58 B 28.
89
Stob. I.49.59 = Porphyr. fr. 381 Smith: ἡ δὲ τῆς ψυχῆς διαμονὴ καὶ ἀϊδιότης ἐν τοῖς μάλιστα τῶν Πυθαγόρου
δογμάτων γνώριμόν ἐστι πᾶσι καὶ περβόητον, ὅνγε πρὸς τὸν εἰπόντα δόξαι κατὰ τοὺς ὕπνους ἰδεῖν τεθνεῶτα τὸν
πατέρα φασὶν εἰπεῖν ‘οὐκ ἔδοξας, ἀλλ᾽εἶδες (“The eternity of the soul and its (temporal) sojourn in the body is one
of the most widely known and famous doctrines of Pythagoras: when someone, they say, told him that it seemed
to him that he saw his deceased father in his dreams, Pythagoras replied: “It didn’t seem so to you; you (really) saw
him!”). This unique and remarkable report is transmitted in Stobaeus with the lemma Προφυρίου, but the language
is not Neoplatonic, so Bernard, Jones and Sandbach (quoted by Smith ad loc.) with good reason attributed this ex-
cerpt to Plutarch or regarded it as Porphyrius quoting Plutarch. Plutarch, in his turn, who was a bibliophile and
possessed some very rare ancient books (like Anaximenes of Miletus), may have found it in some ancient IVth-cen-
tury source. In the case of Epimenides, the belief in immortality and the reincarnation of the soul is also inextrica-
bly linked with the prophetic power of dreams.
90
For the story of the apnous woman who was breathless for 30 days and resurrected from the dead, see Hera-
clides Ponticus ap. Diog. Laert. 8.60–61; Heraclid. Fr. 77, 80 Wehrli; cf. Diog. Laert. 8.67 = Heraclid. Fr. 83 W.
91
This is certain, since Aristotle takes for granted the existence of the Table of Opposites “when Pythago-
ras was an old man”, i.e. circa 500 BC.
278 A.V. Lebedev
of Pythagoras with an aura of “ancient wisdom”. Orpheus was an ancient mantis, so his
“Theogony” was presented as the “word of god”, and since he was contemporary with
the Argonauts, his theogony was more ancient and more authoritative than the “lies”
of Homer and Hesiod. These claims were dismissed as fraudulent as early as Herodo-
tus: in his words, customs that claim to be “Orphic and Bacchic”, like the prohibition
against burying the dead in woolen garments, in fact are “Egyptian and Pythagorean”,
i.e. were brought by Pythagoras from Egypt and ascribed to Orpheus92. The idea of the
body as a source of evil and of the original sin of all humans has no roots in Greek re-
ligion or epic tradition and is utterly un-Hellenic or was so until the emergence of the
Orphic-Pythagorean doctrine of the soul and radical body/soul dualism in late VIth cen-
tury BC. The traditional Greek idea of inherited guilt was inextricably linked to the fate
of some aristocratic families, but never to the fate of all Greeks or the whole of human
race93. It is also incompatible with the new Ionian concept of physis and its ethical out-
shoot, the idea of the self-determination of man: “Man’s character is his daimon” (Her-
aclitus, fr. 96L/B119). The idea of original sin implies and requires the existence of some
kind of Devil, a cosmic power of evil, capable to corrupt the beautiful creation of god,
but there was no Satan in Greek mythology. The dualism of being and of human nature,
which was the metaphysical foundation of the doctrine of original sin, must have been
inspired by some form of oriental religious dualism, primarily Iranian and Egyptian (as
interpreted by the Greeks). This fits neatly with the biographical tradition that insists
on Pythagoras’ connections with Persian magi, Egyptian priests, etc. Onomacritus, in
turn, served as a diviner at the court of Xerxes along with genuine Iranian magoi and
had the opportunity to learn more about Zoroastrianism than most Greeks of his time.
In his criticism of those who doubt the authenticity of the anthropogonic interpre-
tation of the Orphic sparagmos myth in Olympiodorus and dismiss it as a “late inven-
tion” (although already Plato in Laws 701c2 speaks of τῆν λεγομένην παλαιὰν Τιτανικὴν
φύσιν), Burkert [Burkert, 1992, p. 126] with good reason points to the “rudiments of du-
alistic anthropology” in Enuma Elish and Atrahasis attested a thousand years before Ho-
mer. Striking parallels between the Orphic-Bacchic Gold leaves and the Egyptian Book
of the dead have been recognized by many scholars (see, e.g., [Лурье, 1963; Zuntz, 1971,
p. 392–393] with reservations; [Bernabé, Jiménez, 2008, p. 207–208]; and especially the
detailed study of Dousa in [Edmonds, 2011, ch. 6]. Herodotus (2.81) explicitly states that
“the so called Orphic and Bacchic observances” are in fact “Aegyptian and Pythagorean”.
Herodotus is in full agreement with the more ancient evidence of Heraclitus who ac-
cuses Pythagoras of plagiarizing the “writings” (συγγραφαί) of the Egyptian god Taau-
tos-Thoth, i.e. the Egyptian Book of the dead. In our edition of Heraclitus we argue that
in its original form the fragment 22Leb/B129 DK must have read like this: Πυθαγόρης
Μνησάρχου ἱστορίην ἀνθρώπων ἤσκησεν μάλιστα πάντων καὶ, ἐπιλεξάμενος Τααύτου
τὰς συγγραφὰς, ἐποιήσατο ἑωυτοῦ σοφίην πολυμαθίην, κακοτεχνίην (“Pythagoras, the
92
Herod. 2.81 longer version, cf. note 60 above.
93
[Gagné, 2013, p. 453–460] offers an interesting discussion of this topic in his “Ancestral fault in An-
cient Greece”. However, his attempt to deny the connection of Orphic initiations in Plato’s Republic 364e and of the
sparagmos myth in Orphic theogony with the idea of original sin is unconvincing. The evidence of the Olbian bone
plates as interpreted above, provides additional support to Bernabé’s comprehensive criticism of Edmunds’ views
on which Gagné’s thesis is based.
son of Mnesarchus, engaged in learned enquiries beyond all other men and, having read
the writings of Taautos, claimed as his own wisdom what was [in fact just] much learn-
ing and fraud”) [Лебедев, 2014, с. 152 with commentary с. 288–291].
Τάαυτος is one of the variants of the name of the Egyptian god Thoth (Θεύθ, Τάτ,
Θαύθ, Θώθ etc.), attested by Philo of Byblos in his translation of the Sanchoniathon’s cos-
mogony (fr. 4 J.). The misreading of unintelligible for ordinary scribe and extremely rare
form ΤΑΑΥΤΟΥ as a form of the familiar pronouns οὗτος αὕτη τοῦτο or αὐτός is not
only likely, it is attested three times in the MSS. tradition of Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evan-
gelica I.9 with excerpts from the Phoenician archaiologia of Philo of Byblos that men-
tion ΤΑΑΥΤΟΣ: PE v. I, p. 41, 1 Mras, τὰ Τααύτου BONV ταῦτα αὐτοῦ Α; v.I, p.43, 21.
TAAYTOY BONV τὰ αὐτοῦ AH; v. I. p. 50, 3 Τάαυτος ONV ταῦθ᾽ὅς A. In 8 other cas-
es Τάαυτος is corrupted as Ταυθός (see Mras, index nominum, s.v. T.). The loss of as-
piration in this form can be explained by the psilosis in the Ionian dialect (cf. [Rusch,
1936, S. 351], 40–42). The standard Greek verb for reading ἀναγιγνώσκω is never used
in this sense in early Ionian prose: in Herodotus it means only ‘to persuade’ or ‘to rec-
ognize’ (Powell, Lex. Herod., 21). The word that is regularly used for ‘reading’ in Hero-
dotus is ἐπιλέγομαι, Powell sites 11 instances (Lex. Herod. s.v., 4). In later prose such us-
age became virtually extinct, there are only few instances in Pausanias and one in Long-
inus (cited below). The misreading of the uncommon verb for reading ἐπιλεξάμενος as
a more trivial ἐκλεξάμενος is anything but surprising.
In this invective Heraclitus most probably makes a critical reappraisal of the orig-
inal “pious” Pythagorean legend, one of the miraculous stories about Pythagoras’ trav-
els and coming in contact with the wisest priests in the world. Just as Pythagoras “de-
scended” with Epimenides into the Idaean cave in Crete (Diog. Laert. 8.3) and was ini-
tiated into the mysteries of Idaean Zeus and Zagreus (presented in Euripides as “Or-
phic”), so he also “descended” into Egyptian secret “shrines” (ἄδυτα) and learned the
divine wisdom from the “ancient stelae of Hermes”, i.e. of Taautos-Thoth. This Pythag-
orean story was known to later Platonists: Iambl. De mysteriis 1.1: Φιλόσοφον δ᾽εἴ τι
προβάλλεις ἐρώτημα, διακρινοῦμέν σοι καὶ τοῦτο κατὰ τὰς Ἑρμοῦ παλαιὰς στήλας, ἃς
Πλάτων ἤδη πρόσθεν καὶ Πυθαγόρας διαναγνόντες φιλοσοφίαν συνεστήσαντο (“And
if you set any philosophical question, we will explicate it to you following the ancient
stelae of Hermes, which Plato and Pythagoras have read long before, and constructed
[on the basis of them] philosophy”). Cf. Philo of Byblos, fr.4 J. πάντες δὲ τὰς ἀφορμὰς
παρὰ τοῦ Τααύτου λαβόντες ἐφυσιολόγησαν (“all those who engaged in the study of
nature, took the stariting points from Taautos”).
Plato alludes to this legend in the Philebus 18b: the god Theuth invents the alpha-
bet and writing relying on the Pythagorean metaphysics of the limit and the unlimit-
ed (πέρας και ἄπειρον), while the “Prometheus” who brought this doctrine as a divine
gift to humanity (16c7) can only be the theios aner Pythagoras. ([Horky, 2013, p. 223]
Horky thinks of Vth and IVth century “mathematical Pythagoreans”, but Plato cannot re-
fer to Philolaus and Archytas as “ancients”, while Hippasus was ambiguous figure in the
Pythagorean school. These “descents” of Pythagoras into inaccessible to others arcane
sources of superhuman wisdom resemble his greatest marvel, the katabasis into Hades
followed by a no less miraculous return, i.e. resurrection from the dead. Pythagoras’ ka-
tabasis was admired and hailed by his disciples and followers, but it was ridiculed and
280 A.V. Lebedev
satirized by his critics: the version of Hermippus in Diog. Laert. 8.41 turns the pious
story into comedy about doctus alazon and may derive from a lost comedy, cf. a sim-
ilar plot with a diasyrmos of Pythagorean theology in Epicharmus [Lebedev, Epichar-
mus on god as mind…, 2017, p. 17 ff.]. In Hermippus Pythagoras not only dupes his
fellow-citizens into believing that he has just arrived from Hades (φάσκειν ὡς ἀφῖκται
ἐξ ἅιδου), but as a shrewd trickster he eventually manages to get into his disposal their
wives. He achieves all this by fraud, i.e. by κακοτεχνίa (a legal term for false testimony),
by “reading” in ecclesia (ἀναγινώσκειν αὐτοῖς τὰ συμβεβηκότα) from falsified “tablets”
(δέλτους) about the events in Croton during his absence in Hades with precise dates
“recorded” (σημειουμένην) and lowered to him by an accomplice, his “mother”. In this
parody the Egyptian “shrine” turns into an underground chamber (οἰκίσκος) dug by the
trickster himself, while the ancient stelae into “tablets”: note that the word δέλτοι could
be equally applied both to the Roman XII Tabulae and to the “cards” of a fortune-teller
like those of Pharnabazos (syn. ἀγυρτικοὶ πίνακες). The plates that we call “gold leaves”
