Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/258

236 236 HISTORY OF THE (// (Tvt'fidrjc), — for there were others still more wild and extravagant,— and which probahly formed a part of the long poetical collection of " Sacred Legends," which has been already mentioned. We see, at the very outset of the Orphic theogony, an attempt to refine upon the theogony of Hesiod, and to arrive at higher abstrac- tions than his chaos. The Orphic theogony placed Chronos, Time, at the head of all things, and conferred upon it life and creative power. Chronos was then described as spontaneously producing chaos and aether, and forming from chaos, within the aether, a mundane egg;, of brilliant white. The mundane egg is a notion which the Orphic poets had in common with many Oriental systems; traces of it also occur in ancient Greek legends, as in that of the Dioscuri; but the Orphic poets first developed it among the Greeks. The whole essence of the world was supposed to be contained in this egg -, and to grow from it, like the life of a bird. The mundane egg, which included the matter of chaos, was impregnated by the winds, that is, by the eether in motion; and thence aio c e the golden-winged Eros*. The notion of Eros, as a cosmogonic being, is carried much further by the Orphic poets than by Hesiod. They also culled him Metis, the mind of the world. The name of Phanes first became common in Orphic poetry of a later date. The Orphic poets conceived this Eros-Phanes as a pantheistic being; the parts of the world forming, as it were, the limbs of his body, and being thus united into an organic whole. The heaven was his head, the earth his foot, the sun and moon his eyes, the rising and setting of the heavenly bodies his horns. An Orphic poet addresses Phanes in the following poetical language : " Thy tears are the hapless race of men; by thy laugh thou hast raised up the sacred race of the gods." Eros then gives birth to a long series of gods, similar to that in Hesiod. By his daughter, Night, he produces Heaven and Earth; these then bring forth the Titans, among whom Cronus and Rhea become the parents of Zeus. The Orphic poets, as well as Hesiod, made Zeus the supreme god at this period of the world. He was, therefore, supposed to supplant Eros-Phanes, and to unite this being with himself. Hence arose the fable of Zeus having swallowed Phanes; which is evidently taken from the story in Hesiod, that Zeus swallowed Metis, the goddess of wisdom. Hesiod, however, merely meant to imply that Zeus knows all things that concern our weal or woe; while the Orphic poets go further, and endow their Zeus with the anima mundi. Accordingly, they represent Zeus as now being the first and last; the beginning, middle, and end; man and woman; and, in fine, everything. Nevertheless, the universe was conceived to according to which the Orphic verse in Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iii. 26. should be thus understood : Avrap 'ioura £»«'vjj (not KoUii) no.) ■xvivpura. vuvrx (rn the nominative case) Irixvatrt*.
 * This feature is al.-o in the burlesque Orphic cosmogony in Aristoph. Av. 694;