Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/256

234 234 HISTORY OP THE travelled to the far north, in search of the Hyperboreans. He de- scribed this marvellous journey in a poem, called Arimaspea, which was read by Herodotus, and Greeks of still later date. It consisted of ethnographical accounts and stories about the northern nations, mixed with notions belonging to the worship of Apollo. In this poem, how- ever, Aristeas so far checked his imagination, that he only represented himself to have penetrated northwards from the Scythians as far as the Issedones ; and he gave as mere reports the marvellous tales of the one- eyed Arimaspians, of the griffins which guarded the gold, and of the happy Hyperboreans beyond the northern mountains. Aristeas be- came quite a marvellous personage : he is said to have accompanied Apollo, at the founding of Metapontum, in the form of a raven, and to have appeared centuries afterwards, (viz. when he really lived, about the time of Pythagoras,) in the same city of Magna Gra&cia. Pherecydes, of the island of Syros, one of the heads of the Ionic school, belongs to this class of the sacerdotal sages, inasmuch as he gave a mythical form to his notions about the nature of things and their internal principles. There are extant some fragments of a theogouy composed by him, which bear a strange character, and have a much closer resemblance to the Orphic poems than to those of Hesiod*. They show that by this time the character of the theogonic poetry had been changed, and that Orphic ideas were in vogue. § 5. No name of any literary production of an Orphic poet before Pherecydes is known; probably because the hymns and religious songs composed by the Orphic poets of that time were destined only for their mystical assemblies, and were indissolubly connected with the rites performed at them. An extensive Orphic literature first appeared about the time of the Persian war, when the remains of the Pytha- gorean order in Magna Graecia united themselves to the Orphic asso- ciations. The philosophy of Pythagoras had in itself no analogy with the spirit of the Orphic mysteries ; nor did the life, education, and manners of the followers of Orpheus at all resemble those of the Pythagorean league in lower Italy. Among the Orphic theologers, the worship of Dionysus was the centre of all religious ideas, and the starting point of all speculations upon the world and human nature. The worship of Dionysus, however, appears not to have been held in honour in the cities of the Pythagorean league ; these philosophers preferred the worship of Apollo and the Muses, which best suited the spirit of their social and political institutions. This junction was evidently not formed till after the dissolution of the Pythagorean league in Magna Grsecia, and the sanguinary persecution of its god Ophioneus, the unity of Zeus and Eros, and several other things in the Theo- gony of Pherecydes also occur in Orphic poems. The Cosmogony of Acusilans (Damascius, p. 313, after Eudemus), in which TEther, Eros, and Metis, are made the children of Erebos and Night, also has an Orphic colour. See below, § 6.
 * Sturz de Pherecyde p. 40. sqq. The mixture of divine beings (fctucgatria), the