could also be called πινάκια or δέλτοι. Reading falsified evidence from “tablets” looks
like a parody of “reading the ancient stelae” of Hermes-Thoth. According to Timaeus of
Tauromenium, one of the best local ancient sources on Pythagoras and his school, the
house of Pythagoras after his death became a shrine of Demeter (FGrHits 556 F 131).
The Δημήτριον in Vth century Olbia besides Demeter accommodated also the cults of
Persephone and Iakkhos, aka Dionysos Orphikos.
The results of our investigation provide additional support to the opinion of Zu-
ntz that the poet who composed the original verses, from which the quotations in gold
leaves derive, may have been most likely Pythagoras. At the same time these results also
show that Zuntz was overcautious when he doubted that at least one of the sources of the
gold leaves was the Egyptian book of the dead (this also applies to the helpful, but inde-
cisive study of [Dousa, 2011]). “Egyptian or Pythagorean?” is a false alternative when
it comes to the sources of the gold leaves, because Pythagoras was the middleman be-
tween the Egyptian doctrine of afterlife and the eschatology of the gold leaves. This is
more than conjecture, because it is supported not only by the parallels themselves, but
also by the external early evidence, the consensus of Herodotus and Heraclitus, which
in turn, is in full agreement with the third Vth century evidence, the report of Ion of Chi-
os that Pythagoras “wrote some poems” and attributed them to Orpheus. In this con-
text Antiphon’s testimony that Pythagoras learnt Egyptian (ἐξέμαθε τὴν φωνὴν αὐτῶν
ap. Diog. Laert. 8.3) looks plausible, cf. Heraclitus’ πολυμαθίη.
It is widely known and commonly recognized that dualism is a peculiar feature of
Iranian religion in ancient and medieval times [Gnoli, 1996]. It is well known to Egyp-
tologists that duality is a characteristic feature of the Egyptian mindset [Servajean, no
date]. This Oriental religious, metaphysical and spiritual dualism should not be con-
fused with polarity in early Greek “natural history” [Lloyd, 1966], since the opposites
in the former are axiologically marked as positive vs. negative, while in the latter they
are axiologically neutral and descriptive (e.g. hot and cold, wet and dry etc). This differ-
ence is as significant as that between religion (or morality) and science. The metaphys-
ical hierarchical-axiological dualism is unknown to Ionian physics, but it is the foun-
dation of the Pythagorean table of opposites which Aristotle in book Alpha of Meta-
physics ascribes to Pythagoras nominatim. So even if we for a moment leave aside the
impressive biographical tradition on Pythagoras’ travels to Near East and contacts with
Oriental wise men, this fact alone proves the existence of Oriental “genes” in the West-
ern Greek speculative metaphysics and doctrine of the soul.
History gives us many examples of wars resulting in cultural and linguistic con-
tacts between warring peoples. Knowledge of the Persian language, or at least of Persian
words and names, was much more common at the time of the Persian wars than it was
before. For a fascinating study of Sprachkrieg in Greek poets who fought against Persians,
see the work of Nina Braginskaya and Andrei Koval’ [Брагинская, Коваль, 2008]94.
In both its Pythagorean and its “Orphic” versions, reincarnation is considered
a punishment; the goal of a believer’s life is to escape from the “horrible” cycle, etc. How-
ever, there may have existed different, less pessimistic views of changing bodies. Neither
in the extant fragments nor in doxographical reports is there any hint that Epimenides
regarded his previous lives as a horror and punishment: he simply remembered that
he was descended from beautiful-haired Selene, that he once inhabited the body of the
Nemean lion, that after Heracles liberated his soul from the lion’s body he was first born
as glorious Aiakos, etc. This is a wonderful story about a wonderful world. Epimenides
seems to be happy with his previous lives and with his present condition. He does not
lament, like Empedocles, the “cursed” day on which he was born on the island of Crete
to become a famous healer, soothsayer, poet and a priest of the Idaean Zeus. Another
important distinction of Epimenides’ theogony from the Orphic theogony is that it ig-
nores the sparagmos myth and does not regard the Titans as a source of evil. This fact
alone confirms the reliability of the testimony of Pausanias that it was Onomacritus who
“took the name of Titans from Homer” and invented the sparagmos myth modelled on
the Egyptian myth of the dismemberment of Osiris with Titans playing the role of Seth
and Demeter the role of Isis. It is therefore conceivable that in some cases a reincarna-
tion doctrine could be an alternative model for constructing the afterlife based on a sin-
gle-world ontology and opposed to a dualist ontology of “this” and “the other” world.
Theoretically speaking, if the souls of the dead can be accommodated in this world, sim-
ply changing bodies, there is no need for a special distinct realm of the dead like the tra-
ditional Greek Hades or the Egyptian Duat. In a remarkable study titled Death, Wom-
en and the Sun [Goodison, 1989], Lucy Goodison emphasized the importance of solar
and sea symbolism in early Minoan religion and connected it with women and repro-
ductive processes in nature. The transition from this early egalitarian feminine symbol-
ism to a later hierarchical male-dominated world-view, according to Goodison, reflect-
ed analogous social changes and the replacement of a female by a male vegetation god.
The pattern of change in Minoan religious symbolism from the Early Minoan to the Iron
Age over the course of two millennia, as established by Goodison through her analysis
of archeological iconographical data, is surprisingly similar to the transition from the
original “Aegean” version of the Tr/Re doctrine in Epimenides to the late VIth-century
Orphic-Pythagorean version established on independent grounds (i.e. unrelated with
feminist approach) in our analysis of the literary evidence. In the Pythagorean Table of
Opposites the “limited” (peras) is systoikhon, i.e. corresponds to, the “good” and “male”,
94
There is reason to believe that Democritus knew ancient Persian and the Avestan language: fragment 520
Luria looks like a translation of Yasht I.12 [Lebedev, 2020].
282 A.V. Lebedev
whereas the “unlimited” (apeiron) corresponds to the “evil” and “female”. By subordi-
nating the “unlimited” to the “limited”, Pythagoreans subordinated the “female” to the
“male” and the body to the soul95. The Orphic-Pythagorean version looks like a syncre-
tistic integration of both types into a single model in which life on earth, and the incar-
nate state as such, became a punishment. Punishment involves crime (perjury and can-
nibalism), and crime is punished by the judgement that restores justice and condemns
the sinful soul to exile and suffering within an “allotted” term. “Orphic” abstinence and
Pythagorean katharsis by a virtuous life, music and mathematics bring salvation through
expiation. All the elements of this legalistic conceptual framework, apparently invented
to underpin a puritanical ideology and anti-individualist, anti-hedonistic ethics of re-
pentance and self-restraint (sophronein), stand or fall together, but they certainly need
not be connected to reincarnation. There are well-known later religions of salvation that
employ the same legalistic framework, but reject reincarnation as something unneces-
sary and even alien to them. Pausanias’ explanation of the Orphic sparagmos myth as
Onomacritus’ reworking (Interpretatio Graeca) of the Egyptian myth of the dismember-
ment and resurrection of Osiris is quite plausible. The “Dionysos Orphikos” mentioned
in an Olbian bone tablet (i.e. Dionysos of the Orphic theogony, the son of Persephone)
is a chthonian god of the dead in the Underworld, to whom one should pray on the 30th
day of the month. He has nothing to do with the traditional Greek Dionysos, the son of
Semele, the god of vegetation, sexuality and ecstatic joy of life. The chances are that Pau-
sanias’ report is not based on his own guess, but relies on more ancient (Vth- or IVth-cen-
tury) evidence provided by one of the old sceptics, who, like Herodotus, Prodicus (the
Derveni papyrus) and Aristotle, regarded the Orphic Theogony as a fake composed by
Onomacritus and possessed more detailed information on the history of this fabrica-
tion. There is an impressive consensus between three quite independent sources in the
early tradition on Pythagoras (Heraclitus, Herodotus, Isocrates) that explicitly point to
Egypt as the source of his wisdom. We may conclude that the Greek Orphic-Pythagore-
an doctrine of the transmigration of the immortal soul (psyche) was created by Pythag-
oras of Samos in Magna Graecia in the last third of the VIth century BC from two main
building blocks: the ancient Aegean belief in reincarnation (expounded in Epimenides’
Theogony and possibly in Pherecydes), reinterpreted as punishment, and the Egyptian
doctrine of osirification in a blessed afterlife. This conclusion goes against the hypothe-
sis of Indian import supported, among others, by Burkert and Kahn: the similarities be-
tween the moralized Orphic-Pythagorean version and the Indian karma doctrine should
rather be viewed as a parallel development from a common Indo-European heritage.
Somewhat later Onomacritus, who may have been Pythagorean himself, produced an
“acousmatic” version of Pythagoras’ doctrine in the form of an allegedly ancient mytho-
poetic theogony under the name “Orpheus”. Where, when and in what circumstances?
Probably in Athens before his exile sometime during the rule of Hipparchus (527–514
BC), when he was a court diviner of the Peisistratids and an influential figure in the re-
ligious affairs of the Athenian polis. The relation of this cult to the Eleusinian mysteries
95
If Goodison’s hypothesis of the original Minoan Sun-goddess is justified, could the Cycladic reclining
pregnant FAF be a representation of a solar goddess giving birth and regenerating the deceased? I simply pose the
question; I cannot answer it.
remains unclear; it may have been somehow connected with the Eleusinian cult of Iak-
khos/Bakkhos, Demeter and Persephone [Graf, 1974]96. We are also not in a position
to know how much of Onomacritus’ epos was original, and how much he took from
pre-existing “Orphic” poems from Magna Graecia and Sicily.
8. A brief reception history of the Tr/Re doctrine

