In chapter 12 of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Socrates as the new Orpheus, who rises up against Dionysus and murders tragedy:
… in league with Socrates, Euripides dared to be the herald of a new kind of artistic creation. If this caused the older tragedy to perish, then aesthetic Socratism is the murderous principle; but in so far as the fight was directed against the Dionysiac nature of the older art, we may identify Socrates as the opponent of Dionysos, the new Orpheus who rises up against Dionysos and who, although fated to be torn apart by the maenads of the Athenian court of justice, nevertheless forces the great and mighty god himself to flee. As before, when he fled from Lycurgus, King of the Edonians, Dionysos now sought refuge in the depths of the sea, namely in the mystical waters of a secret cult which gradually spread across the entire world. (Trans. R. Speirs) (Cambridge, 1999), 64
For the story of Lycurgus’ resistance to Dionysus, Nietzsche follows Homer (Il. 6.130–40) and ps.-Apollodorus (Bibl. 3.5.1). But since neither of these authors mentions Orpheus in connection with the Thracian king, it is probable that Nietzsche is referring to the Bassarides, the second tragedy of Aeschylus’ lost Lycurgan tetralogy.Footnote 1 Only meagre fragments of the Bassarides survive, but a summary of the plot by ps.-Eratosthenes indicates that Orpheus was dismembered by maenads sent by Dionysus because of his exclusive devotion to Apollo:Footnote 2
[διὰ δὲ τὴν γυναῖκα εἰς Ἅιδου καταβὰς καὶ ἰδὼν τὰ ἐκεῖ οἷα ἦν] ὃς τὸν μὲν Διόνυσον οὐκ[έτι] ἐτίμα, [ὑφ’ οὗ ἦν δεδοξασμένος], τὸν δὲ Ἥλιον μέγιστον τῶν θεῶν ἐνόμιζεν εἶναι, ὃν καὶ Ἀπόλλωνα προσηγόρευσεν· ἐπεγειρόμενός τε τῆς νυκτὸς κατὰ τὴν ἑωθινὴν ἐπὶ τὸ ὄρος τὸ καλούμενον Πάγγαιον <ἀνιὼν>Footnote 3 προσέμενε τὰς ἀνατολάς, ἵνα ἴδηι τὸν Ἥλιον πρῶτον. ὅθεν ὁ Διόνυσος ὀργισθεὶς αὐτῶι ἔπεμψε τὰς Βασσαρίδας, ὥς φησιν Αἰσχύλος ὁ τῶν τραγωιδιῶν ποιητής, αἵτινες αὐτὸν διέσπασαν καὶ τὰ μέλη διέρριψαν χωρὶς ἕκαστον. αἱ δὲ Μοῦσαι συναγαγοῦσαι ἔθαψαν ἐπὶ τοῖς λεγομένοις Λειβήθροις. (ps.-Eratosth. [Cat.] 24 = S. Radt [ed.], TrGF 3, 138–9 = Orph. 536T + 1033T + 1070T + 1074T Bernabé)Footnote 4
[having descended to Hades on account of his wife and having seen what things there were like] … who did not [any longer] worship Dionysus [by whom he had been made famous], but considered Helios the greatest of the gods, whom he also addressed as Apollo. Getting up during the night and ascending the mountain called Pangaeum at dawn, he would wait for the sunrise, so as to be first to see the sun. Hence Dionysus, being angry with him, sent the Bassarids, as the tragedian Aeschylus says, who tore him to pieces and threw his limbs in different directions. But the Muses gathered them up and buried them in the place called Leibethra.
Like the Bacchae, for which it was an important model, the Lycurgia seems to have given a prominent place to reflection about mousikê.Footnote 5 Strabo quotes a passage from the Edonians in which the chorus compares the new cult's exotic instruments to those which they use in the worship of Cotys.Footnote 6 The fact that an entire tragedy was dedicated to the quintessential mousikos Orpheus points the same way:Footnote 7 the Bassarides, which ended with the gathering of Orpheus’ limbs by the Muses, was surely the focus of Aeschylus’ reflections about mousikê; above all, tragedy.
Starting from the hypothesis that metatragedy was an important element of the Bassarides, this paper will attempt to make sense of the conflict between Orpheus and Dionysus in terms of Orpheus’ two spheres of interest—mousikê and mysteries. Since, as I will argue, in both spheres, Orpheus was connected with transcendence of mortality, his collision with Dionysus invites reflection about the metaphysical significance of their differing types of mousikê and the antagonism between Orphic and Dionysiac rites. The way I read this collision, therefore, has a good deal in common with, and is also indebted to, Birth of Tragedy, in which the mysteries of Dionysus, as taught at Eleusis, provide the doctrinal underpinning for tragedy (Birth of Tragedy, ch. 10). Indeed, the connections between Birth of Tragedy and the Bassarides seem to me sufficiently striking for an argument to be made that Birth of Tragedy is, in part, an implicit commentary on Aeschylus. Birth of Tragedy will therefore be an important point of reference throughout this discussion. For reasons of space and focus, however, I will not attempt a systematic exploration of Nietzsche's use of the Bassarides. My focus will be the existential conflict between Orpheus and Dionysus in Aeschylus and the question of how it may have been resolved.
