Orpheus’ Head at the Mouth of the Meles: Conon Narratives 45

MA Dissertation - updated 2021, 2013

Although absent from early Archaic sources by the sixth century BCE Orpheus the poet had become synonymous with poetry and inspiration. This essay will examine the emergence of the myths of Orpheus in Archaic Greece with a view to understanding his place in society. This will entail the exploration of the relationship between poetry and the evolving role of the individual in Archaic society in order to clarify the context in which Orpheus came to prominence. By examining the changing role of the poet within society one can understand ways in which the evolution of Archaic society, including the development of the polis and what has been termed ‘the rise of the individual,’ may have influenced the creation and performance of poetry. These factors, together with the absorption of new cultural influences into Greek society and the development of new attitudes to the afterlife created the social context in which the Orpheus myths took form. This work will clarify the extent to which changing values found expression in the figure of Orpheus and the ways in which the elements of the myths reflected contemporary social concerns. Consideration will be given to claims of exotic influence made by modern scholars and the extent to which Orpheus’ mythology made him a suitable vehicle for the importation of exotic ideas such as reincarnation and metempsychosis and whether these myths expressed the concerns of a society increasingly preoccupied with the fate of the individual soul after death. Orpheus’ perceived otherness made him a liminal figure who crossed boundaries in transcending and uniting the divisions between the animal, human and divine worlds. This work will highlight ways in which the mythical Orpheus was essentially a construct of Archaic Greek society and reflected notions concerned with poetry, heroic identity and immortality inherent in this culture.

The question of the authorship of the two Homeric epics - whether there was one Homer, or two - has vexed scholars since the inception of critical literary study. The more bellicose, less inner and mysterious Iliad was by far the more popular poem in antiquity. And although the later Aeneid of Virgil tendentiously fuses together war and nostos (homecoming), it is of arms and a man, not a man of many ways and wiles, that the Roman poet sings. Odysseus is likened, invidiously, to a Canaanite (Phoenician) traveling merchant in his flexibility and adaptability - he, the "rootless cosmopolitan" of his remote age, resonates with the predicament of alienation of modern man and with the psychological depth of the modern literary sensibility, then bellicose, candid, limited Achilles and Aeneas. It is proposed in the article that the Odyssey employs the topos of a man traveling in search of lost members of his family, with a happy resolution, that seems indeed to have been peculiarly popular over many centuries with Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The author suggests indeed that Menaechmus, the name of a character in a play based on this topos with a Punic setting that might even have been performed, in a Northwest Semitic translation in Qart.adast (Newtown, i.e., Carthage) itself, is merely the very common Hebrew name Menachem. And it is noted that the topos recurs, employed in aid of religious propaganda of the Jewish Christians, in the setting of the PseudoClementine Recognitions.

2013

Whereas Silius’ indebtedness to Virgil’s Aeneid has received a lot of scholarly attention, the relationship between the Punica and the epic of his contemporary Valerius Flaccus has not. This is due to the fact that intertextual contact seems to be practically non-existent or is at least very hard to pin down. In this paper I will argue for an intertextual link between the manifestations of the archetypal poet Orpheus in both Flavian epics, which might explain why the intertextual between the two poems is so hard to detect. As I will suggest, the appearance of Orpheus in the Punica, in the context of the Argonautic expedition (11.469-72), functions as a sly metapoetical allusion to the Flavian Argonautica, revealing the different programmatic positions taken by both Flavian poets with regard to the epic tradition.

A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, 2017

Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments, 2011

Kernos. Revue internationale et pluridisciplinaire de religion grecque antique 32 (2019): 13-28, 2019

The man in a Thracian outfit represented on a hydria from London as eating a dead child has been interpreted as a Titan with Zagreus or Lycurgus with his son. Neither of these interpretations seems plausible, especially in light of our present knowledge about sacrificial rules. As I argue, the image is more likely to be inspired by a story dramatized by Aeschylus in the Lycurgeia, in which an advent of Dionysus to the country ruled by Lycurgus caused a cannibalism epidemic. With much likelihood, this motif was also present in an, unfortunately only partially preserved, passage in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (21.117–123). This mythical crisis was subsequently solved by Orpheus, which results from passages in Aristophanes, Horace and Themistius, who allude to a rationalized version of this story.

1992

Mythos. Rivista di Storia dei Religioni (open access on the site of the Journal), 2020

Starting with pointing at the presence of a specific ethnic and geographical duality of Orpheus in the mythical image, the article aims to explain the context of the appearance and function of his tomb and statues in Pieria. Re-analysis of the testimonies reveals the discrepancies between the early sources and their subsequent transformations, as well as some kind of tensions between Thracian and Pierian context in the mythical stories about Orpheus. The analysis of the circumstances in which certain features of the mythical image appear will allow us to pose a question about the role of his cult and tomb within the phenomenon of the cult of the poets, on the one side, and King Archelaos’ cultural politics, on the other. In my conclusions I try to show that the cult of the Muses, as well as the tomb and the heroic cult of Orpheus in Pieria was part of the "Hellenizing" policy of Macedon, as well as an important element of the newly constructed cultural identity of the Macedonians as true "Hellenes".