in Vth- and IVth-century Athens
We will conclude with a brief sketch of the vicissitudes of the history of “Orphism”
and the doctrine of transmigration in Athens in the Vth and IVth centuries. What im-
mediately strikes us is the silence of all possible sources on the mystery cult instituted
by Onomacritus in the late VIth century in Athens, on Orphic communities or on indi-
vidual Orphics or Orpheotelestai, as well as on Orphic ideas, poems or ways of life in
Athens for at least half a century and conceivably even more. References to the mythi-
cal singer Orpheus do not count; nor can the “Orphic” passages in Pindar and Bac-
chylides be used as evidence for Athenian Orphism, as they may have been inspired by
Western sources. Then, suddenly, we have an explosion of relevant texts from the late
thirties and early twenties, i.e. roughly from the outbreak of Peloponnesian war: Eurip-
ides’ Cretans (431?) and Hippolytus (428), the Egyptian logos of Herodotus (circa 425),
Ion of Chios (died c. 421), and the Derveni papyrus, which we date to after Anaxago-
ras’ death (428) and connect with Sophistic circles (Prodicus) and the psephisma of Di-
opeithes (432 or 430 BC) in Athens. It is equally significant that four of these five ear-
ly instances are critical and anti-Orphic (Euripides, Herodotus and the Derveni au-
thor), while the fourth (Ion) is skeptical about the antiquity of Orpheus’ poems, ascrib-
ing them to Pythagoras97. How to explain this long silence and explosion of invectives
against Orphism? Here is our guess. After the great victories over Xerxes in 480–479
BC Onomacritus, who according to Herodotus (probably sharing the opinion of many
Athenians) incited Xerxes to invade Greece by his falsification of oracles, became an
ominous figure in Athens: he must have been considered a traitor and collaboration-
ist, and the Orphic sect founded by him probably fell into disrepute, may have been
prosecuted, and was either disbanded or went underground. The ensuing Pentekontae-
tia essentially coincides with the Vth-century Sophistic Enlightenment whose intellec-
tual leaders, Anaxagoras and Protagoras, brought to Athens a new naturalistic Ionian
worldview and humanism that was incompatible with Orphic-Pythagorean creation-
ism and puritanism, with the anti-humanist doctrine of original sin, etc. But after the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian war and the ensuing plague and hardships of war, a new
wave of witch-hunts for “impious” culprits, instigated by the psephisma of Diopeithes
as early as 432 or 430 BC, swept through Athens. Religious conservatives revived the
extinct Orphic orgia on the basis of the “ancient” “holy words” of Orpheus, which de-
96
Pace Lobeck’s Aglaophamus.
97
At this time, there is evidence of positive reception only from Pythagorean circles: the Olbian bone tablets
and possibly Philolaus B 14.
284 A.V. Lebedev
manded from the masses “expiation of sins” and abstinence from meat (i.e. reduced
consumption, as required by war time), and at the same time strengthened the resolve
of warriors by promising immortal life and a hero’s honor to those who fell in battle:
the epitaph to Athenians fallen in Potidaea in 432 BC is a case in point. Anaxagoras was
the first victim of this witch-hunt. His friends and disciples Euripides and Prodicus (the
author of the Derveni papyrus), both in allusive language, defended Anaxagoras from
accusations of impiety and attacked Diopeithes and the religious conservatives who re-
lied on the authority of the “ancient theologian” Orpheus. Euripides did this by having
Theseus, the father of the Athenian demos, say in his Hippolytus that the abstinence
from meat propagated by the “nonsensical” (kapnos) Orphic books stood in flat con-
tradiction to the ancestral Greek religion based on animal sacrifice (thysia) (Eurip. Hipp.
952–957). When he talks of hypocrites who cover with “holy words” their “disgraceful
deeds”, Euripides has a specific person in mind, mantis Diopeithes, and by disgraceful
deeds he means his psephisma, which resulted in the trial and torture of Anaxagoras98.
The anti-Orphic invective concealed in the fragment of Euripides’ Cretans has been dis-
cussed above in section 4 (with notes 52–63). Prodicus attacked Diopeithes and reli-
gious conservatives with his humorous polemical reinterpretation (peritrope) of the Or-
phic theogony as a handbook of Anaxagorean physics. Additional evidence for a kind
of Orphic revival at the time of the Peloponnesian war in Athens is supplied by the con-
nection between Orphic literature and the Eleusinian mysteries in the late Vth century
established by Fritz Graf [Graf, 1974], as well as by the possible connection between
the “Hymns” of Orpheus (containing Attic forms) quoted in the Derveni papyrus on
the one hand, and the Athenian family of the Euneids, the sacral kitharoidoi of Dio-
nysos Melpomenos, on the other99. This process goes hand in hand with increased pub-
lic interest in Pythagoras and the Pythagorean doctrine of the afterlife (Ion of Chios);
Herodotus, who writes primarily for the Athenian public, calls Pythagoras “not the
weakest” (using litotes to mean “greatest”) Greek sophist (4.95). The author of the Dis-
soi logoi portrays “Anaxagoreans and Pythagoreans” (6.8) as the two main camps com-
peting on the philosophical scene around 400 BC. Most ancient sophists, Protagoras
and Prodicus first of all, sided with the “Anaxagoreans”, i.e. were adherents of Ionian
naturalism and humanism. The domination of the Ionian worldview in Periclean Ath-
ens was inextricably linked with Athenian democracy due both to the rationalistic Zeit-
geist of democratic parrhesia and to the personal relations inside the “circle of Pericles”
which sustained close ties between the leaders of the Greek Enlightenment and the su-
preme state power. Everything changed with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war.
The Athenian plague (430), the Sicilian catastrophe (413) and the humiliating defeat of
Athens in the Peloponnesian war (403) must have been perceived by religious Athe-
nians as “divine rage” and punishment for miasma, hybris and asebeia. Once again, So-
phistic education and Ionian astronomy, which denied the divinity of the heavens, came
under fire. The trial and execution of Socrates (399) prima facie looks illogical since he
was the main philosophical opponent of the Ionian sophists. Contrary to the wide-
98
Ib. 955–957 τοὺς δὲ τοιούτους ἐγὼ φεύγειν προφωνῶ πᾶσι· θηρεύουσι γὰρ σεμνοῖς λόγοισιν, αἰσχρὰ
μηχανώμενοι. For more details see [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Papyrus, 2019, p. 546–549].
99
Eurip. Hypsipyle, v. 5 TrGF, fr. 759a. [Burkert, 1994; Cassio, 2000].
spread view, according to which Plato in his Phaedo wishfully made Socrates a Pythag-
orean believer in a happy life after death, the chances are that Socrates in fact sided with
the Pythagoreans in refuting the “godless” naturalism of the Ionians, as he does in the
elaborate defense of creationism in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, which cannot depend on
Plato100. Socrates was chosen as a “sacral victim” by mistake, because after Aristophanes’
Clouds, in the eyes of ordinary Athenians he was one of those cursed meteorosophistai
who do not “honor the gods honored by the polis”. The first half of the IVth century ap-
pears to see the almost total eclipse of naturalism and the triumph of Pythagorean meta-
physics and the doctrine of the transmigrating immortal soul thanks to Plato and the
Old Academy. Even if this impression is to some extent produced by an “optical illu-
sion”, i.e. by the total loss of the writings of Plato’s opponents, such as Antisthenes, who
still stood firmly by Ionian naturalistic monism, the spread of dualist “Orphic” and Py-
thagorean doctrines and practices in IVth-century Athens is genuinely impressive: the
revival of Pythagoreanism in the “high” sophisticated form of Plato’s Academy, intend-
ed for the intellectual and political elite of the polis, goes hand in hand with the “low”
popular form of the Pythagoristai of Middle Comedy on the streets of Athens with their
hippy-like lifestyle and vegetarianism, no doubt based on the belief in reincarnation101.
In philosophy this trend passed away together with the last members of the Old Acad-
emy. Aristotle, who had Ionian blood in his intellectual veins, revolted against the Py-
thagorean-Platonic metaphysics of two worlds and the doctrine of transmigration based
on it. All the Hellenistic schools dismissed Pythagorean-Platonic substance dualism
and returned to naturalistic monism, even though the teleological naturalism of the
Stoics had little in common with the mechanistic naturalism of the Epicureans. Only
with the advent of post-Hellenistic philosophy in the Ist century BC was the “perenni-
al philosophy” of Pythagoras and Plato, with its doctrine of the transmigrating immor-
tal soul, revived by Neopythagoreans and Middle Platonists to become dominant from
the IIIrd century in Neoplatonism during the last centuries of the ancient philosophy.
The Church Fathers adopted a modified version: immortal, yes, but not preexistent or
transmigrating. From their point of view this was logical: the eternity and uncreated-
ness of the soul challenges the omnipotence of God by making it in a sense equal to
God and giving it too much autonomy. In the Orphic-Pythagorean version it was in-
deed conceived as an (exiled) daimon, i.e. originally divine. If our reconstruction of the
original Aegean version is correct, the Tr/Re doctrine originated in a non-dualist worl-
dview without “another world”, recognizing only “this world” of the sea, the land and
the sun. This belief retained, so to speak, a pantheistic “pagan flavor”, which the Church
Fathers with their “gift of discernment”, sensed and eliminated.
100
Memorabilia, Book 3, chapter 4 (conversation with Euthydemus). On this, and on its relation to Prodicus’
theory of religion and the Derveni papyrus, see [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Papyrus, 2019, p. 597–599].
101
For some recent attempts to define the specific features of Plato’s reception of the Tr/Re doctrine see
[Bernabé, L’âme après la mort 2007; Transfer of Afterlife Knowledge in Pythagorean Eschatology, 2016; Bussanich,
2016; Mace, 2016]. Hladky’s assessment of the difference between Plato and his predecessors is marred by pseudo-
historical evolutionism (a postulated development “from material to ideal”, although Ionian naturalism was
a result of Scientific revolution in Miletus, whereas Plato’ dualist metaphysics and doctrine of the soul were
a revival of archaic Pythagorean doctrines), and the post-Burnet stereotype of the “Presocratics” as physicalists
[Hladky, 2018].
286 A.V. Lebedev
Appendix 1. Revisiting the Pharnabazos graffito

