Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/89

Rh saved by knowledge; the common man could not look that way. Amid the discouragements of the sixth century, the ebb of colonisation, the internal wars, the fall of Sybaris and of the half-divine Nineveh, came the turning away from this life to the next, the setting of the heart on supernatural bliss above the reach of war and accident.

Hence arose a great wave of religious emotion scarcely represented in our tradition, but affecting every oracle and popular temple from Caria to Italy. The main expression of this movement was Orphism. It appears first as an outburst of personal miracle-working religion in connection with Dionysus-worship. We can make out many of the cardinal tenets. It believed in sin and the sacerdotal purging of sin; in the immortality and divinity of the soul; in eternal reward beyond the grave to the 'pure' and the 'impure'—of course, none but the initiated being ultimately quite pure; and in the incarnation and suffering of Dionysus-Zagreus. Zagreus was the son of Zeus and the Maiden (Korê); he was torn asunder by Titans, who were then blasted by the thunderbolt. Man's body is made of their dead ashes, and his soul of the living blood of Zagreus. Zagreus was born again of Zeus and the mortal woman Semelê; lived as man, yet god; was received into heaven and became the highest, in a sense the only, god. An individual worshipper of Bacchus could develop his divine side till he became himself a 'Bacchos,' his potential divinity realised.

So a worshipper of Kybêbê in Phrygia became Kybêbos; and many Orphic prophets became Orpheus. The fabled Mænad orgies never appear historically in Greece. The connection with wine was explained away