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Home , Brontinus, Metempsychosis

CHAPTER 6 and Other Teachers of Salvation

Heraclitus believed that our is divine and that purification is the agent of its deliverance from earthly life and restoration to divine station. The Orphic Gold Plates1 show the same pattern of belief: the soul is of divine descent;2 having kept pure during the life on earth3 and having ‘paid the penalty for unrighteous deeds’,4 the deceased’s soul pleads in the underworld for release from the ‘woeful, painful circle’—evidently the circle of mortal births,5 which is granted: ‘You have become a god instead of a mortal.’6 ’ doc- trine is cognate: the fallen δαίμων should pass through all kinds of mortal life until, purified, he returns to the company of gods. Heraclitus’ fugitive δαίμων entombed in the body, the Orphics’ soul imprisoned in the body (above, p. 100 n. 33), and Empedocles’ exiled δαίμων wrapped in ‘an alien robe of flesh’ (B 126)7 are variants of the same belief in the divinity of the soul only

1 The plates are Totenpässe, dating from c. 400 BCE on, discovered in burials in various places of the Greek world. The metrical portions of the inscribed texts evidently come from hexa- metrical poem(s) (for a tentative restoration of the archetype see Riedweg, ‘Poésie orphique et rituel initiatique’, 470–77), whereas short non-metrical portions are probably ritual accla- mations. For the Orphic background of the Gold Plates see esp. Merkelbach, ‘Zwei neue orphisch-dionysische Totenpässe’, 6–13, and Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal, ‘Are the “Orphic” Gold Leaves Orphic?’ 2 ‘I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven/ but my race is heavenly’: OTF 475F.12, 15, 476F.6–7, 484F.3–4, the first line is also in 474F.10, 478F.3, etc.; ‘I also claim to be of your happy race’: 488F.3–490F.3. 3 ‘I come pure from the pure’: OTF 488F.1–491F.1. 4 OTF 489F.4, 490F.4. 5 OTF 488F.5. , in Ti. iii 297.8–10: ‘In those who are initiated into the mys- teries of and Kora pray “To cease from a circle and recover from evil”.’ Heraclitus’ ‘up down’ of the travel of the in ‘a necessary succession’ (Aeneas, above, pp. 89–90, Table 3.(1)–(4)) is but another name for what the Orphic initiands called ‘circle’. ‘Up down’ emerges as a password (σύνθημα· ἄνω κάτω τοῖς[ ) in col. i.26 of the Gurôb papyrus (OTF 578F), a mid- third-century BCE ritual text of the Orphic background. 6 OTF 487F.4, 488F.9; cf. Empedocles B 112.4: ‘I, an immortal god in your eyes, no longer mortal.’ 7 σαρκῶν ἀλλογνῶτι περιστέλλουσα χιτῶνι (cf. περιστέλλων μέλη, ‘clad in bodily frame’, in Pind. Nem. xi 15–17); note also σώμασι θνητοῖς ἐνδέδενται, ‘bound fast to the mortal body’, of Empedocles’ souls in Plut. De esu carn. i, 996C1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi ��.��63/9789004338210_008 Heraclitus and Other Teachers of Salvation 127 temporarily attached to the mortal body.8 ’ combination of the belief in metempsychosis with the ascetic way of life indicates similar beliefs.

As Walter Burkert showed, the philosophical tenets traditionally ascribed to Pythagoras are mostly projections of ’s teachings by his successors in the Academy, whereas ’s ‘so-called Pythagoreans’ belong among the later Presocratics.9 So, we are left with the notion of the early Pythagoreans as a community defined by a distinctive (‘Pythagorean’) way of life shaped by the belief in metempsychosis and related eschatological concerns.10 The earliest evidence of Pythagoras’ belief in metempsychosis comes from his contempo- rary (21 B 7); the earliest mention of the ‘Pythagorean life’ is Pl. Resp. 600B2–5. (ii 81) notes the similarity between the Pythagorean and the Orphic funerary rites; the general agreement between the two ideolo- gies was evidently so apparent as to give rise to the allegation, made as early as Ion of Chios (36 B 2), that some of the poems circulating under the name of Orpheus were actually composed by Pythagoras, or by his disciples Cercops and Brontinus (Epigenes, presumably the early fourth century BCE, ap. Clem. Al. Strom. i 21.131.5; Cic. Nat. D. i 38.107 (Arist. fr. 7)=DK 15; Suda Ο 654).11

The Orphics, Heraclitus, and Empedocles concurred in seeing earthly life as wretched.12 The Orphics imagined the body as the soul’s prison, Empedocles as an alien robe of flesh the fallen δαίμων was bound to wear. But although ‘The body is . . . alien to the soul or the daimon or whatever name should be given to the “I” which pre-exists and enters it.., its ills originated not in the flesh or the

8 On the affinities between the Empedoclean and Orphic teachings see Riedweg, ‘Orphisches bei Empedocles’; Parker, ‘Early ’, 498–500; Betegh, ‘Empédocle, Orphée et le papyrus de Derveni’. 9 Lore and Science in Ancient , 15–96; see also Huffman, ‘The Pythagorean Tradition’. On the history of Pythagorean scholarship see Cornelli, ‘Pythagoreanism as an Historiographical Category’. 10 Cornelli, In Search of Pythagoreanism, 52–85, and passim. 11 On the overlapping of the Orphic, Bacchic, Eleusinian and Pythagorean ideologies see Burkert, ‘Orphism and Bacchic Mysteries’, 6–7, and Greek Religion, 299–300; Parker, ‘Early Orphism’, 500–04; see also Nilsson, ‘Early Orphism and Kindred Religious Movements’; on equating Pythagorean and Orphic ideas in antiquity see Bernabé, ‘Orphics and Pythagoreans: the Greek Perspective’. 12 Pythagoras’ attitude is summarized by Burkert as ‘life is πόνος [toil], which must be endured’: Lore and Science, 191.