from Olbia
Vinogradov and Rusjaeva [1998, S. 55–61] have submitted to detailed criticism my

reading and interpretation of the graffito from Olbia with the mention of Pharnabazos
(Φαρνάβαζος) “diviner of Hermes” (θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ) whom I consider as a plausi-
ble owner and author of the cleromantic plates discussed above [Lebedev, Pharnaba-
zos, 1996]. In her edition of the graffiti from Olbia Anna Rusjaeva repeated the same
arguments [Русяева, 2010, c. 70–71]. Here I will briefly reply to this criticism just to
make clear that it does not create problems for my interpretation of the Pharnabazos
graffito and the hypothesis on its relation with the “Orphic” graffiti.
I accept two objections. First, I agree that the correct reading is φιλόκαλος, not
φιλόλαλος. This is obvious from the excellent photograph published by my critics [Vi-
nogradov, Rusjaeva, 1998, Plate IX.1] (see figure 3 , inset); in the editio princeps there
was no photo, my conjecture was based on the drawing by Rusjaeva in which kappa
looks like lambda [Русяева, 1979, c. 119]. Second, I do not insist on the connection
between the Pharnabazos graffito and the Aristoteles graffito. Even if the two graffi-
ti are unrelated, this does not affect my reading and interpretation of both graffiti as
κατάδεσμοι. The interpretation of both as defixiones has been accepted by [Bravo, 2001–
2002, p. 161] and [Belousov, 2020, p. 2, 103], but is still denied by [Русяева, 2010, с. 70].
These are defixiones of a rare type which I termed “curse letters”. Unlike ordinary defix-
iones, which mention the names of the cursed in the third person, these two take the
form of a letter which addresses and curses the victim in the second person. The text of
the Pharnabazos graffito in Rusjaeva, ibidem, according to which an unnamed “diviner
of Hermes” foresees the death of a certain Pharnabazos and keeps quiet, is both gram-
matically impossible and unintelligible. ’Hρεμέω θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ cannot mean “I, the
prophet of Hermes, am calm”, firstly because this is syntactically impossible, and sec-
ondly because in defixiones the curser never discloses his name or identity. Φαρνάβαζος
φιλόκαλος and θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ can only be two terms of address for the same per-
son (contra Bravo and Belousov). The use of Nominative for Vocative is well attested
[Smyth, 1920, §1288]. Τhe name of the cursed in a defixio had to be written precisely,
since for a magical mind the change of even one letter could make the curse invalid.
Hence the first Nominative Φαρνάβαζος, while the second (θεοπρόπος) is used by at-
traction. Belousov, loc. cit., mistranslates θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ as “the one who consults
the oracle of Hermes”. This word can mean both “prophet, diviner” (LSJ, s.v. I, 2) and
theoros. Since there is no evidence for any “oracle of Hermes” in Olbia and since such
oracles are virtually unheard of elsewhere in Greece (the oracle at Pharae is a rara avis),
θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ can only mean “the prophet” or “the diviner of Hermes”102. Rusjae-
102
Belousov’s translation should be also discarded for the reasons of usage. A whole-corpus search in TLG on-
line fails to provide a single instance of θεοπρόπος with a name of god N in genitive in the sense of “one who consults
the oracle of god N”. The word is used in the sense of messenger sent to consult oracle (in another polis!) always in
the plural form θεωροί, often with a phrase πέμψαι θεωρούς vel sim. When used in singular the word θεοπρόπος
as a rule is synonymous with μάντις. Cf. Hesychius, Θ 293 θεοπρόποι· προφῆται, μάντεις, ἐκ θεοῦ προλέγοντες.
va [Русяева, 2010, c. 71] correctly translates “prophet of Hermes” (прорицатель), but