Let us begin, then, by following up on Nietzsche's implication that Socrates is the heir to Orpheus’ conflict with Dionysus. Presumably, his description of Socrates as the new Orpheus who murders tragedy refers not just to the Bassarides but also to the critique of tragedy in Republic 10. And there, too, we find a reference to Orpheus’ demise. In the Myth of Er's selection of lives, Orpheus is the first named figure (Resp. 620a). He chooses the life of a swan so as to avoid being born from a woman, because he hates women on account of his death at their hands. The swan is Apollo's bird, wherein lies the connection between Aeschylus’ Orpheus and Socrates. For, in the Phaedo, Socrates describes his philosophical activity as a kind of mousikê (60e-61b) and explicitly compares his discussion about the immortality of the soul with the swans’ song, calling himself a fellow-servant of their god (84e-85b). He says men are wrong to think that swans sing most beautifully when they are about to die because they are lamenting, for no bird sings when it is in distress. Rather, the swans are joyful because of their prophetic knowledge about the afterlife. Here then, Socrates, like Orpheus, is advocating an anti-tragic Apolline mousikê.Footnote 8
The correspondence is not coincidental. When Socrates compares his discussion about the afterlife with the Apolline swansong, he is engaging with ‘Orphic’ and Pythagorean ideas. Aristotle said that Pythagoras was known by the citizens of Croton as the Hyperborean Apollo.Footnote 9 According to Aristoxenus (fr. 15 Wehrli), Pythagoras got his doctrines from Delphi. One of the Pythagorean ‘symbols’ asks, ‘What is the Delphic oracle?’. The answer is ‘tetractys: the harmony in which the Sirens sing’. This contains, in nuce, the doctrine of cosmic harmony, for which, according to Plato's Cratylus (405c-d), ‘those clever in music and astronomy’, viz. the Pythagoreans (cf. Resp. 530d), worshipped Apollo as the symbol.Footnote 10
Orpheus is a virtual double of Apollo in early iconography; indeed, some sources make him the god's son.Footnote 11 Our earliest evidence for the singer is from Delphi: a relief of c. 570–560 from the treasury of the Sicyonians (LIMC s.v. ‘Orpheus’ 6) which depicts him standing beside the Argo with his lyre. In early epic, Orpheus accompanied the Argonauts in order to ensure them safe passage past the Sirens.Footnote 12 This points to his twin spheres of mousikê and eschatology. Given the importance which the Pythagoreans ascribed to these spheres, it is unsurprising that they were so closely entwined with the early history of things Orphic. Herodotus (2.81 = Orph. 650T) says that Orphic and Bacchic rites are really Egyptian and Pythagorean. He seems to be referring to reincarnation.Footnote 13 Orpheus’ connection with these rites must, in part, be due to texts in his name. Ion of Chios said that Pythagoras had published writings in Orpheus’ name (Orph. 1144T). The fourth-century grammarian Epigenes asserted that four Orphic poems were the work of Pythagoreans (Orph. 406T).Footnote 14
Plato's interest in Orphic and Pythagorean ideas is well known.Footnote 15 Dieterich argued long ago for their presence in Plato's eschatological myths, including the Myth of Er, in which reincarnation and cosmic harmony supervised by the Sirens play a key role.Footnote 16 In his re-working of the Myth of Er, Plutarch refers to an Orphic katabasis poem which mentioned an oracle at Delphi shared by Apollo (presumably Helios) and Night (De sera 566c). Martin West has suggested that, in his Bassarides, Aeschylus drew on this poem, which may have been Krater or a katabasis. He envisages Aeschylus’ Orpheus as a Pythagorean figure.Footnote 17
So Nietzsche, who sees Orphics, Pythagoreans and Plato as ideologically very close, has some justification for making Socrates the inheritor of Orpheus’ quarrel with the god of tragedy. That quarrel, in its Platonic instantiation, is articulated by the structure of Republic 10, which opposes two visions of human existence. Stephen Halliwell has convincingly argued that the critique of tragedy implies a conception of the tragic as a metaphysical vision that depends upon the belief that human suffering is of great significance. This premise, ‘if true, would negate [Plato's] philosophical enterprise at its roots’.Footnote 18 The seductiveness of this vision for the weaker parts of the soul is intensified by the power of the musico-poetic vehicle through which it is experienced; hence the need for a counter-charm. This we find in the anti-tragic Myth of Er, whose cosmic viewpoint looks to the possibility of the soul's final release from human concerns. The myth offers an imaginative vision of Plato's proposition that the individual's pursuit of goodness accords with the rational and harmonious order of the cosmos. Halliwell has argued that Plato was the first to articulate a concept of the tragic.Footnote 19 But the ideological collision in Republic 10 seems to have had an important precursor in Aeschylus’ Bassarides, with Orpheus embodying ideas which resembled those in the Myth of Er. In Aeschylus, Dionysus and tragedy were vindicated. Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy might therefore be interpreted as a correction of Plato's correction, a reinstatement of Aeschylean tragic poetics as against those of Nietzsche's ‘Antipodes’, Plato and Socrates.
THE LYCURGIA AND THE HELLENISTIC EPITOME OF THE BASSARIDES
With these models in mind, let us turn to Aeschylus’ Lycurgia. Footnote 20 The tetralogy was first performed in the 460s.Footnote 21 A scholion to Aristophanes (Thesm. 135) gives the titles as follows: Edonoi, Bassarides, Neaniskoi and Lykourgos (the satyr play). It is generally assumed that ps.-Apollodorus (Bibl. 3.5.1) preserves the outline of the tetralogy. The first half of the Edonians was reconstructed by Deichgräber on the basis of Aeschylean fragments and those of Naevius’ Lycurgus. The fragment in Strabo (fr. 57 Radt) describing the exotic instruments of Dionysus’ followers is from the parodos. A scene of confrontation between Lycurgus and the god probably came next, followed by the imprisonment of Dionysus and his entourage. There are obvious parallels with the Bacchae both here and in the earthquake which rocks the palace after the god's escape (fr. 58). Ps.-Apollodorus recounts the king's murder of his son, whom, in the grip of madness, he mistook for a vine branch and cut down with an axe.Footnote 22 The Edonians probably concluded with anagnōrisis and lamentation, like the Bacchae. The expiation of this crime seems to have been the subject of the third play, Youths, whose chorus probably comprised the companions of the murdered boy.
