THE HIERONYMAN THEOGONY

Like the Eudemian theogony, our title “Hieronyman theogony” comes from Damascius’ De Principiis (sixth century ad),1 but there is less confusion over its contents. Damascius provides more information about the Hieronyman theogony than he does about the Eudemian theogony, but there are not many other sources that refer to it. Apart from two sources that seem to corroborate certain details, the only authors who discuss the Hieronyman theogony are Damascius and the Christian apologist Athenagoras (second century ad).2

The first section of this chapter discusses these two authors and how they used Orphic texts to support their arguments, because each author exemplifies one of two opposing methods of interpretation that were generally used in late antiquity. Athenagoras reads Orpheus literally to expose the immorality of the gods in Greek myth, but Damascius uses allegorical interpretation to argue that Orphic myth agrees with Neoplatonic philosophy.

In De Principiis, Damascius mentions the Hieronyman theogony, along with the Eudemian and Rhapsodic theogonies and other traditions, in a discussion of the Neoplatonic question of how the Many emanate from the One, in order to argue (anachronistically) that different poets allegorized the first principles in different ways, and that all of them agreed with Plato.3 Because of this emphasis, most of what he tells us about this theogony focuses on primordial entities: the pre- existing mass of water and mud, the appearance of Chronos out of the water and mud, the cosmic egg made by Chronos, and Phanes who is born from the egg. As far as our evidence is concerned, this narrative appears in its full form for the first time in the Hieronyman theogony.4

Athenagoras does not identify his source, but much of what he says about the theogony agrees with Damascius, so most likely they are referring to the same text. Bernabé has combined the two authors in his collection of the Orphic fragments and split the relevant passages into sixteen smaller fragments, which he places in chronological order. For example, OF 75 B contains only the reference to water and mud as it appears in both Damascius and Athenagoras, OF 76 B is about only the birth of Chronos in both authors, and so on.

Therefore, the second section of this chapter discusses in more detail what these two authors have to say about these deities, considering both the context of the ancient texts and the way they have been split into fragments by Bernabé. Unlike the Eudemian theogony, we have a more solid basis for reconstructing the narrative of the Hieronyman theogony because Damascius gives us more information, which correlates well with Athenagoras even on unusual details.

Because Damascius’ De Principiis is concerned with first principles, it gives the impression that Orphic theogonies were generally preoccupied with the topic of the first gods who came into existence. In the earliest Orphic theogonies, this tended to be Night, or perhaps Ocean and Tethys; but in the Hieronyman and Rhapsodic theogonies, there was a shift toward Chronos, who produces Phanes by means of the cosmic egg. In the Hieronyman theogony, Chronos emerges from the primordial water and mud, and in the Rhapsodies he emerges from an undifferentiated mass of elements, so in both, Night is removed from her former position as the first of the gods.5 By the time these later theogonies were written, Hesiod had become the mainstream canonical narrative. Thus they represent a further departure from the Hesiodic narrative, which points in two directions. First, the Hieronyman theogony points backward in time toward Near Eastern parallels, both in myths about a time deity producing an egg, and in iconography that resembles the description of Chronos in the Hieronyman theogony; so once again, a departure from Hesiod tends to correlate with eastern precedents. Second, it points forward in time toward philosophical discourse by appearing to reflect philosophical ideas that were not current in Hesiod’s time. But we must be cautious when assessing Damascius’ philosophical argument: he refers to the Orphic text in order to support Neoplatonic ideas, and his source, Hieronymus, is likely to have been influenced by Stoic ideas, but it is not certain that the poem itself contained anything but mythical narrative.

The third section of this chapter discusses these matters in an attempt to explain the meaning of the Orphic narrative of Chronos and Phanes.