her attempt to infer from the graffito the existence of a “peculiar oracle” (своебразное
прорицалище), allegedly located “near the statue or altar” of Hermes in the common
sanctuary of Aphrodite and Hermes in the Western temenos, should be discarded: it
is based on the syntactically impossible text and the wrong separation of an “anony-
mous prophet” (ib.) from Pharnabazos. Keeping essentially the text we proposed in
1996, i.e. taking ΗΡΕΜΕ as Ionism for ἠρέμει (as we did in ZPE 1996, despite the in-
correct indications in the app.crit. of [Belousov 2020]), Ι read and translate, correcting
one word only: Φαρνάβαζος φιλόκαλος, πρόοιδα τέθνηκας· ἠρέμε (= ἠρέμει in nor-
malized orthography), ὦ θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ! “Pharnanzaos, the lover of beauties, I fore-
know you are dead, don’t move, you, diviner of Hermes!”. The foreknowledge of Pharn-
abazos’ death magically determines his death, and the perfect tense of τέθνηκας expres-
sively renders the final and accomplished character of his mortification, after which he
becomes “immobile” like a corpse. A makhaira inserted into Parnabazos’ throat graph-
ically reinforces this threat. Someone who claims such magical powers must be a ma-
gician himself, hence our hypothesis that the anonymous enemy of Pharnabazos is an-
other fortune-teller from Olbia driven by professional rivalry. This hypothesis remains
plausible even if the Aristoteles graffito is unrelated.
The proposed reading and interpretation provides us with the invaluable informa-
tion that a “diviner of Hermes” called Pharnabazos worked in Olbia in the late Vth cen-
tury, and therefore is the most likely candidate for the author of the cleromantic con-
temporary graffiti on the bone plates. There may have been more than one street di-
viner or specialist in magic working on the agora of Olbia in late Vth century BC, but it
seems that a diviner who claimed to be a θεοπρόπος Ἑρμοῦ “diviner of Hermes” (ab-
solute hapax teste TLG online) was one, since the author of the curse letter uses this
uncommon “title” not as a sign of respect, but as a signum that precisely identifies the
person targeted in defixio. This address may be also flavored with sarcasm: you, Pharn-
abazos, claim to be a diviner of Hermes, but I surpass you in magical power and I will
kill you by dedicating you to Hermes Chthonios (the Aristoteles graffito is typological-
ly comparable). In common Greek perception the “mantic art” of Hermes, as distinct
from the inspirational mantic of Apollo, was cleromancy. On Hermes as “Herr de As-
tragalorakel” see the index in the edition by [Nollé, 2007, S. 322], s.v. Hermes. The cor-
rect reading φιλόκαλος actually adds a new interesting detail: the word in the present
context probably does not mean just “lover of beauty”, but “lover of καλοί” or καλαί,
i.e. of beautiful boys or girls. Therefore, the hatred of Pharnabazos’ anonymous enemy,
who threatens to kill him, may have been motivated by jealousy, not just by profession-
al rivalry. In Alexis fr. 253 Φιλόκαλος, according to Arnott, is a seducer of young wives
(νύμφαι). In Ps.-Lucianus Amores 35 φιλοκαλία is associated with παιδεραστεῖν. I will
not repeat here my 1996 hypothesis of the possible identity of Olbian Pharnabazos with
an exiled Persian aristocrat, the satrap of Mysia (RE 2). Even then I concluded my pon-
derings on such possibility with a “non liquet” [Lebedev, Pharnabazos, 1996, p. 276]. It
is in the 1998 reply of my critics that this conjectural possibility was made into firmly
established historical fact and a “full value historical source” (“eine vollwerte historische
Quelle” [Vinogradov, Rusjaeva, 1998, S. 161]) on the political relations of Olbia with
Athens “and the whole Mediterranea world” in the last years of the Peloponnesian war.
288 A.V. Lebedev
In her 2010 commentary on the graffito (loc. cit.). Rusjaeva delicately distances herself
from this historical novel. Pharnabazos the “diviner of Hermes” was probably a Greek
charlatan who assumed the bombastic “royal” name of a Persian magos.
Appendix 2. Some remarks on the relation between Pythago-

