Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/90

by the elect, and was in reality secondary. Dionysus is the god within, the spirit of worship and inexplicable joy : he appears best in communion with pure souls and the wild things of nature on the solitary mountains under the stars. The Orphic hymns brim over with this joy ; they are full of repetitions and magniloquence, and make for emotion. The first hymn — very late but typical — runs : " / ca// Hecate of the Ways, of the Cross-ways, of the dark- ness, of the Heaven and the Earth and the Sea; saffron-clad goddess of the grave, exulting amid the spirits of the dead, Perseia, lover of loneliness, Queen who holdest the Keys of the World,. . . be present at our pure service with the fulness of joy in thine heart!' That hymn dates from the fourth century A.D., and so do most of our complete Orphic poems. We only possess them in their last form, when the religion was a dying thing. But it is a remarkable fact, that there is no century from the fourth A.D. to the sixth B.C. which is without some more or less celebrated Orphic teachers. At the height of the classical epoch, for in- stance, we know of a strong Orphic spirit in Pindar, Empedocles, Ion of Chios, Cratinus the comedian, Prodicus the philosopher, and probably in Euripides. Plato complains of the "crowd of books by Orpheus and Musaeus," and inveighs against their doctrine of ceremonial forgiveness of sins. Besides this 'crowd' — in the case of Musieus it amounted at least to eleven sets of poems and numerous oracles — there were all kinds of less reputable prophets and purifiers. There was a type called ' Bakis ' — any one sufficiently ' pure ' was appar- ently capable of becoming a Bakis — whose oracles were a drug in the Athenian market. Epimenides, the