[45] According to the Ὀρφικὰ ἔπη καλούμενα, ap. Arist. de An. 1, 5, p. 410b, 28 ff.: τὴν ψυχὴν ἐκ τοῦ ὅλου εἰσιέναι ἀναπνεόντων φερομένην ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνέμων. (The ancient commentators add nothing fresh.) ἐκ τοῦ ὅλου means simply “out of space”. The ἄνεμοι were regarded as daimonic powers subordinate and related to the Τριτοπάτορες: see above, chap. v, [n. 124]. We cannot say how this conception was made to square with the other articles of Orphic belief (purgation of souls in Hades, etc.). It is plainly nothing but an attempt at such reconciliation that (following the Rhapsodiai, fr. 224) makes the souls that pass in death out of the bodies of men, go into Hades, while those that have inhabited the bodies of animals fly about in the wind εἰσόκεν αὐτὰς ἄλλο ἀφαρπάζῃ μίγδην ἀνέμοιο πνοῇσιν. Aristotle knows nothing of any such restriction. Plato (Phd. 81 D; rather differently 108 AB) apparently making free use of Orphic ideas regards all the μὴ καθαρῶς ἀπολυθεῖσαι ψυχαί as liable to the same fate as that allotted by the Rhapsodiai to the beasts. (Of course it is possible to suppose that the ψυχαί on being released from Hades for a new ἐνσωμάτωσις first of all fly about in the wind round the dwelling places of the living and are then breathed into a new body. This would not prevent there being a predestined conjunction of a particular soul with the particular σῶμα corresponding to its state of purification.)—The establishment in later Orphic poetry of the theory that the ψυχαί dwelt in the air may have been assisted by the philosophic theory of the soaring-up of the πνεύματα into their element the aether (of which more [below]). This theory, though not first put forward by the Stoics, was specially favoured by them: it almost attained the status of a popularly accepted belief. When the realm of the souls had thus been at least in part transferred to the air, late Orphic poetry began to regard one of the four rivers of the soul-world, Ἀχέρων, as the ἀήρ: frr. 155, 156 (Rhaps.). There is no reason to see in all this the traces of a supposed ancient conception in which Okeanos is really a river in the sky (in spite of Bergk’s fanciful speculations in Opusc. ii, 691–6). The elevation of the soul-kingdom to the sky is in Greek thought invariably the result of comparatively late speculation. We might even ask whether there is not Egyptian influence at work in the transference of Okeanos (= the Milky Way?) to the sky. Such influence would be late of course; but in Egypt the idea of the Nile in the sky was quite familiar.
[46] κύκλος τῆς γενέσεως, fr. 226; ὁ τῆς μοίρας τροχός, rota fati et generationis: see Lob. 797 ff.
[47] οἱ δ’ αὐτοὶ πατέρες τε καὶ υἱέες ἐν μεγάροισιν (πολλάκις) ἠδ’ ἄλοχοι σεμναὶ κεδναί τε θύγατρες . . . γίγνοντ’ ἀλλήλων μεταμειβομένῃσι γενέθλαις, frr. 225, 222 (Rhaps.). Here, as Lob. 797 rightly remarks, there is an allusion to the dogma of the recurrence of exactly the same state of things in the world. The doctrine of complete παλιγγενεσία or ἀποκατάστασις ἁπαντων (see Gataker ad. M. Ant.1, p. 385) was closely and indeed indissolubly bound up with the doctrine of the migration of souls. (Illogicality belongs rather to the conception of the break in the circle caused by the secession of individual souls.) It was therefore found among the Pythagoreans to whom it is ascribed by Eudemos fr. 51 sp. (see Porph., VP. 19, p. 26, 23 ff. N.; used later still in a Pythagorean sense by Synes., Aeg. 2, 7, p. 62 f. Krab.). It was borrowed from the Pythagoreans by the Stoa (by Chrysippos esp.), which after its usual fashion pushed the rather bizarre fancy to pedantic extremes. (After the Stoic model is Plot. 5, 7, and perhaps also the genethliaci spoken of by Varro ap. Aug., CD. 22, 28.) It is at least [357] probable in the extreme that these ideas were first held by the Orphics and not borrowed by them from the Stoics: there are even traces in Orphic tradition of the great World-year (which is always closely connected with the ἀποκατάστασις τῶν ἁπάντων): Lob. 792 ff.
[48] κύκλον τε λῆξαι καὶ ἀναπνεῦσαι κακότητος were the words Proclus probably had before him: (fr. 226) in Tim. 330 B. The forms ἂν λήξαι καὶ ἀναπνεύσαι—thus rightly accented here by Schneider—come from Procl. himself, who accommodates the words of the original to the construction of his own sentence. We must therefore not write αὖ λῆξαι with Gale and Lob. 800. In this case the subject of the sentence is the praying soul; on the other hand, in the form preserved by Simp., κύκλον τ’ ἀλλῦσαι καὶ ἀναψῦξαι κακότητος, the subject is the gods to whom the soul prays; ψυχή being object. In either form the freeing of the soul from the circle is regarded as a grace from the gods.
[49] fr. 76. The lines of the Carm. Aur. 55 ff. (Nauck, p. 207) are probably modelled on the Orphic οὔτ’ ἀγαθοῦ παρεόντος κτλ. The point is: few are they who trouble about the salvation that Orpheus (or Pythagoras) brings them; the ὅσιοι are always a small minority.
[50] frr. 208, 226. Διόνυσος λυσεύς, λύσιος, θεοὶ λύσιοι; see Lob. 809 f. and cf. fr. 311 (Ficinus).
[51] Ὀρφέα τ’ ἄνακτ’ ἔχων βάκχευε . . . E. Hp. 953 (N.B. ἄναξ not δεσπότης, l. 88).
[52] Ὀρφικὸς βίος, Pl., Lg. 782 C; Lobeck, 244 ff.
[53] The Pythagorean ἔπου θεῷ, ἀκολουθεῖν τῷ θεῷ (Iamb., VP. 137, from Aristoxenos) might also have been given to the Orphics as their motto.
[54] ἄψυχος βορά of the Orphics: E., Hp. 952, Pl., Lg. 782 CD; Lob., p. 246. This, too, is the meaning of Ar., Ra. 1032, Ὀρφεὺς μὲν γὰρ τελετάς θ’ ἡμῖν κατέδειξε φόνων τ’ ἀπέχεσθαι, i.e. using slain animals for food. Hor., AP. 391 f.: silvestris homines . . . caedibus et victu foedo deterruit Orpheus means to speak not of the ritual vegetarianism of “Orpheus”, but of the previous cannibalism of men which Orpheus had put an end to. As this is nowhere else mentioned of Orpheus we might perhaps regard it as mistaken allusion on the part of Horace to the passage of Aristoph. quoted above. It is not, however, impossible that Horace did in fact have in mind some Orphic verse which really reported something like what he himself says of Orpheus. The Orphic fragment [247] ap. S.E., M. ii, 31; ix, 15 (Lob., p. 246), may have arisen in the same way; see Maass, Orpheus, 77. (The well-known lines of Kritias [S.E., M. ix, 54 fr. 25 Di.] and Moschion, p. 813 Nauck, can hardly have anything to do with Orphism and should rather be connected with the theories of the Sophists and Demokritos—followed later by the Epicureans—about the gradual evolution of human civilization from miserable and savage origins; and not from a “golden age” of which the Orphics too spoke.)