As for the Bassarides, there are two manuscript traditions for ps.-Eratosthenes’ epitome. As Martin West has demonstrated, both are ancient; the tradition with greater detail (T and R) was read by the Latin scholiasts who refer to the story. According to this longer version, which West considers Aeschylean,Footnote 23 Orpheus was an apostate who turned away from his ‘original’ worship of Dionysus and became a devotee of Apollo because of knowledge acquired on his journey to the underworld to fetch his wife.Footnote 24 Massimo Di Marco, however, has argued plausibly that the supplements in T and R are not Aeschylean but derive from elsewhere in the Orpheus tradition.Footnote 25 As he points out, the sequence in T and R does not fit well with the chronology of the tetralogy, which treated Dionysus’ arrival in Thrace from Phrygia. If, as their longer version requires, Orpheus is Dionysian in the Edonians, he will need to have lost his wife and made his underworld journey and religious conversion in between the Edonians and the Bassarides. This does not seem plausible. Furthermore, Orpheus was never depicted as an easterner at this stage in the tradition and, hence, cannot have been a member of Dionysus’ Phrygian entourage.Footnote 26 Given the setting of the Bassarides, it is probable that Aeschylus made Orpheus a Pierian Thracian.Footnote 27 Orpheus’ ethnicity weighs decisively against the apostate idea and in favour of the shorter version, namely that Orpheus was originally devoted to Apollo, but then was forced to understanding of Dionysus in death. Whether or not his worship of Apollo was connected with knowledge acquired on a katabasis (perhaps for the sake of his wife) remains an open question. The epitome's statement that Orpheus got up during the night and climbed Mt Pangaeum to greet the sun resembles an ascent following a katabasis.Footnote 28 For reasons which will become clear as my argument progresses, it seems very possible that Aeschylus should have promoted the heterosexual dimension of Orpheus’ love-life.
The surviving fragments are compatible with the scenario sketched in the shorter version of the epitome. Fr. 23 Radt, in which someone refers to a bull on the point of charging, was interpreted by Richard Kannicht as a phantom of Dionysus appearing to Orpheus.Footnote 29 Kannicht ingeniously combined it with Adesp. 144 N., in which the speaker debates where he should flee. Fr. 23a mentions pine torches on Mt Pangaeum: the women presumably found Orpheus at the end of their night-time revels on the mountain. Fr. 24 apparently refers to the charred remains of an altar, where, perhaps, Orpheus has been conducting his sun-worshipping rites.
THE DEATH OF ORPHEUS BEFORE AESCHYLUS
The epitome's statement about Orpheus’ sun-worshipping is followed by a connecting relative (ὅθεν ὁ Διόνυσος ὀργισθείς—‘in consequence of which, Dionysus, being angry’) which clearly refers to the preceding clause.Footnote 30 Only Aeschylus is credited with making Dionysus responsible for Orpheus’ death and it is likely that both Dionysus’ involvement and the cause of his anger were Aeschylean innovations. Orpheus’ death at the hands of Thracian women was a favourite subject for vase painters. The images first appear c. 490 b.c.e. and proliferate in the period 470–440 b.c.e. Footnote 31 The story which they depict is not the Aeschylean one: Orpheus’ assailants are never Bassarids or maenads, nor is there dismemberment; the women attack him with traditional weapons and household tools.Footnote 32 In a fragment of Hellenistic poetry (Phanocles, fr. 1 Powell), Orpheus was killed by the Thracian women because he founded pederasty and ‘did not recommend’ heterosexual love. As I argue elsewhere, of our extant explanations about Orpheus’ death, this is the most compatible with the vase paintings.Footnote 33 The singer's death is sometimes combined with scenes in which he performs to an enchanted group of Thracian men.Footnote 34 Some of these scenes have homoerotic overtones. This is not sufficient, however, to explain the violence of Orpheus’ conflict with women. In Greek culture, homo- and heterosexual erôs are not incompatible, but Phanocles’ Orpheus actively disparages heterosexual love. Women are apparently excluded from Orpheus’ performances on the vase paintings. Antagonism with women is, in fact, a remarkably stable theme in the traditions about Orpheus.Footnote 35 In Republic 10, he is vehemently misogynistic, at least after his death. In Euripides’ Hippolytus, Theseus interprets his son's rejection of Aphrodite as of a piece with his ‘Orphic’ lifestyle (952–4). In the Argonautic story of Orpheus' contest with the Sirens, he is again pitted against female figures and located in an all-male group on the brink of manhood.Footnote 36
François Lissarrague has argued plausibly that the vase paintings depict Orpheus’ music-making as a threat to the oikos.Footnote 37 Orpheus’ death is ignominious and anti-heroic.Footnote 38 The Thracian men, stereotyped as savage warriors, have abandoned all thoughts of warfare under the spell of Orpheus’ song. The women's motley array of weapons—spears, rocks, agricultural tools and household implements—highlights the confusion of gender roles. An interesting textual analogue may be found in the Republic's discussion about preliminary education, in which Socrates contemplates the deleterious effects on the thymos of too much or too little mousikê: softness, on the one hand, and savagery, on the other (Resp. 410b-412b). The passage may well be an implicit commentary on the Orpheus myth, since elsewhere in the Republic (435e) the Thracians epitomize spiritedness. This gendered exploration of mousikê is part of a broader discourse about the tensions between the mousikos and the (democratic) polis, exemplified by texts such as Euripides’ Antiope. In the agôn, Zethus accuses his twin brother Amphion of effeminacy, cowardice and neglecting politics and philoi. In Plato's Gorgias, Socrates envisages his dispute with Callicles as a reconfiguration of the Euripidean debate, with philosophy taking the place of mousikê.Footnote 39
In Orphic traditions, these tensions are cast in metaphysical terms. The enchantment of mousikê belongs to the realm of transcendence: it is a desire which engages the soul rather than the body, an opportunity to share in the divine. Hence, it represents an alternative to the generative realm and generative erôs. This dualistic Orphic idea is embraced by Plato, who transposes it, replacing the (erôs of) mousikê with philosophy.Footnote 40 The Symposium characterizes love of women as the vulgar (merely procreative) Aphrodite, whilst celestial homosexuality leads the soul back to where it really wants to be. The most extreme case of the musician's estrangement from the sublunary world is that of the cicadas’ ancestors, who were so bewitched by music that they forgot to eat and died of starvation. For Plato, however, mousikê without knowledge of the forms is a dead end. By contrast, the true mousikê of philosophical erôs will enable Socrates and Phaedrus to steer past the Sirens in safety (Phdr. 258e–259d).