reanism and Orphism. A reply to Gábor Betegh
In a recent discussion of the the relation between Orphism and Pythagoreanism
[Betegh, 2014] has argued that, unlike Pythagoreanism, Orphism is not inextricably
linked with metempsychosis and vegetarianism, does not contain a unified set of doc-
trines, but rather presents a loose “pluralistic picture” of religious practices and believes.
All new and old evidence, according to Betegh, “presses for non-essentialist view”. Such
“pluralistic” approach might be justified in the study of the various appropriations of the
name of Orpheus by various sects and authors in Hellenistic and Imperial times, but it
is unsuitable for the study of the classical Orphism known from the Vth- and IVth-centu-
ry sources, precisely because here we are dealing predominantly with one and the same
mystery cult with clearly defined set of doctrines, ritual practices and peculiar “way of
life”. Pace Betegh, nothing in the “new evidence” supports the non-essentialist view. The
author of the Derveni papyrus is neither an Orphic priest nor a physikos trying to recon-
cile Ionian cosmogony with Orphic faith which is something like trying to reconcile the
Big Bang theory with Hexaemeron. He is an Ionian sophist who quotes Orpheus’ theog-
ony only as supposed historical evidence on the original “natural” religion of primitive
men [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Papyrus, 2019]. Whether he discussed
metempsychosis in the lost columns, we do not know, but even if did, he no doubt of-
fered a “correct” interpretation in terms of Anaxagorean corpuscular theory of matter,
i.e. depriving it of any ethical and religious meaning. The Olbian bone plates, as inter-
preted above, provide no evidence on “Orphic community” in Olbia, but rather sup-
port the model of “itinerant priests” familiar from Plato’s Republic. At the same time,
they provide evidence both on the central Orphic myth of sparagmos and Pythagore-
an influences on early Orphica questioned by Betegh. Burkert’s image of three overlap-
ping circles representing Orphica, Bacchica and Pythagorica, invoked by Betegh does
not require “some refinements” [Betegh, 2014, p. 153]; it rather requires rejection and
replacement by the image of two overlapping circles only, representing Pythagorica and
Bachicca; the common area produced by the superimposition of the Pythagorean circle
on the original non-Orphic Bacchic circle, is what we call “Orphism”.
As Jan Bremmer put it, “Orphism was the product of Pythagorean influence on
Bacchic mysteries” [Bremmer, 2002, p. 15]. Finally, the reticence of the gold leaves
about Orpheus or Orphica does not prove that the owners of these plates could not re-
gard the texts inscribed on them as ‘oracles of Orpheus’ (χρησμοὶ Ὀρφέως), ‘incanta-
tions of Orpheus’ (ἐπωιδαὶ Ὀρφέως) etc. Orpheus was the prophet (mantis), not the
god worshipped in this mystery cult of Bacchus, he only transmitted the divine words
to the initiates, there was no reason to mention his name in these magical phylakteria.
As regards the “old evidence”, Betegh’s conclusions are based on invalid arguments ex
silentio. One example of Betegh’s invalid conclusion ex silentio: Theophrastus’ charac-

ter of deisidaimon (Char. 16.11) who every month goes to Orpheotelestai with his chil-
dren “in order to be initiated” (τελεσθησόμενος). Betegh [2014, p. 154–155] “strongly
doubts” that Theophrastus’ superstitious man was vegetarian or believed in metempsy-
chosis. Theophrastus does not mention metempsychosis, but why should he? Theoph-
rastus “Characters” is a study of human ethos which, according to Aristotle, consists of
habits (ἕξεις), i.e. his subject is a study of behavior, not of religious doctrines or philo-
sophical doxography. The chances are that the “bunch of books” of Mousaios and Or-
pheus carried by itinerant beggar priests according to Plato’s Republic 364e contained
(pace Betegh) the theogony of Orpheus with the sparagmos myth and doctrine of rein-
carnation. Vegetarianism was inextricably linked with the belief in metempsychosis, so
every mention of vegetarianism as a feature of Orphikos bios provides indirect evidence
on Orphic metempsychosis. Let us not forget that the doctrine of metempsychosis was
a hieros logos and that one could face a charge of asebeia for divuling a hieros logos: this
explains why Herodotus 2.123 conceals the names of those Hellenes who appropriated
the Egyptian logos of the 3000-years peregrinations of the soul.
The above two-circles model explaining the relation of Orphica to Bacchica and
Pythagorica is incomplete, i.e. does not include all sources of Orphism. Its purpose is
limited: to correct the three-circles model of Burkert which admits the original exis-
tence of the independent citcle of Orphism, and eo ipso the existence of some of “Or-
phism” before the late VIth century BC, i.e. before early Pythagoreans and Onomacritus.
But there is no reliable historical evidence for such pre-Pythagorean “Orphism”. Some
doctrines that we associate with “Orphism”, e.g. the doctrine of immortality and trans-
migration of the soul did exist before (Epimendes and Pherecydes), but these doctrines
were never attributed to “Orpheus”. All earliest Orphica are Pythagorica. As regards the
sources of Onomacritus’ Theogony attributed to “Orpheus”, it borrows religious/philo-
sophical doctrines and mythopoetic cosmogonic narratives from four pre-existing “cir-
cles”: 1) the Theogony of Eimenides of Crete; 2) the heavily reworked Theogony of He-
siod; 3) knowledge of Pythagorean substance dualism of body and the soul from oral
or written sources; 4) the Egyptian myth of the death and resurection of Osiris trans-
formed into Dionysos Orphikos.
Onomacritus, who was credited with editorial work on the Homeric epic, must have
been a connoisseur of Greek epic poetry, and as the “editor of the oracles of Mousaios”
(διαθέτης χρησμῶν τῶν Μουσαίου Herod. 7.6), he must have been versed in hexamet-
ric versification and in falsification of ‘ancient holy words’ (ἱεροὶ λόγοι).
Appendix 3. Aristotle on “Pythagorean myths”

of reincarnation in De anima I
In his doxography of various opinions on the nature of the soul in the first book
of De anima Aristotle mentions the Pythagoreans twice. Both mentions are surprising,
since they attribute to the Pythagoreans prima facie uncommon doctrines not paral-
leled in other sources. It is equally surprising that after this Aristotle quotes anony-
290 A.V. Lebedev
mously (attributed to “some”) the doctrine of soul as harmonia which is by many other
authors regarded as primarily and typically Pythagorean. According to Aristotle some
of his predecessors emphasized as essential feature of psyche its kinetic function, and
some sensation (aisthesis) and cognitive function. He quotes as an example of the first
group (alongside with Thales, Heraclitus, Democritus and others) the Pythagoreans.
404a16–20 ἔοικε δὲ καὶ τὸ παρὰ τῶν Πυθαγορείων λεγόμενον τὴν αὐτὴν ἔχειν διάνοιαν·
ἔφασαν γάρ τινες αὐτῶν ψυχὴν εἶναι τὰ ἐν τῶι ἀέρι ξύσματα, οἱ δὲ τὸ ταῦτα κινοῦν.
It seems that the same thought is expressed in what the Pythagoreans are saying. Some of
them said that motes in the air are soul, while some others that what sets them in motion.
It is hard to imagine two groups of Pythagoreans engaging in such a strange de-

