An Ancient "Whodunnit"
“...these Heraclitean doctrines (or, as you say, Homeric or still more ancient)...”
“Thus some people say that the body (sōma) is the tomb (sēma) of the soul, on the grounds that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called ‘a sign’ (‘sēma’) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body. I think it is most likely the followers of Orpheus who gave the body its name, with the idea that the soul is being punished for something, and that the body is an enclosure or prison in which the soul is securely kept (sōzetai)—as the name ‘sōma’ itself suggests—until the penalty is paid; for, on this view, not even a single letter of the word needs to be changed.”― Plato, Cratylus
“Perhaps in reality we’re dead. Once I even heard one of the wise men say that we are now dead and that our bodies are our tombs, and that the part of our souls in which our appetites reside is actually the sort of thing to be open to persuasion and to shift back and forth.”
― Plato, Gorgias
“Doesn't Heraclitus call birth a death, in conformity with Pythagoras and with Socrates in the Gorgias in this passage: "Death is all that we see when awake, dreams all that we see when asleep."?”
“Heraclitus certainly deprecates birth when he says, "Once born they have a desire to live and have their dooms," or rather enjoy their rest, "and they leave behind children to become dooms."”
― Clement of Alexandria
“Heraclitus says that both living and dying are in all living and in all dying: while we live our souls are dead and buried in us, and when we die our souls revive. Some people suppose that it is actually better for us to be dead than to be alive.”
― Sextus Empiricus
“It may also be possible to infer that Heraclitus was himself drawn to Orphic writings because he found therein a truer grasp of the workings of the cosmos than he found in Homer, Hesiod, and the other authors he criticizes. How much he borrowed and adapted from Orphic texts, and from the related Bacchic and Pythagorean beliefs and practices, we shall probably never know for certain. Clement, it is true, claims that Heraclitus derived most of his doctrines from Orpheus, but Clement was probably reading much late Orphic poetry modelled on Heraclitus as though it were Heraclitus who learned from Orpheus.”
― David Sider
“As everyone knows, Greek religion was not a 'religion of the book'. No doubt it acquired its distinctive stamp before writing was thought of. But it persisted as a religion 'not of the book' through something like a millennium of literacy. (And it had passed through an earlier literate phase in the Mycenaean period.) In this area, it seems, social factors prevented the 'technology of communication' from exercising a really decisive influence.
ReplyDeleteThe city used writing to record publicly its commitment, financial and so moral, to the cult of particular gods. What mattered about this declaration was that it could be seen to have been made, even if not all Athenians had the skill, and fewer still the interest, to read the dry and difficult inscriptions. Writing was not, by contrast, used to build up a complicated specialized corpus of ritual knowledge. We stressed earlier the crucial importance of the fact that 'sacred laws' (not a Greek term) are a subsection of the whole law-code of a community, not an independent category resting on a different authority. They are so, of course, because of the indissoluble unity of 'church and state' in Greece, powers that could never be at odds because they could never be clearly distinguished. A crucial aspect of this integration of religion in Greece is the ordinariness of the priests; they were ordinary in many ways, but above all in lacking all pretension to distinctive learning. Elaborate ritual texts are the hallmark of a more specialized priesthood and a more autonomous religious order than those of Greece.
The amateur status of the Greek priesthood was not affected in any way by the advent of the art of writing. One does not picture the priestess of an Athenian public cult with a book in her hand. The famous sixth-century marble sculptures of 'seated scribes' from the acropolis are generally held to represent not priests but, significantly, 'treasurers' or similar officials, bound to give account of the sacred monies in their care. When the religious book begins to appear, it is rather the mark of marginal figures, the wandering initiators and purifiers and prophets, who in the phrase of the Derveni papyrus 'make a craft out of rites'. Lacking a position in the civic religious structure, they naturally need to display credentials of other kinds. The association between bookishness and irregularity is at its clearest in Orphism.
Both in social and religious terms Orphism is profoundly unorthodox; and it displays several characteristics of a 'religion of the book', being indeed transmitted through a 'hubbub of books'. The only books of public cult, by contrast, are the calendars inscribed for all to view (though few to read) on wood or stone.”
― Robert Parker, Athenian Religion