Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/91

 LEADERS OF ORPHISM 6y medicine-man from Crete, who purified Athens after Kyloii's murder, was the reputed author of Argo- nmitika* Purificaticms* and Oracles* Though he slept twenty years in a cave, he has more claim to reality than a similar figure, Abaris, who went round the world with — or, as some think, on — a golden arrow given him by Apollo. Abaris passed as pre- Homeric; but his reputed poems were founded on the epic of the his- torical Aristeas of Proconnesus about the Arimaspi, which contained revelations acquired in trances about the hyperboreans and the grifHns. Aristeas appeared in Sicily at the same time that he died in Proconnesus. These were hangers-on of Orphism ; the head centre seems to have been Onomacritus. He devoted himself to shaping the religious policy of Pisistratus and Hip- parchus, and forging or editing ancient Orphic poems. He is never quoted as an independent author. The tradition dislikes him, and says that he was caught in the act of forging an oracle of Musaeus, and banished with disgrace by Hipparchus. However, it has to admit that he was a friend of that prince in his exile,^ and it cannot deny that he formed one of the chief influences of the sixth century. Before the sixth century we get no definitely Orphic literature, but we seem to find traces of the influence, or perhaps of the spirit, from which it sprung. The curious hymn to * Hecate the Only-born ' in the Theo- gony (411 f.) cannot be called definitely Orphic, but it stands by itself in the religion of the Hesiodic poems. The few references to Dionysus in Homer have an 'interpolated' or 'un-Homeric' look, and that which tells of the sin and punishment of Lycurgus implies ^ Herodt. vii. 6.