In a Gelan krater dating to the mid fifth century, Orpheus’ head is raised heavenwards as he performs to the enchanted Thracian men.Footnote 41 One is depicted frontally and has his eyes closed, as if transported to another dimension. Orpheus’ music seems to be represented as yearning for the divine. This idea of mousikê as a transcendent alternative to erôs belongs to the earliest stratum of Orpheus’ myth. His defeat of the Sirens suggests immunity to female sexual temptation and the ability to transcend mortal limits, since their song is a summons to death. In the story of his katabasis, music again transcends death.Footnote 42 This evidence suggests that the constellation of music, eschatology and immunity to female sexual temptation was already part of Orpheus's mythical identity by the early sixth century.
AESCHYLEAN INNOVATIONS
Mapping the Bassarides onto the alternative version of Orpheus’ death, we find the following correspondences and/or substitutions:
Aeschylus has substituted Dionysus for the generative realm and Apollo for transcendent mousikê (with its homoerotic connotations). Erôs and mousikê are closely related in the dichotomous existential views of singer and god, which result in very different types of ekstasis. One need only think of the perennially aroused satyrs, who will have featured in the final play of the tetralogy, performing their exuberant dances.Footnote 43 As for the Bassarids, although our earliest extant reference (in Anacreon) refers to their ‘swinging hips’, mythical representations of maenads tend to focus not on their sexuality as such, but rather on their re-connection with nature through miracles of creation and nurture as well as ritually, in mountain-roaming, ecstatic dancing and, notoriously, dismemberment.Footnote 44 Orpheus’ lyre-singing, on the other hand, does not put his audiences back in touch with their primal energies but tames their savagery away. Indeed, some early vase paintings show satyrs listening to Orpheus’ music in a state of fascinated repose.Footnote 45 Orpheus has no association with dance, nor with the exotic panoply of instruments which the chorus of Edonians describes as inducing terror and frenzy (fr. 57 Radt). Nietzsche speaks of the Apolline mousikos as ‘keeping at bay’ the ‘essence’ of Dionysiac music: ‘the power of its sound to shake us to our very foundations, [the unified stream of melody and the quite incomparable world of harmony]’, which includes not just ‘the mouth … but the full gesture of dance with its rhythmical movement of every limb’.Footnote 46 Where the presence of Dionysus elicits a breaking out of savage energies and a ritual channelling of those energies into ecstatic dance, the Apolline Orpheus turns to the harmony of the heavens. It is not difficult to see why this transcendent figure should run into conflict with Dionysus.
Hyginus (Poet. astr. 2.7 = Orph. 1034T) says that Dionysus sent the maenads against Orpheus while he was sitting on Mt Pangaeum delighting in song. This immediately follows a statement that ps.-Eratosthenes’ account diverges from others in locating Orpheus’ death on Mt Pangaeum. Hyginus seems to be referring to the Aeschylean version. The solitary worshipper of Apollo is dismembered whilst hymning his god as the sun on the summit of Pangaeum. This fits the argument that Aeschylus’ Orpheus had Pythagorean traits. Aeschylus seems to have given the myth a more metaphysical and religious slant, drawing on themes present in the earlier tradition.
RITUAL DIMENSIONS OF THE COLLISION BETWEEN ORPHEUS AND DIONYSUS
The collision has obvious metatragic implications. But in order to better understand how they were articulated, we need to consider further the ritual dimension of the tragedy. For, Di Marco has plausibly argued that the purpose of Aeschylus’ innovations was to provide an aetiology for Orphic rites. Ps.-Apollodorus juxtaposes Orpheus’ founding of Dionysiac mysteries with his dismemberment and burial in Pieria (Bibl. 1.3.2 = Orph. 501T + 1035T). Damagetus talks of Orpheus’ founding Bacchic mysteries in conjunction with his burial at the Thracian foot of Mt Olympus (Anth. Pal. 7.9 = Orph. 1071T). There is only one story concerning Dionysus with which Orpheus seems to have been connected in the Classical period: that of Dionysus Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, who was dismembered and eaten by man's ancestors—the Titans.Footnote 47 As Nietzsche and Proclus noted, Orpheus’ dismemberment is a mirror image of this story.Footnote 48
Di Marco's aetiological argument is therefore appealing, but it raises a problem. For, what we know of Orphic-Bacchic mysteries seems every bit as antithetical to the Dionysiac sphere as Orpheus’ celestial music.Footnote 49 On a ‘bone tablet’ from Olbia (Orph. 463T), the words DIO<NYSOS> and ORPHIK<OI> appear together in connection with the words ‘life/death/life’ and ‘truth’. A second bone tablet (Orph. 465T), if supplemented correctly, seems to equate σῶμα and ψυχή with falsehood and truth respectively.Footnote 50 The customary values of life and death are inverted, as in the Euripidean fragment quoted by Socrates in the Gorgias (492e) at the start of his discussion about the σῶμα-σῆμα equivalence.Footnote 51 Two of the so-called Orphic-Bacchic gold leaves contain the remarkable assertion that the initiate has become a god instead of a mortal (Orph. frr. 487–8). In these and two other leaves, the soul declares that it belongs to the race of gods but has been struck by lightning (Orph. frr. 489–90). The soul claims to be pure again, referring to initiation rites. Several of the leaves contain the declaration that the soul is an offspring of Gaia and ‘starry’ Ouranos; some add, ‘but my race is heavenly’ (Orph. frr. 475–7, fr. 484); one (Orph. fr. 477) specifies, ‘my name is Asterios (Starry)’. This seems to be a dualist account of origins, with an astral dimension.Footnote 52
INTERPRETERS OF THE ZAGREUS MYTH IN PLATO
H.J. Rose connected the leaves with the Zagreus myth on the basis of Meno 81b-c.Footnote 53 Both there and elsewhere in Plato, the myth appears in conjunction with Pythagorean ideas.Footnote 54 In the Meno, Socrates says that wise priests and priestesses interpret the story as teaching reincarnation, and deduce from it the need to live as holy a life as possible. In the Cratylus (400c), Plato attributes to ‘Orpheus and his followers’ the idea that the soul is imprisoned in the body as a penalty for certain crimes. Some of these ‘followers’ connect this idea with the body-as-tomb (σῶμα-σῆμα) doctrine, which, in the Gorgias, is ascribed to a wise man from a Pythagorean environment of eschatological myth-making and allegorizing.Footnote 55 In the Phaedo, the story of the soul's imprisonment in the body forms the basis for the philosophical life. It is associated with the mysteries and with the Pythagorean Philolaus’ prohibition against suicide.Footnote 56
All this suggests that the Orphic/Bacchic doctrines to which Plato refers were derived from the Zagreus myth through allegorical interpretation along Pythagorean lines.Footnote 57 This interpretation finds support in Plutarch, who says that some verses of Empedocles which preclude the eating of meat refer allegorically to the story of the soul's imprisonment (De esu carnium 996b-c). He says that with these verses Empedocles means (but does not say directly) that the soul is imprisoned in the body as a punishment for murder, the eating of flesh and cannibalism. But, he says, the doctrine appears to be older than Empedocles, since the story about Dionysus’ sufferings and dismemberment, the Titans’ assault on him, their eating of his flesh and their punishment by the thunderbolt of Zeus are really a ‘riddling’ myth about reincarnation. The disorderly and violent part of us comes not from gods, but from evil spirits, whom the ancients called Titans, meaning those who are punished and paying the penalty.
