Good Works Translation from Ancient Greek

This page translates Kern fragments 291-292 from Otto Kern's Orphicorum fragmenta. Kern places them under Katharmoi, "Purifications," because both touch the ancient "Orphic life": abstention from forbidden food, reverence for parents, and the ordering force of law.

Translation

Kern Fr. 291 — Beans and the Heads of Parents

Heraclides of Pontus says:

If someone throws a bean into a new case, hides it in dung for all forty days, and then uncovers it, he will find that the bean has changed into the appearance of a human being made flesh.

For this reason, the poet said:

It is the same for you
to eat beans

and to eat
the heads of parents.

Kern notes that the same bean-line travels through later writers in Orphic and Pythagorean discussions. A related agricultural compilation also says that Amphiaraus was the first to abstain from beans because of dream-divination, and it attributes this warning to Orpheus:

Wretched ones,
all-wretched ones,

keep your hands
away from beans.

Kern Fr. 292 — Law and the Flesh-Eating Age

Sextus Empiricus says, in an argument about rhetoric and civic law:

Nor is rhetoric useful to cities. Laws are the bonds of cities. Just as, when the soul is destroyed, the body also perishes, so too, when laws are abolished, cities are utterly destroyed.

Accordingly Orpheus the theologian, showing the necessity of laws, says:

There was a time
when men held life
from one another,

flesh-devouring,
and the stronger man
tore the weaker man.

Sextus continues by comparing Hesiod:

When no law stood over them, each man held justice in his own hands. It is like the saying that, for fish, wild beasts, and flying birds, it has been granted "to eat one another, since there is no justice among them."

Colophon

This Good Works translation was made from Otto Kern's Orphicorum fragmenta (Berlin: Weidmann, 1922), frr. 291-292, under the title Katharmoi. Kern's numbering is retained.

The source witnesses translated here are Heraclides of Pontus as preserved by John Lydus for fr. 291, with the related Didymus/Geoponica witness noted by Kern, and Sextus Empiricus for fr. 292. Kern also collects Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria, Athenaeus, Sextus, Lucian, Gregory Nazianzen, Empedocles, Critias, Moschion, Horace, Plato, Diogenes Laertius, and Cicero as parallels for the bean taboo and the pre-law human age; those parallels are not treated as separate Orphic fragments here.

Source Text

Kern Fr. 291 — Beans and the Heads of Parents

Ἡρακλείδης ὁ Ποντικός? apud Ioannem Lydum, De mensibus IV 42:

ὁ δὲ Ποντικὸς Ἡρακλείδης (Περὶ τῶν Πυθαγορείων?) φησίν, ὡς εἴ τις τὸν κύαμον ἐν καινῆι θήκηι ἐμβαλὼν ἀποκρύψει τῆι κόπρωι ἐπὶ τεσσαράκοντα πάσας ἡμέρας, εἰς ὄψιν ἀνθρώπου σεσαρκωμένου μεταβαλόντα τὸν κύαμον εὑρήσει, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο τὸν ποιητὴν φάναι·

ἶσόν τοι κυάμους τε φαγεῖν κεφαλάς τε τοκήων.

Didymus in Geoponica II 35, 8:

πρῶτος δὲ ἀπέσχετο κυάμων Ἀμφιάραος, διὰ τὴν δι' ὀνείρων μαντείαν. φέρεται δὲ καὶ Ὀρφέως τοιάδε ἔπη·

Δειλοὶ <πάνδειλοι>, κυάμων ἄπο χεῖρας ἔχεσθαι·

καὶ·

ἶσόν τοι κυάμους φαγεεῖν κεφαλάς τε τοκήων.

Kern Fr. 292 — Law and the Flesh-Eating Age

Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors II 31:

καὶ μὴν οὐδὲ ταῖς πόλεσίν ἐστιν ὠφέλιμος (ἡ ῥητορική)· οἱ γὰρ νόμοι πόλεών εἰσι σύνδεσμοι, καὶ ὡς ψυχὴ σώματος ἐκφθαρέντος φθείρεται, οὕτω νόμων ἀναιρεθέντων καὶ αἱ πόλεις διόλλυνται. παρὸ καὶ ὁ θεολόγος Ὀρφεὺς τὸ ἀναγκαῖον αὐτῶν ὑποφαίνων φησίν·

ἦν χρόνος, ἡνίκα φῶτες ἀπ' ἀλλήλων βίον εἶχον

σαρκοδακή, κρείσσων δὲ τὸν ἥττονα φῶτα δάϊζεν.

μηδενός γὰρ ἐπιστατοῦντος νόμου ἕκαστος ἐν χερσὶ τὸ δίκαιον εἶχε, καὶ ὡς

ἰχθύσι <μὲν> καὶ θηρσὶ καὶ οἰωνοῖς πετεηνοῖς

ἐπιτέτραπται

ἔσθειν ἀλλήλους, ἐπεὶ οὐ δίκη ἐστὶ μετ' αὐτοῖς.