Good Works Translation from Ancient Greek and Latin

This page translates Kern fragment 214 from the Orphic Sacred Discourses in Twenty-Four Rhapsodies. Kern labels this fragment as an altered and expanded form of the story of Zagreus' death. The witnesses here are not neutral Orphic exposition: Himerius gives a late rhetorical version of the attack on Dionysus, and Julius Firmicus Maternus gives a hostile Christian euhemeristic account of the same mythic complex.

Translation

Kern Fr. 214 — Himerius on the Titans' Attack

Himerius says:

I want, friends, to hint at a certain story that fits what has happened. Dionysus was still young, and the race of the Telchines was growing up against the god. Bacchus was increasing, and all the Titans were bursting with envy. At last, unable to endure it, they wanted to tear him apart. They practiced tricks, poisons, stings of slander, and the devices of nature.

They hated, I think, Silenus and the Satyr, and called them sorcerers, because they pleased Bacchus.

What then happened to Dionysus after this? He lay there, I think, struck down, and groaned under a deadly wound. The vine was downcast; the wine was gloomy; the grape-cluster seemed to be in tears; and Bacchus no longer had his ankle well-fitted for motion.

But the tear did not last to the end, nor did the trophy belong to his enemies. Zeus, watching over all, saw everything. He raised Dionysus, as the story says, and caused the Titans to be driven out by the myths.

Kern Fr. 214 — Firmicus' Hostile Euhemeristic Account

Julius Firmicus Maternus says that other superstitions still remain, and that their secrets must be exposed: the rites of Liber and Libera. He says these must be specially brought to Christian attention, so that even in these profane religions one may know that deaths of human beings have been consecrated.

Liber, he says, was the son of Jupiter, that is, of a Cretan king. Since the child had been born from an adulterous mother, he was being raised by his father with more care than was proper. Jupiter's wife, whose name was Juno, was moved by stepmotherly rage and prepared every kind of plot for the child's death. When the father went abroad, because he knew his wife's hidden anger, he entrusted the protection of his son to guardians he thought suitable, so that nothing would be done by the angry woman through deceit.

Then Juno found the right moment for the plot. She was inflamed all the more because, when the father left, he had handed the boy both the royal chair and the sceptre. First she corrupted the guards with royal rewards and gifts. Then she placed her attendants, who were called Titans, in the inner parts of the palace. With toys and a cleverly made mirror she so enticed the child's mind that, leaving the royal seat, he was led by childish desire to the place of the ambush.

There he was intercepted and killed. So that no trace of the murder could be found, the band of attendants divided the cut-up limbs among themselves in pieces. Then, to add one crime to another, because they greatly feared the cruelty of the tyrant, they cooked the boy's limbs in different ways and consumed them, so that they might feed on unheard-of banquets of a human corpse.

The sister, whose name was Minerva, kept the heart divided off for herself, because she too had been a participant in the crime, and so that there would be clear proof for an accusation, and so that she would have something with which to soften the rage of her furious father. When Jupiter returned, his daughter explained the order of the crime.

Then the father, moved by the deadly calamity of the disaster and by the bitterness of sharp grief, killed the Titans after torturing them in different ways. In revenge for his son, no torment or punishment was passed over. He raged through every kind of penalty and avenged the death of whatever kind of son he had, with a father's feeling but a tyrant's power.

Then, because the father could no longer bear the torments of his grieving mind, and because the pain that came from childlessness could not be relieved by any consolations, he made an image of the boy from gypsum with plastic art. The child's heart, from which the crime had been discovered when his sister brought it forward, was placed by the modeler in the part where the lines of the chest had been shaped.

After this, Jupiter built a temple instead of a tomb and appointed the boy's tutor as priest. His name was Silenus.

The Cretans, to soften the savagery of the raging tyrant, established festive days of funeral rites and composed an annual sacred rite with trieteric consecration, doing in order all the things that the boy, as he died, either did or suffered. They tear apart a living bull with their teeth, stirring up cruel banquets in annual commemorations. Through the hidden places of the woods, howling with discordant cries, they pretend to the madness of a frenzied mind, so that the crime might be believed to have happened not through fraud but through insanity.

A chest is carried forward, in which the sister had secretly hidden the heart. With the sound of flutes and the clashing of cymbals, they imitate the toys by which the boy had been deceived. Thus, in honor of a tyrant, a god was made by a servile people: one who could not have a burial.

Colophon

This Good Works translation was made from Otto Kern's Orphicorum fragmenta (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922), fr. 214, in the section headed "Hieroi logoi en rhapsodiais ka'." Kern's numbering is retained.

The source witnesses translated here are Himerius and Julius Firmicus Maternus as printed by Kern. Firmicus' account is translated as a hostile Christian polemical witness and not as a neutral ritual report.