bate. Most likely, these are two interpretations of some mysterious Pythagorean saying
of akousmata type like “Planets are the dogs of Persephone” and “earthquake is a con-
vention of the diceased” σύνοδον τῶν τεθνεώτων (DK 58 C 2). We suggest, exempli
gratia, the following text: τί ἐστι τὰ ἐν τῶι ἀέρι ξύσματα; ψυχαὶ τεθνεώτων “What are
motes floating in the air? The souls of the diceased”. The correct interpretation was
probably the second. In this case the motion of the motes in the complete calm (κἂν
ἦι νηνεμία παντελής) may have been intended as empirical proof (τεκμήριον) that the
air around us is full of souls, a belief with parallels in Orphic fragments (OF 421–422)
and probably alluded to in “the so-called Orphic verses” quoted by Aristotle below in
410b27. A similar belief was shared by the Stoics and, probably, by Heraclitus as well.
In any case this archaic “acousmatic” view of the soul stands in stark contrast with the
sophisticated theory of psyche-harmonia maintained by mathematikoi like Philolaus
and most probably going back to Pythagoras.
For the second time, Aristotle refers to the Pythagorean doctrine of the soul in
a highly critical tone immediately after his criticism of Plato’s theory in the Timaeus.
Plato commits mistake by making the soul a kind of mechanical engine that transmits
its own motion to the body, by “dragging it together with itself ” (συνεφέλκειν). The
soul moves the body in different way, “by intention and thought” (διὰ προαιρέσεώς
τινος καὶ νοήσεως 406b25). The common fault of Plato and Pythagoreans is their radi-
cal dualism of the body and the soul, treating the soul in isolation and separation from
the body, and paying no attention to their association or synergy (κοινωνίαν 407b18).
407b20 περὶ δὲ τοῦ δεξομένου σώματος οὐδὲν ἔτι προσδιορίζουσι, ὥσπερ ἐνδεχόμενον —
κατὰ τοὺς Πυθαγορικοὺς μύθους — τὴν τυχοῦσαν ψυχὴν εἰς τὸ τυχὸν ἐνδύεσθαι σῶμα· δοκεῖ γὰρ
ἕκαστον ἴδιον ἔχειν εἶδος καὶ μορφήν.
As regards the body that will receive the soul, they provide no further specifications any-
more, as if it were possible — according to the Pythagorean myths — that any kind of soul puts
on (like a dress) any kind of body, although it stands for reason that each (body or animal) has
its own peculiar species and form.
In order to interpret correctly this passage and to distinguish clearly between the
objective (descriptive) doxographical content from Aristotle’s own polemical inferences
it is important to understand that “any kind of body” refers to any species, and not to
any particular body, as some modern commentators think. This is clear both from the
preceding context (407b20 “they only speak about what kind of soul”, ποιόν τι ψυχή, but
do not specify what kind of body will receive the soul) and from the remark on εἶδος
καὶ μορφήν that immediately follows. Aristotle means that a human soul cannot “put
on” a body of a puppy, as in Xenophanes’ ridicule of Pythagoras’ reincarnation doctrine
(DK B 7). It is equally important to note that ἐνδεχόμενον is used here in a sense sim-
ilar to συμβαίνει (αὐτοῖς) λέγειν, a standard Aristotelian formula for absurd implica-
tions of opponent’s thesis (Bonitz, Ind. Ar. s.v. 3), and that ὥσπερ “as if ” also points to
a latent incongruity. Strictly speaking, Aristotle criticizes here not only Pythagoreans,
nor even primarily Pythagoreans, but all those who consider the soul in isolation from
the body, and first of all Plato in the Timaeus. The Pythagorean theory of reincarnation
is for Aristotle an exemplary absurdity not worth of refutation (hence the contemptu-
ous μύθους “fabulations”), while Plato’s radical dualism of the body and the soul en-
tails the possibility (ἐνδεχόμενον) of such absurdity. We conclude that Aristotle’s iron-
ical mention of “Pythagorean fabulations” is interesting in the context of his polem-
ics with Plato’s doctrine of the soul, but is of little or no value for the reconstruction of
Pythagorean Tr/Re doctrine. Therefore, scholars who saw in this passage alleged evi-
dence on some version of Tr/Re doctrine distinct from the standard ethical-religious
version, have been mistaken. Zhmud’ [2012, p. 232] commits a double mistake when
he both misinterprets “any kind of body” as a randomly chosen particular body rath-
er than body of another species (εἶδος, μορφή), and wrongly ascribes to Pythagoreans
Aristotle’s own polemical inference which cannot be used as a proof that the Pythago-
rean Tr/Re doctrine was a naturalistic theory without ethical-religious meaning. “Phys-
ical” version of the Tr/Re doctrine never existed, it was from the beginning a religious
eschatological doctrine of ‘rebirth’ (palingenesia) and remained so in all later versions,
including the moralistic and philosophically refined.
The misreading of the Derveni papyrus as an attempt to bridge the gap between Io-
nian physics and Orphic faith has also contributed to the origin of this modern myth.
In fact, the Derveni papyrus is a testimony of the irreconcilable conflict between the
two [Lebedev, The Authorship of the Derveni Papyrus, 2019]. R. Gagné [2007] has ar-
gued that the source of Aristotle’s quotation from “the so called Orphic verses” expos-
ing a doctrine (logos) that the “the soul, being carried by the winds, enters the body
from the Universe” (τὴν ψυχὴν ἐκ τοῦ ὅλου εἰσιέναι ἀναπνεόντων, φερομένην ὑπὸ τῶν
ἀνέμων: De an. 210b27 = OF 421) is the Orphic poem Φυσικά attributed by Clement
to Pythagorean Brotinus (OF 800–893). Gagné’s hypothesis rests on his attempt to de-
fend the transmitted reading ἐν τοῖς Φυσικοῖς in Iamblichus’ De anima fr.8 D. emend-
ed by Gaisford in 1850 (omnium consensus) to ἐν τοῖς Ὀρφικοῖς on the basis of Aris-
totle’s MSS.
But Gaisford was right, the reading ἐν τοῖς Φυσικοῖς is indefensible for the follow-
ing reasons. 1) Since Aristotle does not mention Physica of Orpheus, Gagné’s hypothe-
sis requires the assumption that Iamblichus knew the Orphic doctrine at issue not only
from Aristotle, but also from the original poem or another complementary source. But
as a matter of fact, he, like all commentators of Aristotle’s De anima (Philoponus twice,
Themistius, Simplicius, see testimonia in [Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci, 2007, p. 350]),
knows this Orphic logos in Aristotle’s prose paraphrase only, he could not find the orig-
292 A.V. Lebedev
inal verses, and therefore had no access to the poem Physica. 2) In the second quotation
of the same Aristotelian passage in the same De anima (ap. Stob. I.49.38) Iamblichus in-
troduces the same logos ὡς οἱ Ὀρφικοὶ λέγουσι which is a variant of ἐν τοῖς Ὀρφικοῖς.
3) Gagné’s surprising claim that Φυσικοῖς is a lectio difficilior, is refuted by a whole
corpus proximity search in TLG which yields 40 instances of the combination (within
7 words) of Ἀριστοτελ- + ἐν τοῖς Φυσικοῖς and only one instance (in Stobaeus – Iam-
blichus) of the combination Ἀριστοτελ- + ἐν τοῖς Ὀρφικοῖς, i.e. not a single parallel.
4) The scribe was misguided by the preceding words τινὲς τῶν φυσικῶν in Iamblichus’
text and therefore misred or ‘corrected’ ΟΡΦΙΚΟΙΣ as ΦΥΣΙΚΟΙΣ. 5) The reading ἐν
τοῖς Φυσικοῖς makes the word αὐτός strange, whereas the distinction of what Aristotle
says about Orphic doctrine, on the one hand (Ἀριστοτέλης μὲν ἐν τοῖς Ὀρφικοῖς), and
what “Orpheus himself ” (Ὀρφεὺς αὐτός) teaches, on the other, makes the text more
logical103. I would venture to guess that Aristotle paraphrases OF 436–437 in combina-
tion with OF 422 ἀέρα δ᾽ἕλκοντες ψυχῆν θείαν δρεπόμεσθα or something similar in
the context. Τὸ ὅλον (subst.) in the sense of ‘Universe’ is a word of IVth century philo-
sophical prose alien to epic poetry. Aristotle’s ἐκ τοῦ ὅλου can be compared with OF
437, v. 3 ψυχὴ ὅλον αἰθέρα ἀλλάσσουσα. Aristotle attributed the Orphic theogony to
Onomacritus, that is why he says “in the so-called verses”. OF 437 is almost certainly
based on Heraclitus 67Leb/B36; Heraclitus’ book should be dated circa 490 BC, On-
omacritus was still alive in 480 BC. Both OF 421 and 436–437 may derive from the sec-
tion of Onomacritus’ Theogony which described the cosmic peregrinations of the ex-
iled daimon. Empedocles in his Katharmoi combined the classical Tr/Re doctrine with
elemental transmigration, so why Onomacritus could not adopt the same pattern? The
chances are that the doxographicum in Sextus (OF 108) which attributes to “Onomac-
ritus in Orphica”, i.e. in the Orphic Theogony, a triad of elements (fire, water, earth) is
based on OF 437. The doxographical source of Sextus interpreted ψυχή in OF 437 as
πῦρ. Ψυχή in the same triad of elements in Heraclitus fr. 67Leb/B36 has also been in-
terpreted by some (imprecisely) as fire. In this case OF 437 can be with certainty at-
tributed to Onomacritus’ Ἱερὸς λόγος (or Ἱεροὶ λόγοι), which we call “Orphic Theog-
ony”. And the same holds true for OF 421. If the soul, that we inhale, derives from the
“whole aither” that encompasses the Universe, we may be said to inhale the soul “from
the Whole”, i.e. from the Universe. Themistius in his commentary to Aristotle’s pas-
sage (OF 421) takes ἀναπνεόντων as a reference to our first breath (πρώτη ἀναπνοή).
[Horky, 2021] has recently advanced a thesis that immortality of the soul is not at-
tributed to Pythagoras before Dicaearchus. This thesis is indefensible. Reincarnation is
inseparable from the immortality of the soul. The same is true for anamnesis: you can-
not remember your previous lives unless you have lived them. Both reincarnation and
anamnesis are well attested for Pythagoras already in 5th century. Horky also ignores
the evidence if Ion if Chius (section 5 above) which alone is sufficient to refute his the-
sis. Aristotle in De anima need not refer to Plato’s Phaedo since ἐνδύεσθαι was a com-
mon word for reincarnation. Empedocles does not use this particular word, but he uses
the same image of ‘putting on’ a chiton of a new body (B126) which Horky overlooks.
103
On Φυσικά as a Byzantine pseudo-title of Orpheus’ theogony see Appendix 4 below.
And it remains to be proven that anonymous akousmata, composed nobody knows