According to the ‘founders of the mysteries’, katharsis is necessary if one is to achieve blessedness in the beyond (Phd. 69c). Aristoxenus (fr. 26 Wehrli) said that the Pythagoreans used music for the purification of the soul. In the Phaedo (69c-d), philosophy is the cathartic agent: as we have seen, it is described by Socrates as a kind of mousikê (60e-61b), his service to Apollo. Strabo (10.3.10) said that, on account of the doctrine of cosmic harmony, the Pythagoreans and Plato used mousikê and philosophy as virtual synonyms. The context of his statement is a discussion of music and mysteries as analogous types of contact with the divine or turning aside from human affairs. In Plato's Timaeus, a dialogue whose Pythagorean affinities are well known, the individual soul is a microcosm of the world soul; both are composed in accordance with harmonic ratios and music's purpose is to realign them, resolving any discord in the soul (47d).
ORPHEUS AS AN ANTI-DIONYSIAC, ANTI-TRAGIC FIGURE IN THE BASSARIDES
As Plato and Nietzsche saw, these ideas are not very compatible with tragedy. One might think along Christian lines in which tragedy's theme is the vanity of human efforts, and the Orphic consolation is that we must turn away from the world and embrace the god within. This, presumably, is the conclusion that Nietzsche wants to avoid. And he must be right that it is an unlikely denouement for the Bassarides. Why would the Muses have lamented if Orpheus’ soul was being released from its incarnate prison? The vision of men as fallen gods seems an unthinkable resolution to a plot in which Orpheus is dismembered for overvaluing celestial harmony. Nor is it likely that Aeschylus was advocating Pythagorean ideas to his Athenian audience, for whom Orpheus’ most important association was the Eleusinian mysteries, whose founder he was said to be by at least the end of the fifth century.Footnote 58 Although initiates at Eleusis were promised a blessed afterlife, there was no talk of becoming divine or of reincarnation, let alone vegetarianism, which was contrary to sacrifice, the city's accustomed mode of communicating with the divine. As Theseus’ contemptuous parody in Euripides’ Hippolytus (952–4) makes clear, such ideas were considered deviant and elitist.Footnote 59 In the second quarter of the fifth century, the Pythagoreans in Croton suffered purges which ended their dominance in southern Italy.Footnote 60 It is tempting to see this strife as the immediate political context of the Bassarides. If Orpheus’ connection with Orphic-Bacchic mysteries played a role, it is unlikely that these were its ideological telos.
DENOUEMENT OF THE BASSARIDES (1): ORPHEUS’ ORACULAR HEAD
How, then, was the conflict between Orpheus and Dionysus resolved? The epitome says that the Muses buried Orpheus in Pieria. Presumably the resolution came from them; above all, from Orpheus’ mother, Calliope. Let us first consider its ritual dimension. Since Orpheus was devoted to Apollo until his death, his connection with Dionysiac rites must have been post-mortem. Scholars have noted that Orpheus’ connection with these rites presupposes the existence of texts in his name. There is therefore good reason to suppose that Orpheus’ oracular head played a role at the end of the trilogy. Several sources refer to a Thracian oracle of Dionysus. The chorus of Euripides’ Alcestis (962–9) sings of writing tablets in Thrace ‘which the voice of Orpheus wrote down’. Our earliest visual evidence that the head is talking is a spectacular hydria of c. 440 b.c.e. (now in Basel—BS 481 = LIMC s.v. ‘Orpheus’ 68), showing a naked man who consults the head in the presence of six Muses. A late fifth-century cup, now in Cambridge, shows a young boy taking dictation from the head in the presence of Apollo.Footnote 61 On the reverse, Muses are depicted with a lyre. Linforth suggested that the boy be identified as Musaeus, who is represented as Orpheus’ scribe in several sources and serves to connect Orpheus with the Eleusinian mysteries.Footnote 62 A hydria of c. 420 b.c.e. shows Apollo pointing at Orpheus’ head with his staff. The scene seems to depict an oracular investiture.Footnote 63 Muses may, again, be present. As I argue elsewhere, these scenes seem to use the same version of the myth as Aeschylus and may even have been inspired by the Bassarides.Footnote 64 They raise the possibility of Apollo's involvement in the tragedy, which seems prima facie likely. An anonymous epigram (Anth. Pal. 7.10 = Orph. 1054.IIT) describes the Pierian Muses lamenting together with Apollo Lyceius at Orpheus’ death. We will return to this in due course.
