La “contradicción” del sistema

The third of the three theogonies cited by Damascius (above, p. 68) was `the theology recorded in the Peripatetic Eudemus as being that of Orpheus'. In one of his works, we do not know which, Eudemus surveyed the theogonic doctrines of earlier thinkers, both

Greek and barbarian. Besides Orpheus he discussed Homer, Hesiod, Acusilaus,

Epimenides, Pherecydes, the Babylonians, Persians, and Phoenicians. We know all this from the same long passage of Damascius, in which Eudemus is repeatedly mentioned and is evidently the primary source.¹ Eudemus is much quoted by the Neoplatonists, and there is no doubt that they had direct access to his works. There are several indications that Damascius' account of his theogonic discussion is substantially accurate.²

The Genealogical Framework

It appears from Damascius' words that Eudemus described a theogony and said that this was the theogony of Orpheus, or the one said to be by Orpheus. In other words Eudemus knew one Orphic theogony, and was not troubled as we are by the complication of

knowing more than one. Damascius unfor-fortunately reproduces only one fact about it. It began from Night, and nothing was mentioned before Night.

Aristotle, too, speaks of `theologians' who derive everything from Night.³ He is clearly not thinking of theogonies like those ascribed to Musaeus and Epimenides, which began from a pair, Tartarus and Night, or Aer and Night. He has in view a theogony where Night

alone occupied the first place, and it was surely the Orphic one described by his pupil and colleague Eudemus. Two additional details can be gathered from what he says. The

theogony did not represent Night itself as having

1 See F. Wehrli, Eudemos von Rhodos (1955), fr. 150, with commentary, pp. 121-3.

2 Wehrli, l.c.

3Metaph. 1071b27 = fr. 24 Kern; cf. 1072a8, and the `ancient poets' in 1091b4 (Night and Heaven).

a beginning: it did not say that Night `came into being' (as Hesiod says `First Chaos came into being') but that `Night was in the beginning' (as Aristophanes' birds say

`There was Chaos and Night and black Erebos first'). The ruler of the world was not Night but Zeus.

Plato in the Timaeus (40e) summarizes a theogony which comes from `the offspring of gods, as they said'. He must mean either Orpheus or Musaeus; he speaks of their claim to divine parentage in very similar terms elsewhere.4 Musaeus, however, is unlikely,

because none of Plato's or Aristotle's (or any earlier writer's) mentions of Musaeus clearly refers to a theogony under his name, and Eudemus does not seem to have included one in his survey. Hellenistic authors knew one, but we cannot detect any points of contact between it and the divine genealogy of the Timaeus.5 On the other hand Plato does quote twice elsewhere from an Orphic theogony (see below). The likelihood is that the Timaeus genealogy is derived from the same poem. It is also likely to be the same as the Orphic theogony to which Aristotle and Eudemus alluded. What Plato knew, Aristotle

knew; and particularly where Aristotle turns aside to consider philosophical implications in early poetry, he follows his master's lead.6

The Timaeus genealogy runs:

From Ge and Uranos the children born were Oceanus and Tethys; from these, Phorkys and Kronos and Rhea and all of that brood; from Kronos and Rhea, Zeus and Hera and all their brothers and sisters we hear tell of; and again from these more children.

The fact that Night does not appear at the beginning is no obstacle to the identification of this poem with the Eudemian Theogony. In the Timaeus all gods are sprung from the great Demiurge; and night cannot be a god, being merely something produced by the earth's shadow (40c) and a unit of time. Plato is not concerned to do justice to Orpheus' scheme, he is just taking what he wants from it. It is inconceivable that the poem had nothing before Ge and Uranos, and there is nothing against supplying Night there. There is in fact a passage of John

4Rep. 364e/366b. Cf. Staudacher, 79 n. 14. Linforth, 109 is hypercritical.

5 Cf. p. 42.

6Metaph. 983b28, Meteor. 347a6 ~ Crat. 402b, Theaet. 152e; Metaph. 984b23 ~ Symp. 178b; 986b21 ~ Soph.

242d.

Lydus where the first principles according to Orpheus are said to be Night, Earth, and Heaven. This does not agree with the only Orphic theogony current in Lydus' time, the Rhapsodies, and the most likely hypothesis is that he got it directly or indirectly from Eudemus.⁷

We can accordingly put together a genealogy as follows:

Here are six generations; and in Philebus 66c (= fr. 14 Kern) Plato quotes a verse of Orpheus

In the sixth generation end the array of song.

This instruction must have been addressed to the Muses in a proem in which they were told what to sing.⁸

In Cratylus 402b (= fr. 15 K.) Plato quotes the verses

Oceanus first, the fair-flowing, initiated marriage;

he was husband to Tethys, his own sister from one mother.