when and by whom, are a more reliable source on Pythagoras than explicit testimonia
with his name.
Appendix 4. Confirmatory new evidence from the Sinai

palimpsest
The newly found verses of the Orphic theogony published by Rossetto [2021] con-
firm the main findings of our study. The attribution of the new hexameters to the 23rd
rhapsody of the Orphic theogony proposed by Rossetto seems certain. The archaic
simplicity and some naivety of these verses make them closer to Homer than to the
Hellenistic and late epic overloaded with “erudition” and artificial finesse. Firstly, the
new verses confirm the inseparable connection of the sacred geography and the main
Orphic myth of the sparagmos of Dionysus with Crete and the oracular Idaean cave.
Now there is no doubt that Euripides in the Cretans followed the Rhapsodic Theogo-
ny. Secondly, they confirm the reliability of Aristotle's testimony about Onomacritus as
the compiler of the original Orphic Theogony. According to the 4th century attitogra-
pher Phanοdemus (FGrHist 325F6), the Tritopatores cult was exclusively Attic (μόνοι
Ἀθηναῖοι θύουσι). The scant epigraphic evidence of this cult elsewhere (Selinunt, Tro-
ezen, Delos, Cyrene) confirms rather than refutes the account of Phanodemus [Rob-
ertson, 2009, p. 167–197]. Therefore, it is very likely that Onomacritus added the Attic
Tritopatores and Amalkides (f.6v, 14) to the anthropogonic myth of the Titans and Di-
onysus as allies of the Cretan protectors of Dionysus, the Corybantes (Akmon), in or-
der to please the Peisistratids and the Athenian public. Rossetto [2021, p. 56–57] is cer-
tainly right in accepting Kern's opinion that the so-called Φυσικά of Orpheus is a vari-
ant of the title of the Orphic Theogony [Kern, 1890, p. 10–11]. Note that of the two vari-
ants the sing. Τὸ Φυσικόν (scil. ποίημα Ὀρφέως) is a lectio difficilior, and this is just a
reference to Orpheus “poem on the natural world”, i.e. to his cosmogony aka theogony.
The form Τὰ Φυσικά is used exclusively by Christian authors, for whom ἱεροί λόγοι was
a synonym for the Holy Scripture ( Ἱερὰ Γραφή), unsuitable for pagan theogony with
its veneration of “nature”. The cult of Tritopatores in Attica existed from the 6th to the
4th centuries BC. This fact is in perfect agreement with the authorship of Onomacritus
but speaks against attempts to date the newly found hexameters to the Hellenistic era.
Many Rossetto’s supplements are convincing. In some cases, we offer alternative
solutions (our new readings are marked with an asterisk):
f.2r, 13 …μυχῶι* κ]ρυφίοιο μελ[ά]θρου
f.2r, v.15 ἵκελον [αὐ]γῆ[ι]* ἱρ[ῆι]* μηνὸς περιτελλομένοιο
‘similar to the sacred light of the rising moon’
f.2r, v.16 εἵμασί τε στ[ίλβ]οντα* καὶ ἱμερτοῖς στεφάνοισιν ‘shining by his clothes
and lovely crowns’, cf. Il. 8.392 κάλλεΐ τε στίλβων καὶ εἵμασι, so Aphrodite to Helen
extolling the beauty of Paris awaiting for her in the bedroom.
f.2v, 2 read ει instead of ω with supplement εἵ[μασι]* καλοῖς, cf. 2r, 16.
f.2v,14 φίλον δ᾽ἅ[μα]* πολ[λά]κι παῖδα ‘and at the same time…’
294 A.V. Lebedev
f.6r, 3 περ[ιῆγον]* πάντες. κύκλωι περιάγειν is a set phrase Her.8.180; often in mil-
itary contexts, of “siege” etc. Xenoph. Hel. 7.4.22; Plato Phil. 19a4 etc.
f.6r, 4 read ἧχι περ Οἶνος ἐφῆστό* τε τίμ[ιος]* [ἐκ Δ]ιὸς* αἴσης [all Giants/Ti-
tans surrounded the throne] ‘where the honorable Oinos was sitting by the dispensa-
tion of Zeus’. ἐφῆστο is Impf. from ἔφημαι ‘to sit upon’. Cf. οἶνον…τιμήν in the Pelin-
na gold tablet, v.6.
f.6v, 18 [ἀκα]μάτοιο*. In early epic usage standard epithet of elements: fire (πῦρ),
wind and sea. Emped. B111.6 ἀκαμάτων ἀνέμων. Amalkides was a wind god.
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Figure 3. Pharnabazos graffito from Western temenos of Olbia, late Vth cent. BC.
Photo [Vinogradov, Rusjaeva, 1998, Plate IX]. Stored at the Institute of Archeology
of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
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Aegean Origin of Greek Reincarnation Immorality Doctrines Corr

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Article · June 2023

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Natalia Yu. Chalisova

Higher School of Economics

В.И. Брагинский (SOAS, London), Мицуёси Нумано (Tokyo Univ., Japan),

д.филол.н. Ф.Б. Успенский;

Миф, ритуал, литература [Текст] / отв. ред. Ю.В. Иванова,

Appendix 1. Revisiting the Pharnabazos graffito from Olbia.

1. Epimenides’ art of divination and Cretan oracular caves.

2. Reconstructing the proem and cosmogony of Epimenides’

3. Selene, the Lion of Nemea and Aiakos: the former lives

4. Epimenides, the Orphics (Onomacritus), and Pythagoras:

καὶ νυκτιπόλου Ζαγρέως βoρὰς 52

His explication of the anti-Orphic message in Hippolytus is also persuasive. However,

tion, probably a kind of sophisticated astragalomancy: it was probably rolled in a con-

5. The doctrine of transmigration in Pherecydes of Syros.

Epimenides is the earliest and best documented proponent of immortality and

6. A tentative typology, filiation and chronology of the early

and Pherecydes). Secondly, we introduce a distinction between animal reincarnation

The following types and varieties of Tr/Re doctrine can be distinguished.

7. A hypothesis of the common “Aegean substrate” of the

8. A brief reception history of the Tr/Re doctrine

Appendix 1. Revisiting the Pharnabazos graffito

Vinogradov and Rusjaeva [1998, S. 55–61] have submitted to detailed criticism my

va [Русяева, 2010, c. 71] correctly translates “prophet of Hermes” (прорицатель), but

Appendix 2. Some remarks on the relation between Pythago-

silentio. One example of Betegh’s invalid conclusion ex silentio: Theophrastus’ charac-

Appendix 3. Aristotle on “Pythagorean myths”

It is hard to imagine two groups of Pythagoreans engaging in such a strange de-

And it remains to be proven that anonymous akousmata, composed nobody knows

Appendix 4. Confirmatory new evidence from the Sinai

Studies, Harvard University, 2012. < http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&b-

Lebedev A.V. Alcmaeon on Plants: A New Fragment in Nicolaus Damascenus // La Parola

Schibli H.S. Pherekydes of Syros. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.

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