The establishment of a Dionysiac oracle at the end of the Bassarides fits well with the probable plot of the Lycurgia. Ps.-Apollodorus says that after the murder of Dryas (the subject of the first play) a plague afflicted the land of the Edonians and an oracle was sent from Dionysus, saying that fruitfulness would be returned to the land if Lycurgus was punished. So the Edonians took Lycurgus to Mt Pangaeum, where they ‘bound him to the mountain’ (Bibl. 3.5.1). If we accept that these events refer to the Neaniscoi, the Dionysiac oracle will need to have been established previously.Footnote 65 There is no space in the Edonians for the establishment of an oracle. This leaves the Bassarides.
Further clues about the ending of the Bassarides and its relation to the wider trilogy are offered by a scene in the [Euripidean] Rhesus, for which the Lycurgia appears to be the principal model.Footnote 66 An unnamed Muse obtains post-mortem privileges for her son Rhesus on the grounds that Persephone is obliged to honour ‘the friends of Orpheus’ (965-6). She says that Orpheus, her nephew and Rhesus’ cousin, revealed to Athens her secret mysteries and that Musaeus was trained by Phoebus and the Muses (941–7). The Muse is apparently referring to Eleusis.Footnote 67 She says that her son will inhabit a cave under Mt Pangaeum as a ‘man-god’, a prophet of Dionysus (970–3):
He will lie hidden in caverns of the silver-bearing earth, a man-god, looking upon the light; a prophet of Bacchus, who once settled the rock of Pangaeum; a reverend god to those who know his secrets.
As scholars have noted, Rhesus’ fate in this passage resembles that of Lycurgus as described in a choral ode of Sophocles’ Antigone for which the Lycurgia is again thought to be the principal model.Footnote 69 The chorus says that Lycurgus ebbed out his anger, drop by drop, in a rocky prison. Strabo (10.3.16), however, in the same chapter in which he quotes from Aeschylus’ Edonians, refers to a more favourable outcome for Lycurgus—a cultic identification between the king and Dionysus on Mt Pangaeum. Following this lead, West adopts VaL's reading ὥστε for ὅς γε at Rhesus 972, and argues that Rhesus’ fate is directly compared with that of Lycurgus, whom he envisages installed in a chamber on Pangaeum as Bacchus’ prophet. James Diggle, however, has rejected VaL's reading on the grounds that there are no definite cases in tragedy of ὥστε with finite verb following its subject.Footnote 70 He adopts Matthiae's ὅς τε, making Bacchus the subject of a relative clause which describes his settling on Pangaeum. As Diggle points out, neither Strabo nor Sophocles nor ps.-Apollodorus mentions any oracle of Lycurgus. We may also note that the oracle mentioned in ps.-Apollodorus concerned Lycurgus’ own fate; it cannot, therefore, have been delivered by him qua Βάκχου προφήτης.
If we accept Diggle's arguments, the oracle on Mt Pangaeum was established by Dionysus. Orpheus is an obvious candidate for its first priesthood. An intriguing parallel with the Thracian Zalmoxis lends further support to this view. Zalmoxis’ affinities with Orpheus are well known. Herodotus (4.94–5) says that the Hellespontine Greeks considered Zalmoxis a slave of Pythagoras, and adds that he invited the most prominent men of Thrace to dinner parties, where he gave lessons in immortality and then duped them by disappearing into a cavern.Footnote 71 Herodotus, however, considers Zalmoxis much older than Pythagoras and reports the Getae's belief that, rather than dying, they would join their daimon Zalmoxis in paradise. In Plato's Charmides (156d), Socrates says that he has learnt a charm from ‘followers [plural] of Zalmoxis’, who claim to have the ability to make people immortal. Strabo says that Zalmoxis lived in a cave on a holy mountain from which he instructed the king in the gods’ commands (7.3.5). An oracular priesthood connected with knowledge about the afterlife seems a good fit with both the Bassarides and the Rhesus.
There seems, therefore, to be a good case that the ending of the Rhesus is alluding to the Muses’ establishment of Orpheus as a post-mortem prophet of Bacchus in Aeschylus’ Bassarides. A secondary reference to the king's imprisonment—and perhaps a cultic amalgamation between god and king at the end of the trilogy—is also possible. In Aeschylus’ play, Orpheus was probably represented as a priest of the native religion, who, like Zalmoxis, was closely associated with the king.Footnote 72 As Nietzsche noticed, Lycurgus’ name suggests that, like Orpheus, he too was a kind of surrogate for Apollo Lyceius.Footnote 73 It is Apollo Lyceius who, in Anth. Pal. 7.10, laments Orpheus’ death together with the Muses.Footnote 74 That the singer and the king should have suffered parallel fates on Pangaeum in punishment for their opposition to Dionysus seems plausible. This reading also makes sense architecturally: the Bassarides was a microcosm of the larger theological drama.
DENOUEMENT OF THE BASSARIDES (2): A SOLAR SYNTHESIS OF APOLLO AND DIONYSUS
It is probable, then, that at the end of the Bassarides, Orpheus’ head was established as an oracle of Bacchus in a cave on Mt Pangaeum. The Rhesus passage and the close relation between the Eleusinian Musaeus and Orpheus’ oracular head suggest that this oracle situated Orpheus and his rites within a wider Eleusinian context, perhaps as founder of the Eleusinian mysteries. A final, fascinating Aeschylean fragment seems also to point beyond esoteric Orphic rites, this time to Delphi. Macrobius (Sat. 1.18.6), quoting an unidentified fragment (fr. 341 Radt), tells us that Aeschylus identified Apollo and Dionysus:
Apollo in ivy, the Bacchic prophet
Nauck and Wilamowitz assigned the fragment to the Bassarides because of the bacchiacs.Footnote 76 Macrobius introduces the quotation as part of a demonstration that Mt Parnassus is sacred to one and the same god, Apollo-Dionysus, whom he later identifies with the sun. The fragment appears to have a single subject, to which two nouns serve as predicates, the second in apposition to the first. Although the text is uncertain, all plausible readings point either to an amalgamation or exchange of attributes or, more strongly, to Macrobius' interpretation of a synthesis between Apollo and Dionysus. Our earliest secure evidence for the identification of Apollo with Dionysus at Delphi is Philodamus’ Paean to Dionysus in the fourth century. A late fifth-century vase painting shows Apollo and Dionysus shaking hands over the Delphic tripod.Footnote 77 All three tragedians refer to Dionysus’ Delphian connection.Footnote 78 But Macrobius’ statement is our only evidence for a synthesis at the time of Aeschylus. Can there be any substance to it?