Athenagoras takes the narrative further forward than Damascius in the genealogy of the gods. Since Damascius’ concern is to discuss first principles in a variety of theogonies, he has no need to mention anything that happens later in any of those narratives. Athenagoras, on the other hand, is a Christian apologist who finds plenty of relevant scandalous material in the episodes of the later generations of gods. He provides us with more detailed genealogical information,6 and also with evidence that the succession myth of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus could have appeared in this narrative, in accordance with most traditional theogonic narratives.7 Athenagoras is also our first source who indicates that Dionysus appears in an Orphic theogony, and this is a crucial detail that distinguishes the Hieronyman theogony from early Orphic theogonies. In contrast to the Derveni poem’s brief but enigmatic allusion to Zeus wanting to have sex with his mother, here we find an entire narrative structure: Zeus takes on the form of a snake to have sex with Rhea/ Demeter, who gives birth to Persephone; and in turn Zeus has sex with Persephone, who gives birth to Dionysus.8 Athenagoras makes no mention of the Titans killing Dionysus, so we cannot be certain that this episode appeared in the Hieronyman theogony. Neither does he recall these narratives in chronological order, so the last section of this chapter questions whether the births of Persephone and Dionysus even belonged to the same poem as the narrative of Chronos and Phanes. Since Damascius does not mention Persephone and Dionysus, and Athenagoras does not specify which text(s) he cites, we cannot know with certainty whether the Hieronyman theogony was a continuous narrative from Chronos to Dionysus, as most scholars have presumed, or whether Athenagoras knew one poem about Chronos and another about Dionysus.

By studying the Hieronyman theogony as it is represented by both Athenagoras and Damascius, I hope to demonstrate three of the basic points that I have been arguing throughout this study: Orphic bricoleurs incorporated elements of Near Eastern myth into their theogonies, the structure of the texts was not the same as Hesiod’s Theogony, and Orphic myth operated as a point of contact in the discourse between myth and philosophy. In the narrative of Chronos and Phanes, there are significant Near Eastern parallels that help explain this shift away from Night; the Dionysus narrative might not have been from the same poem as the Phanes narrative; and, since the Hieronyman theogony was written later than the Derveni or Eudemian theogonies, it is possible that the poet was influenced by later philosophy.

The Evidence: Apologist versus Neoplatonist

After Damascius outlines the story of Chronos and Phanes in the Rhapsodies, he says that “the [theology of Orpheus] referred to by Hieronymus and Hellanicus, unless he is the same person, is like this.”9 As was the case with the Eudemian theogony, neither Hieronymus nor Hellanicus wrote an Orphic poem, but they wrote prose texts that talked about an Orphic poem, so again Damascius is using a secondary source for a poem that was no longer extant in his own time. We do not know who Hieronymus and Hellanicus were, and Damascius himself even suggests that they might have been the same person, so he was probably using one text, rather than two.10 There is disagreement among scholars about whether Hieronymus should be identified with Hieronymus of Rhodes, a third- century Peripatetic philosopher (as Lobeck thought), or a Hellenistic Egyptian mentioned by Josephus (as West thought), and whether Hellanicus was a fifth- century historian from Lesbos, a third-century Alexandrian scholar, or the father of one Sandon who is mentioned in the Suda as having written “hypotheses about Orpheus book one.”11 Most recently, Edmonds suggests that Hieronymus of Rhodes made a compilation of mythical material, using Hellanicus of Lesbos as a source.12 This would give the Orphic poem a terminus ante quem of somewhere in the fifth century bc, but most scholars think the poem was written later than this.