He quotes them in support of a playful argument that more than one of the older poets anticipated the Heraclitean doctrine of flux. The fragment is in accord with our genealogy to the extent that the marriage of Oceanus and Tethys is put at an early stage, before those of Phorkys and Kronos. But `first initiated marriage' is problematic if Oceanus and Tethys were

7 Lyd. De mens. 2.8 = fr. 310 Kern. The Eudemus he cites in De mens. 4.98 seems to be another. His other quotations from Orpheus come from the Neopythagorean Hymn to Number (frr. 309, 312, 316, probably also 276), which cannot be in question here.

8 Schuster, 13; O. Gruppe, Jahrb. f. cl. Phil., Suppl. 17 (1890), 694 n. 1; cf. Hes. Th. 105 ff. `In the sixth generation' should not be taken to mean that there were only five generations (Linforth, 149); see Holwerda, 371 n. 1. In my identification of the six generations I follow Gruppe, 703, and E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen (6th ed. rev. W.

Nestle, 1919-20), i. 123 n. 2. I can see no ground for the idea of A. Dieterich, Abraxas (1891), 128 n. 2, and Moulinier, 22, that human generations in a myth of Ages are meant. These are in Hesiod, not , and in the only known Orphic version (pp. 75, 97, 107) there were only three of them, not six.

preceded by Uranos and Ge. It is quite artificial to say that the union of Uranos and Ge was something cruder than a gamos;⁹ the Greek word can be used of any mating. If the meaning is that Oceanus was the first of his generation to marry,¹⁰ then the question arises what brothers or sisters he had besides Tethys. Plato does not mention anythough he might have omitted figures such as Pontos, Sea (born from Ge in Hesiod) in order to concentrate on the main line of descent. I shall suggest another answer presently.

It is clear that this poem cannot be identified with the Protogonos Theogony. There too Night was the mother of Uranos and Ge, but she was not the first deity of all. There was no intermediate generation between Uranos and Kronos.

The Primeval Parents

So much for the fourth-century Athenian evidence. It will be possible later to enlarge our knowledge of the poem from another source. But first let us reflect on what we have put together so far and compare it with the Hesiodic genealogy of gods.

In Hesiod the children of Uranos and Ge comprise twelve Titans, three Cyclopes, and three Hundred-Handers. The Titans include Oceanus and Tethys and Kronos and Rhea.

Oceanus and Tethys, however, seem somewhat out of place in this company, for the Titans are essentially gods who have been condemned to Tartarus, and Oceanus was never in Tartarus; he is part of the upper world. Hesiod even represents him as assisting Zeus against the Titans by sending his daughter Styx with her children Zelos, Nike,

Kratos, and Bie (Th. 389-98). In Homer, too, Oceanus and Tethys stay well out of the Titanomachy: Hera is evacuated to them (Il. 14.200-4). In the same passage they are referred to as

Oceanus the genesis of the gods, and mother Tethys,11

9 Schuster, 9-11. `From the same mother' carries no implication that they had no father. Cf. Ar. Nub. 1371-2,

`And at once he started some Euripidean speech about a brother who (Lord save us) screwed his sister from the same mother', with the scholium, `As the Athenians permit marriage with half-sisters from the father, he added ''from the same mother" to emphasize the outrage'.

10 Lobeck, 508; O. Kern, De Orphei Epimenidis Pherecydis theogoniis quaestiones criticae (1888), 43; Holwerda, 314;

Staudacher, 93.

11 201. Cf. 246, `Oceanus, who is the genesis of all'.

which puts them in an earlier generation than the Titans. Hesiod's accommodation of them in the list of Titans, then, appears to be something secondary and artificial, a

matter of administrative convenience, whereas their position in an anterior generation in the Orphic theogony is a better reflection of their status in mythological tradition.

But in Homer Oceanus and Tethys are not children of Uranos and Ge, they are themselves the primeval parents, long estranged from each other.12 The Orphic

genealogy is a compromise between the primacy of Oceanus and Tethys and the primacy of Uranos and Ge. This suggests a new explanation of the verse `Oceanus first, the fair-flowing, initiated marriage'. Perhaps it was originally composed for a theogony in which it was literally true, and the Orphic theogony known to Plato was an adaptation of such a poem, in which the verse was allowed to stand but made to bear a different, forced sense.

The Iliad passage has another point of contact with the Orphic theogony. It mentions the goddess Night, and it mentions her as being a goddess of such high status that even Zeus in a rage is afraid to offend her (261). Otto Gruppe, following Damascius, conjectured that Homer knew a genealogy in which she stood even before Oceanus and Tethys.¹³ In that case we would have a direct precedent for the Orphic genealogy; Uranos and Ge would simply have been inserted between Night and Oceanus.