Source Text

Kern Fr. 214 — Himerius

Himerius, Oration IX:

ἐθέλω δὲ ὑμῖν, ὦ φίλοι, διήγημά τι πρὸς τὸ συμβὰν ὑπαινίξασθαι. ἦν νέος ἔτι Διόνυσος καὶ κατὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τὸ τῶν Τελχίνων γένος ἐφύετο· ηὐξάνετο Βάκχος καὶ Τιτᾶνες πάντες διερρήγνυντο φθόνωι· τέλος δέ, μὴ στέγειν δυνάμενοι, διασπάσαι τοῦτον ἠθέλησαν, τέχνας δ' ἐμελέτων καὶ φάρμακα καὶ κέντρα διαβολῆς καὶ φύσεως μαγγανεύματα. ἐμίσουν δὲ ὡς οἶμαι τὸν Σειληνὸν καὶ τὸν Σάτυρον καὶ γόητας τούτους ἐφθέγξαντο, ὅτι τῶι Βάκχωι ἠρέσκοντο. τί οὖν ἐπὶ τούτοις Διόνυσος; ἔκειτο μὲν οἶμαι βληθεὶς καὶ τὴν πληγὴν καιρίαν ἐστέναζεν· ἄμπελος δ' ἦν κατηφής καὶ σκυθρωπὸς οἶνος, καὶ βότρυς ὥσπερ δακρύων καὶ Βάκχος οὐκέτι σφυρὸν εἰς τὴν κίνησιν εἶχεν εὐάρμοστον. ἀλλ' οὐ διὰ τέλους τὸ δάκρυον οὐδὲ πολεμίων τὸ τρόπαιον. ὁ γὰρ Ζεὺς ἐποπτεύων ἑώρα πάντα καὶ τὸν Διόνυσον ἐγείρας, ὡς λόγος, Τιτᾶνας ἐποίει παρὰ τῶν μύθων ἐλαύνεσθαι.

Kern Fr. 214 — Julius Firmicus Maternus

Julius Firmicus Maternus, On the Error of Profane Religions:

sed adhuc supersunt aliae superstitiones, quarum secreta pandenda sunt: Liberi et Liberae, quae omnia sacris sensibus vestris specialiter intimanda sunt, ut et in istis profanis religionibus sciatis mortes esse hominum consecratas.

Liber itaque Iovis fuit filius, regis scilicet Cretici. hic cum fuisset adultera matre progenitus, nutriebatur apud patrem studiosius quam decebat. uxor Iovis cui Iunoni fuit nomen, novercalis animi furore commota ad necem infantis omnifariam parabat insidias. proficiscens peregre pater quia indignationes tacitas sciebat uxoris, ne quid ab irata muliere dolo fieret, idoneis sicut sibi videbatur custodibus tutelam credidit filii.

tunc Iuno opportunum insidiarum nancta tempus, et ex hoc fortius inflammata, quia proficiscens pater et sellam regni puero tradiderat et sceptrum, custodes primum regalibus praemiis muneribusque corrupit, deinde satellites suos qui Titanes vocabantur, in interioribus regiae locat partibus, et crepundiis ac speculo adfabre facto animos ita pueriles inlexit, ut desertis regiis sedibus ad insidiarum locum puerilis animi desiderio duceretur.

illic interceptus trucidatur, et ut nullum possit necis inveniri vestigium, particulatim membra concisa satellitum sibi dividit turba. tunc ut huic facinori aliud facinus adderetur, quia vehementer tyranni crudelitas timebatur, decocta variis generibus pueri membra consumunt, ut humani cadaveris inauditis usque in illum diem epulis vescerentur.

cor divisum sibi soror servat, cui Minerva fuit nomen, quia et ipsa sceleris fuit particeps, et ut manifestum delationis esset indicium, et ut haberet unde furentis patris impetum mitigaret. reverso Iovi filia ordinem facinoris exponit.

tunc pater funesta calamitate cladis et acerbi luctus atrocitate commotus Titanas quidem vario genere excruciatos necat, nec praetermissum est in ultione filii aut tormentum aliquod aut poena, sed per omnia poenarum genera bacchatus necem qualiscumque filii vindicavit, affectu quidem patris sed tyrannica potestate.

tunc quia diutius pater ferre lugentis animi tormenta non poterat, et quia dolor ex orbitate veniens nullis solaciis mitigabatur, imaginem eius ex gypso plastico opere perfecit et cor pueri ex quo facinus fuerat sorore deferente detectum, in ea parte plastes conlocat qua pectoris fuerant liniamenta formata. post haec pro tumulo exstruit templum, et paedagogum pueri constituit sacerdotem. huic Silenus fuit nomen.

Cretenses ut furentis tyranni saevitiam mitigarent, festos funeris dies statuunt, et annuum sacrum trieterica consecratione conponunt, omnia per ordinem facientes quae puer moriens aut fecit aut passus est. vivum laniant dentibus taurum, crudeles epulas annuis commemorationibus excitantes, et per secreta silvarum clamoribus dissonis eiulantes fingunt animi furentis insaniam, ut illud facinus non per fraudem factum, sed per insaniam crederetur.

praefertur cista in qua cor soror latenter absconderat, tibiarum cantu et cymbalorum tinnitu crepundia, quibus puer deceptus fuerat mentiuntur. sic in honorem tyranni a serviente plebe deus factus est qui habere non potuit sepulturam.