Ritual Texts for the Afterlife

Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets

Fritz Graf, Sarah Johnston, Sarah Iles Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136750793
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Fascinating texts written on small gold tablets that were deposited in graves provide a unique source of information about what some Greeks and Romans believed regarding the fate that awaited them after death, and how they could influence it. These texts, dating from the late fifth century BCE to the second century CE, have been part of the scholarly debate on ancient afterlife beliefs since the end of the nineteenth century. Recent finds and analysis of the texts have reshaped our understanding of their purpose and of the perceived afterlife.

The tablets belonged to those who had been initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus Bacchius and relied heavily upon myths narrated in poems ascribed to the mythical singer Orpheus. After providing the Greek text and a translation of all the available tablets, the authors analyze their role in the mysteries of Dionysus, and present an outline of the myths concerning the origins of humanity and of the sacred texts that the Greeks ascribed to Orpheus. Related ancient texts are also appended in English translations. Providing the first book-length edition and discussion of these enigmatic texts in English, and their first English translation, this book is essential to the study of ancient Greek religion.

1

THE TABLETS

An edition and translation

Fritz Graf (edition) and Sarah Iles Johnston (translation)

Preface

The edition has a double aim: to present a readable text, and to give an impression of the physical appearance of each individual document. Thus, we do not give a critical text, either in a philological or an epigraphical sense – we use the often threatening panoply of such an edition as sparingly as possible, and we indicate readings and scholarly conjectures only where absolutely necessary.¹ Readers interested in these matters should consult one of the more recent critical editions, preferably Bernabé’s Teubner text. None of these editions preserve the Greek in the form it appears on the tablets, instead translating it into uniform Attic spelling and sometimes reconstructing words that the writer did not intend to write. One needs to retain the exact spelling of words as they appear on the tablets in order to understand the degree of literacy possessed by these local writers, and to judge the editorial decisions of modern editors.

To give two examples, one trivial, one less so. First, the most complete and least corrupt tablet from the Timpone Piccolo in Thurii (Zuntz A 1, our no. 5) twice writes double-s before a hard consonant inside of a word (ἀσστεροβλῆτα 4, δεσσποίνας 7; against μακάριστε in 9): the gemination of -σ– in this position is common in Greek, and no editor should normalize it.² Second, line 14 of the Hipponion tablet ends with the word BAΣIΛEI, i.e.,

, “to the king,” after which there is ample space: the writer thus wanted his line to end like this. Although this text is metrically correct, many editors have changed the final word to the metrically equally correct βασιλείαι, “to the queen,” for reasons of mythology: in “Orphic” myth, Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld, is much more prominent than her husband. But mythology is a somewhat uncertain guide: at least in South Italian vase images, such as the one in Toledo (Figure 4, p. 64), Hades is as much present as is his queen.

Unlike in any other edition, the arrangement of the texts here follows geographical criteria. To group them in A and B texts, following Zuntz’s arrangement, is impossible because some of the more recent texts clearly override such a neat dichotomy; to group them according to a reconstructed narrative, as Bernabé and Jiménez San Cristóbal do, begs the question of how they belong together. A geographically determined arrangement not only avoids these problems, but also makes manifest the local groupings and idiosyncracies of these texts: after all, they sometimes belonged to local groups and always attest to the activities of a local orpheotelestēs.³

We use quotation marks to indicate portions of the texts that either are phrases to be repeated by the addressee, i.e., by the soul of the deceased, or are spoken by someone other than the main voice of the tablet in question.

The bibliographical data we have provided list the most important first editions and refer, in an abbreviated form, to the most recent critical editions:

G. Zuntz, Persephone. Three Essays on Religion and Thought in Magna Graecia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

C. Riedweg, “Anhang: Übersicht und Texte der bisher publizierten Goldblättchen,” in: Riedweg 1998, 389–98 [uses the expanded classification of Zuntz].

G. Pugliese Carratelli, Le lamine d’oro orfiche. Istruzioni per il viaggio oltremondano degli iniziati Greci (Milan: Adelphi. 2001) (with an important correction in La Parola del Passato 53, 2002, 228–30).⁴

Alberto Bernabé, Poetae Epici Graeci. II O...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• 1 The tablets: An edition and translation Concordance
• 2 A history of scholarship on the tablets
• 3 The myth of Dionysus
• 4 The eschatology behind the tablets
• 5 Dionysiac mystery cults and the Gold Tablets
• 6 Orpheus, his poetry, and sacred texts
• Appendix 1: Orphism in the twenty-first century
• Appendix 2: The tablets from Pherae
• Appendix 3: The tablets from Roman Palestine
• Appendix 4: Additional Bacchic texts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Subject index
• Index of ancient texts