Hera says in the Iliad passage that Oceanus and Tethys have long been estranged from each other by quarrelling (205). Behind this Olympian gossip there may lie a cosmogonic myth, for the separation of primeval parents who were originally united is a familiar

cosmogonic motif. Usually they are Earth and Heaven.¹⁴ But in the Babylonian Enûma Elis

* they are, as

12 205-7. The Olympians however are , 1.570, al. An ancient scholar whose view is reproduced in the Etymologicum Genuinum and Magnum s.v. explained Acmon, the father of Uranos according to certain poets, as equivalent to Oceanus: a false theory, but based on the idea that Oceanus had been regarded as father of Uranos. Perhaps only a construction from Homer. Theodoretus, Curat. Affect. Gr. 2.28, oddly attributes to Hesiod a genealogy in which Oceanus and Tethys do precede Uranos and Ge, being themselves preceded by Chaos.

13Die griech. Culte und Mythen, i (1887), 618. We may not argue against this conjecture with Schwabl, 1438 that

`genesis of the gods' means that there was nothing before Oceanus.

14 See Staudacher's monograph.

was mentioned earlier, the aquatic figures Apsû and Tiâmata suggestive parallel to Oceanus and Tethys.

The Titans

The children of Oceanus and Tethys in the Orphic poem are named as `Phorkys, Kronos, Rhea, and all the rest'. This is the brood that corresponds to Hesiod's twelve Titans. But Phorkys belongs in Hesiod to a different family, as a son of Pontos. The other place where he appears as a Titan is in the Orphic Rhapsodies (fr. 114), where the Titans number fourteen: Hesiod's twelve plus Phorkys and Dione. It is tempting to guess that in the poem known to Plato Phorkys and Dione were counted among the Titans to make the number up to twelve because Oceanus and Tethys were otherwise accounted for.

If Dione was a Titan, Aphrodite was probably made her daughter by Zeus instead of

being born from Uranos' genitals. Perhaps the whole story of the castration of Uranos was absent from this poem, as the Titans were not his children but his grandchildren. As we have noted similarities between the Orphic poet's system and that of the Iliad, it may be worth observing that Zeus and Dione are Aphrodite's parents in that poem.15 In the

Rhapsodies we seem to have a compromise between birth from a solitary ejaculation by Zeus (Protogonos Theogony, p. 91) and birth from Dione: Zeus has the ejaculation while pursuing Dione.16

The Cyclic Theogony

We have not finished with the Eudemian Theogony, but to get further with it we must at this point start off on a new line of investigation.

At the beginning of Apollodorus' Bibliotheca (1.1) we find an account of the early history of the gods, from the reign of

15 Cf. also the list of gods in Hes. Th. 11-21, which associates Dione with Aphrodite (unlike the main part of the poem, where she is merely a nymph) and ends with Ge, Oceanus, and Night.

16 Frr. 183-4, cf. p. 73. The combination is obviously modelled on the myth of the birth of Erichthonios, in which Hephaestus, pursuing Athena, ejaculated on her leg, and she wiped the semen off with a piece of wool (erion) and threw it on the ground (chthon). (This version Apollod. 3.14.6.3, sch. Pl. Tim. 23e; others in E. fr. 925 (Hyg. Fab.

166) and Amelesagoras 330 F 1.)

Uranos to the nurture of Zeus in Crete, which agrees in most details with section C of the Orphic Rhapsodies (p. 71).

Rhapsodies Apollodorus

Uranos was the first king after his mother Night; he and Ge contract the first marriage. She gives birth to the Moirai;

Kottos, Briareos, Gyges (100Handers);

Brontes, Steropes, Arges (Cyclopes).

Uranos was the first ruler of the world.

He marries Ge.

She gives birth to

Kottos, Briareos, Gyges (100Handers);

Brontes, Steropes, Arges (Cyclopes).

1.1.12 Uranos has heard that he will be

deposed by his own children, and when he sees this stern, lawless brood, he throws them into Tartarus. Ge is angry, and secretly gives birth to the Titans and Titanides:

Uranos binds them and throws them into Tartarus, which is as far below the earth as earth is below heaven.

He fathers more children on Ge: the Titans and Titanides: stays aloof. The deed is done when Uranos comes to lie with Ge. Uranos is cast down from his car (?). The genitals are thrown in the sea, foam forms, and Aphrodite is born; she is received by Zelos and Apate. From the blood the Giants are born.

Ge, angry, incites the Titans to castrate Uranos, and gives Kronos an adamantine sickle. They attack Uranos, Oceanus remaining aloof. Uranos is deposed and the imprisoned brothers released. The genitals are thrown in the sea.

From the blood the Erinyes are born, Alecto, Teisiphone, and Megaira.

1.1.4

Kronos is now king, enthroned upon Olympus.