If the contents of the poem were, as West argues, “a Hellenistic, Stoicizing adaptation of the Protogonos Theogony,” then the poem could not have been written before the third century. However, it is unclear whether the poem itself was influenced by Stoicism, or whether, as was the case with Plutarch’s references to the Orphic Hymns to Zeus, Stoic ideas were applied to the poem by a prose philosopher: in this case Hieronymus, whose text West suggests “contained philosophical, that is, allegorical interpretation.” Edmonds dismisses the latter point, questioning “whether such interpretations were exclusive to the Stoics.”13 Between these competing conjectures it remains unclear who Hieronymus and Hellanicus were. Whether Hieronymus was a Peripatetic or a Stoic, he probably applied allegory to an earlier mythological text, and these allegories could have been read as if they were actually contained in the text, by both Damascius and modern scholars. On the other hand, if allegory was inherent in the text itself, then we might argue for a later date. Brisson has argued for a much later date— indeed, later than the Rhapsodies. Based upon these supposed Stoic overtones and the fact that our earliest evidence for the Hieronyman theogony (i.e., Athenagoras) is from the second century ad, he suggests that the poem was an attempt to make the Rhapsodies compatible with Stoic cosmology.14 Thus the Hieronyman theogony is notoriously difficult to date, with guesses ranging from 500 bc to ad 200, but the most reasonable working hypothesis is that it was written sometime in the Hellenistic Period, between the third and first centuries bc.15 Since the Rhapsodies were still extant in the time of Proclus and Damascius, it is reasonable to conclude that the Hieronyman theogony was earlier, perhaps having been replaced and eclipsed by the Rhapsodies when they were written. The newer, grander Sacred Discourse in 24 Rhapsodies rendered the Hieronyman theogony obsolete, leaving fragments of it to survive only in secondary references.

Although the precise date of the Hieronyman theogony— that is, the poem itself— may never be known, our sources for the poem certainly bring us a few centuries forward in time from the Derveni and Eudemian theogonies. Even in the earliest estimates, the commentary of Hieronymus dates to around 200 bc, so when we move from the Eudemian theogony to the Hieronyman, we move from the Classical Period to the Hellenistic. This makes ancient interpretations of the poem more susceptible to the influence of Hellenistic philosophies like Stoicism, and it also increases the probability that later Hellenistic versions of Orphic poems were influenced by philosophical concepts like Stoic pantheism.

However, it also increases the probability that the meaning of the poem has been distorted by the allegorical interpretations of later authors. From the second to fifth centuries ad, the ancient category of Orphism crystallized around the Christian apologists and Neoplatonic philosophers as both groups appealed to Orphic poetry, which they thought represented Greek tradition as a whole. While the Christian apologists interpreted the texts literally and focused on the most shocking details, the Pagan philosophers interpreted the texts as allegories for philosophical concepts that the Christians would find more acceptable. 16 One consequence is that the fragments are presented in ways that are meant to support the views of the philosopher or apologist using the poem, which does not always accurately reflect the contents of the poem. The Hieronyman theogony is an excellent example of how intellectuals in late antiquity used these texts to represent Greek tradition. Although we have only two sources, both of them represent important perspectives. Damascius applies Neoplatonic allegory to his reading of a prose commentary that might have applied Stoic allegory to a poem, though it is possible that the poet himself was influenced by Stoicism. It would make sense for a Stoic or Platonist to present ideas in the form of a pseud-epigraphic Orphic poem, thus attaching the authority of Orpheus to their writings, in a manner similar to the authors of the Jewish Testaments.17 But this is where we must be most cautious: what appears to be a Stoic element in the poem might be a distortion caused by the source used by Damascius who, unaware of this distortion, might have transmitted Stoic allegory as if it were the poetic material itself, in turn subjecting this material to his own Neoplatonic allegorical interpretation.

It is much simpler in the case of Athenagoras, a Christian apologist who cites Orphic poetry as evidence that the gods of Greek myth were guilty of scandalous deeds, more condemnable than the crimes that Christians were being accused of committing in Athenagoras’ time.18 More than earlier apologists, Athenagoras and his near- contemporary Clement of Alexandria focused their attacks on Orpheus because they viewed him as the earliest representative of Greek tradition, predating Homer and Hesiod. Athenagoras responded to accusations that Christians were committing deplorable crimes by recalling the most deplorable acts of the gods in Orphic myth, including the castration of Ouranos and the incest of Zeus. Thus, Edmonds argues that Athenagoras “picks up on and elaborates” two elements of the apologists’ definition of Orphism: the extreme antiquity of Orpheus, which makes his poetry able to represent the whole tradition, and the extraordinary perversion of the actions of the gods in Orphic poetry, with its “grotesque and perverse imagery.”19 Athenagoras interprets Orphic myth literally because it aids his argument to do so. He aims to show that the immorality of the gods was rooted in the earliest Greek traditions by applying a literal reading to narratives of the most disgraceful acts of the gods in an Orphic theogony.