Macrobius begins his chapter by saying that the identity of Apollo and Liber (Dionysus) has been made ‘with many other arguments’ by Aristoteles qui theologoumena scripsit,Footnote 79 with one argument being that the ‘Ligyreans’ in Thrace have a shrine of Liber from which oracles are given (Macrob. Sat. 1.18.1). Macrobius says that the Boeotians worship Dionysus and Apollo as a single god in Delphi and describes the cult of Bacchus on Mt Parnassus. Immediately before the Aeschylean quotation, he adduces a verse from Euripides’ Licymnius, which he takes to be equivalent to the idea in Aeschylus (ad eandem sententiam Aeschylus …). There can be no doubt that the two gods are identified in the Euripidean verse.Footnote 80 Later in chapter 18, drawing on his proof (in chapter 17) that Apollo is the sun, Macrobius presents proofs that Apollo and Dionysus are the same and that both of them are the sun. These proofs show striking correspondences with the Bassarides. Macrobius mentions a mystical doctrine according to which the sun is called Apollo by day and Dionysus by night; he also compares statues showing Dionysus at different ages which he equates with different stages of the sun's development. When bearded, he says, the god is called Bassareus. Citing Alexander Polyhistor (FGrHist 273 fr. 103), Macrobius says that in Thrace the sun is identified with Dionysus and worshipped as Sebazius ( = Sabazius) in a temple on Mt ZilmissusFootnote 81 whose shape represents the sun. He then quotes Orphic verses (Orph. frr. 538–45) equating Dionysus/Phanes with the sun. One of these verses is quoted by Diodorus Siculus (1.11.3) in conjunction with a verse from ‘epic poetry concerning Bacchus’ by Eumolpus. Together they form part of a demonstration that the Greeks equated Dionysus with Osiris, who, in turn, was identified with the sun. Diodorus’ source here is generally agreed to be Hecataeus of Abdera, who takes us back to the fourth century b.c.e.
The doctrines to which Macrobius refers have other antecedents which date back to the Classical period.Footnote 82 In Euripides’ Phaethon (224–6), the equation of Apollo and Helios is ascribed to ‘those who know the hidden names of things’. This sounds like a mystical and/or Pythagorean environment.Footnote 83 Sophocles (Tereus, fr. 582 Radt) makes the sun the principle god of the Thracians and, elsewhere (fr. 752 Radt), ascribes to sophoi the doctrine that the sun is the father of all things. Plato's Cratylus (405c-d) seems to indicate that the Pythagoreans worshipped Apollo as the symbol of cosmic harmony.Footnote 84 The Thracians in Macrobius, on the other hand, equate Dionysus with the sun, a doctrine which we may now suppose that Orpheus learnt in the course of his fateful encounter with the Bassarids. In the hymn to Dionysus in Sophocles’ Antigone (1116–52), the god is invoked as Lord of Italy and Eleusis, and is called ‘chorus-leader of the fiery stars’ in connection with the maenadic rituals on Mt Parnassus.Footnote 85 In Philodamus’ paean to the mixtum numen of Apollo and Dionysus, Apollo orders the fashioning of a statue of Bacchus which is like the rays of the rising sun (strophe 11).Footnote 86 This was not Philodamus’ invention.
We may also recall Plutarch's reference, in De sera numinis uindicta (566c), to an Orphic poem in which Night and Apollo share the Delphic oracle (above, p. 4). For this, the Derveni papyrus offers an intriguing comparandum. The commentator refers to his own activities in a prophetic shrine. In the Orphic poem which he quotes, the first-born goddess, Night, is also a prophetess, who instructs Zeus to swallow the generative principle of the universe—either the first-born god, known as Phanes in later Orphic mythology (cf. Orphic Argonautica 14–16), or the phallus of Ouranos (the text is corrupt). After doing this, Zeus gives birth to the cosmos a second time by way of his mind. This is the most important event of the poem as we know it, since it resolves the question of Zeus’ primacy. The Derveni author interprets the phallus allegorically as the sun (col. 11). He sees Night's advice as an illustration of her role in maintaining the balance of the cosmos by cooling and solidifying that which the sun warms. Night's shrine is read in opposition to the setting sun (ἄδυτον = a-dyton, ‘unsetting’). In view of the evidence under consideration, it does not seem implausible to suppose that the prophetic shrine in question is Delphi.Footnote 87
It seems likely, then, that the Bassarides concluded with a solar synthesis between Apollo and Dionysus which served as an aetiology for their union at Delphi. How did Orpheus fit in? Callimachus and Euphorion knew a version of the Zagreus myth in which Dionysus’ limbs were given to Apollo, who placed them beside the Delphic tripod.Footnote 88 In a passage whose language recalls Herodotus’ reference to Orphic and Bacchic rites as being ‘in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean’ (2.81), Plutarch, himself a priest of Delphi, maps Dionysiac rites onto those of Osiris, and connects the dismemberment story with a secret sacrifice made by the hosioi in the temple of Apollo, ‘when the Thyiades wake up Dionysus Liknites’.Footnote 89 As we have seen, Plutarch seems to have known one (Pythagorean) interpretation of the Zagreus myth, in which it served as an allegory for reincarnation.Footnote 90 Remarkably, in the De E (388e-389b), Plutarch gives a second allegorical interpretation of the myth, in which the dismemberment and resurrection of Dionysus through the agency of Apollo is explained as a cosmic alternation between unity (Apollo/fire) and multiplicity (Dionysus). For Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy, ch. 10), this second interpretation of the Zagreus myth is ‘the doctrine of the [Eleusinian] Mysteries taught by tragedy: the fundamental recognition that everything which exists is a unity; the view that individuation is the primal source of all evil; and art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation can be broken’ (52–3). He considers the reconciliation between Dionysus and Apollo at Delphi ‘the most important event in the history of Greek religion’.