The Titan brothers and sisters marry one another. Oceanus is set apart and dwells in his remote streams. Kronos' rule is tyrannical. He has children by Rhea (incl. Hera and Hestia), but swallows at least the males.

Kronos is given the kingship. He reimprisons the brothers just freed from Tartarus. He marries Rhea. (For the other Titan

marriages Ap. follows Hesiod, 1.2.2-5, and adds Pontos' family from the same source.) Ge and Uranos foretell that Kronos will be deposed by one of his children, so he swallows them: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Pluto, Poseidon. 1.1.5

Zeus, however, is concealed in the cave of Night, and nursed by the nymphs Adrastea and Ida, daughters of Melissos and Amalthea. Adrastea clashes bronze cymbals at the cave entrance, and mother and child are also guarded by

Rhea, angry, goes to Crete when pregnant with Zeus, and he is born in a cave on Dicte and nursed by the Kouretes and the

nymphs Adrastea and Ida, daughters of Melisseus, who rear him on the milk of Amalthea.

the three Kouretes, who are themselves sons of Rhea. As mother of Zeus Rhea becomes

`Demeter'. She gives Kronos a swaddled stone to swallow, which makes him vomit up his children.

Apollodorus' narrative continues with an otherwise unknown version of the Titanomachy, in which, after the war has gone on for ten years, Ge prophesies that Zeus will be

victorious if he enlists the aid of the gods imprisoned in Tartarus. He goes and releases them, killing their warder, the monster Kampe. The Cyclopes then arm Zeus with the thunderbolt, Pluto with the helmet of invisibility, and Poseidon with the trident. With the advantage of this special equipment they defeat the Titans, consign them to Tartarus, and set the Hundred-Handers to guard them. The conclusion again parallels the

Rhapsodies:

Hades occupies the lower world, Poseidon the sea, while Zeus rides a goat up to heaven.

They draw lots, and Zeus obtains power in heaven, Poseidon in the sea, Pluto in Hades. 1.2.1.4

At first glance the significance of these comparisons may seem questionable. A sceptic could point to the presence in Hesiod of nearly all the constituents of Apollodorus'

account. There are, however, several features in which it differs from Hesiod and agrees with the Orphic narrative:

1. Uranos is expressly designated as the first ruler of the world (with a qualification in the Rhapsodies).¹⁷

2. The Hundred-Handers and Cyclopes are born before the Titans, not after. Uranos throws them into Tartarus, and it is this that leads the Titans to castrate him.

3. Dione appears as a Titan in addition to the Hesiodic twelve.

4. Oceanus is expressly excluded from the assault on Uranos.

5. Zeus is nurtured by the nymphs Adrastea and Ida, daughters of Melissos or Melisseus, and guarded by the Kouretes. Amalthea is also mentioned.

17 Fr. 111 `who first became king of the gods, after his mother Night'. In Hesiod only Kronos and Zeus are called kings.

6. The division of the universe among the three sons of Kronos is described.

There are a few discrepancies between Apollodorus and the Rhapsodies. Some of them can be explained from Apollodorus' own disposition of material. He omits the Moirai from among the children of Ge because he is going to present them as daughters of Zeus and Themis in 1.3.1.1. He omits Phorkys from the list of Titans because in 1.2.6-7 he is going to reproduce Hesiod's stemma of the children of Pontos, and Phorkys has his place there.

He omits the birth of the Giants from the drops of blood because he is reserving their birth for 1.6.1, where he will tell of their battle against the gods. The Erinyes, whom he does record as born from the blood, were probably mentioned with the Giants in the Rhapsodies (as in Hesiod, Th. 185); it is a mere accident that this is not attested in the fragments. Other discrepancies may reflect real differences of detail between Apollodorus' immediate source and the Rhapsodies. When Apollodorus omits the birth of Aphrodite from the severed genitals of Uranos and later (1.3.1.1) makes her the daughter of Zeus and Dione, this may be all that his source gave, as against the two births which she had in the Rhapsodies. Zeus is brought up in the cave of Night according to the Rhapsodies,

He omits the birth of the Giants from the drops of blood because he is reserving their birth for 1.6.1, where he will tell of their battle against the gods. The Erinyes, whom he does record as born from the blood, were probably mentioned with the Giants in the Rhapsodies (as in Hesiod, Th. 185); it is a mere accident that this is not attested in the fragments. Other discrepancies may reflect real differences of detail between Apollodorus' immediate source and the Rhapsodies. When Apollodorus omits the birth of Aphrodite from the severed genitals of Uranos and later (1.3.1.1) makes her the daughter of Zeus and Dione, this may be all that his source gave, as against the two births which she had in the Rhapsodies. Zeus is brought up in the cave of Night according to the Rhapsodies,

In document EL GRAFFITIMOWMENT EN VALLECAS (página 108-114)