Orpheus’ dismemberment and burial by the Muses mirrors Dionysus’ fate at the hands of the Titans and the gathering of his limbs by Apollo. Aeschylus’ remodelling of the story of his death provides a fitting aetiology for his connection to Dionysiac mysteries (qua prophet of Bacchus) as ‘author’ of the Zagreus myth. Since the doctrine of reincarnation seems to have been derived allegorically from the myth, there is no need to suppose that it was foregrounded in Aeschylus’ play. In the Bassarides, the reconciliation between Orpheus and Dionysus situated the singer within a broader mystical context, which was both Eleusinian and Delphian. In Aeschylus’ reconfiguration of the myth, Orpheus’ previously ignominious death became a collision between opposing metaphysical and theological poles, whose reconciliation marked the beginnings of the most sacred institutions in Greek religious life.
This proposed reconstruction of the Bassarides finds further support from an intriguing intertext in Book 2 of Apollonius’ Argonautica.Footnote 91 Apollo appears to the heroes in a solar epiphany, whilst on his way to the Hyperboreans. In Delphic mythology, it was during Apollo's stay with the Hyperboreans that Dionysus presided over the oracle. Orpheus orders the crew to name the island after Apollo ‘of the Dawn’. There is no parallel besides Aeschylus to explain this cult title. Orpheus hymns the god with a version of the Delphian Hymn to Apollo, and the Argonauts found a cult of Homonoia in conjunction with Apollo's gift of concord through mousikê. Apollo's locks are described as βοτρυόεντες (2.677). The word is normally used of clustering grapes and, hence, is ideally suited to ὁ κισσεὺς Ἀπόλλων, ὁ βακχειόμαντις. The epiphany takes place at a time called ἀμφιλύκη (2.671). Just as the word ὀρφναίη (2.670) points to darkness and Orpheus’ underworld connections, so ἀμφιλύκη underscores the solar connotations of Apollo Lyceius.Footnote 92
RESOLUTION OF THE MUSICAL CONFLICT: AN AETIOLOGY FOR TRAGEDY
The evidence so far would lead us to expect a corresponding denouement to the musical collision between Orpheus and Dionysus which made sense in terms of tragedy. The revels of the Bassarids on Mt Pangaeum are an obvious precursor of the trietêris in which the Delphic maenads danced on Mt Parnassus and to which Athens sent a delegation of maenads.Footnote 93 Macrobius may provide further clues. Deichgräber and Wilamowitz gave Macrobius’ quotation to the Bassarids on the grounds of the bacchiac metre. But the Muses may also have sung in bacchiacs. In the choral ode from the Antigone discussed above, Lycurgus is said to have provoked the φιλαύλους … Μούσας (965). The aulos belongs to the sphere of Dionysus rather than to that of Apollo.Footnote 94 As we have seen, in Anth. Pal. 7.10, Apollo Lyceius mourns Orpheus with the Muses; this seems to be a reference to the Bassarides. But it is likely that Aeschylus cast the reconciliation between Apollo and Dionysus in musical as well as in theological terms. Philodamus’ Paean recounts how the Muses in Pieria formed the dance of Dionysus under Apollo's lead (53–62). The fourth-century temple at Delphi showed Dionysus as an Apolline lyre-player with maenads on the west pediment. Apollo and the Muses appeared on the east pediment.Footnote 95 It seems probable that the Bassarides also drew attention to the opposition between Muses and maenads, and closed with an exchange of attributes between them. This may well have been reflected in the metre. The Muses, after all, are not accustomed to lamentation. They are compelled to use music as a solace for grief because of their involvement with the mortal sphere. Their lament counterbalances Orpheus’ vision of mousikê as a vehicle for accessing the divine realm to which the soul, in ‘Orphic’ doctrine, ultimately belongs. As Nietzsche realized, it is an assertion of tragic aesthetics in Pieria, a musical aetiology, whose positive Dionysian counterpart is the ecstatic celebration of life in the mountain dances of the Delphic maenads.
CONCLUSIONS
I began by suggesting that the ideological conflict between tragedy and transcendence dramatized in Republic Book 10 had an important precursor in Aeschylus’ Bassarides, whose ‘ideology’ Nietzsche reasserted, rejecting Platonic metaphysics in favour of tragedy. Noting the well-established convergences between things Orphic and Pythagorean, I took as my starting point the earliest representations of Orpheus’ death in vase paintings, arguing that, already at this stage, his conflict with women was due to his turning aside from worldly affairs through mousikê. Noting the deviations of Aeschylus’ version of Orpheus’ death from the earlier story and taking up Proclus’ and Di Marco's observation that Orpheus’ death (in Aeschylus) mirrored that of Dionysus Zagreus, I suggested that Aeschylus reconfigured the myth as a conflict between Orpheus and Dionysus in terms of mousikê and mysteries. In attempting to ascertain how Aeschylus resolved the conflict, I first explored evidence in ps.-Euripides’ Rhesus and elsewhere that the singer was established as an ultimately Eleusinian prophet of Bacchus. I then suggested, on the basis of Aeschylus fr. 341 Radt, that the mysteries established in the Bassarides resolved the conflict between these competing world-views by way of a synthesis between Apollo and Dionysus (in solar form) at Delphi, celebrated at the trietêris. Orpheus was to be known as founder of the mysteries by way of the Zagreus myth, which served as an underpinning for the Apollo-Dionysus synthesis, but did not imply the doctrine of reincarnation, since this was extracted from it by Pythagorean allegorizing. Rather, Dionysus was to be celebrated in the biennial mountain-roaming of Athenian and Delphian maenads on Mt Parnassus. On the side of mousikê, I argued that Orpheus’ dismemberment and the lamentation of the Muses served as an aetiology for the genre of tragedy, which vindicated its inescapably human perspective.Footnote 96