Damascius also treats Orphic poetry as the earliest, most representative source for Greek myth, but with a different intent: whereas Athenagoras tries to convince his reader to reject Greek tradition as false and immoral, Damascius embraces the tradition but reinterprets it. As Edmonds puts it, the Neoplatonists used Orphic poetry as a “focal point” by “highlighting the consistency” and “profundity” of Greek tradition, because they believed that the most current philosophical concepts were contained allegorically in the earliest myths.20 Referring to the same immoral acts of the gods that the apologists criticized, the Neoplatonists explained these episodes as allegories that taught the very philosophical ideas in which they themselves were interested. Over the course of the careers of the last three heads of the Platonic Academy in Athens— Syrianus, Proclus, and Damascius— the gods in Orphic theogonies were systematically mapped onto Neoplatonic metaphysical speculations, and Orphic narratives were interpreted as allegories of these concepts, based upon their conviction that Plato’s philosophy agreed with Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the Chaldean Oracles. Influenced by Iamblichus, Syrianus developed the myth that Orpheus first brought revelation to the Greeks through the legendary character Aglaophamus, who in turn taught Pythagoras. Proclus expanded upon this idea by systemizing the specific correspondences between the Rhapsodies and Neoplatonic philosophy.21 In doing so, he preserved more fragments of the Rhapsodies than anyone else, but none of his extant works mention the Eudemian or Hieronyman theogonies.

The contribution of Damascius appears somewhat less significant by comparison, but he nevertheless builds substantially on Proclus’ work at systemizing the correlations between Orphic poetry and Neoplatonic metaphysical speculation, by refining and critiquing his predecessor’s ideas. Damascius develops the idea of the “ineffable” (ἀπόρρητον) One from which the Many emanate, in the form of a series of triads gradually descending from the One through the various levels of the Intelligible, Intellective, and Encosmic orders toward the Many physical manifestations of the Platonic Forms in the physical universe.22 Basically, the Neoplatonic universe is structured like a ladder with different levels and sub- levels, each of which is a triad, leading down from the One to the lowest level of existence (i.e., physical matter). According to the Neoplatonists, the deities of the Orphic theogonies correspond to these different levels because they represent the same abstract concepts that each sub- level of the triadic scheme represents. Most of these correspondences are found with reference to the Rhapsodies, which were still in circulation in the Neoplatonists’ time. But in Damascius’ discussion of “first principles” (ἀρχαί), he refers to a long list of traditions, each of which in his view presents a different allegory of how the Many emanate from the One. As we have seen, this is the one place where Damascius mentions the Eudemian and Hieronyman theogonies by name, along with the Rhapsodies. But he also summarizes theogonic narratives from Homer, Hesiod, Acusilaus, Epimenides, Pherecydes of Syros, the Persian magi, the Sidonians, the Phoenicians, and the Egyptians. Briefly summarizing each of these, he argues that all of them represent the same process of the Many proceeding from the One.23

According to Neoplatonic allegory, the first three emanations of the Many from the One, or the top three levels of the Neoplatonic metaphysical system, consist of three triads of Intelligible deities.24 When Damascius comes to the Hieronyman theogony, he asserts that the water and mud are two principles of the first triad, but his source “leaves unmentioned the One before the two” because the One is ineffable, unspeakable, and unknowable. From the One emanates the first multiplicity, the water and the mud. The first triad is formed when Chronos emerges from the water and mud, or, as Damascius puts it, “the third first principle (ἀρχή) after these two is generated from them, I mean from water and earth.”25 Chronos produces Aither, Chaos, and Erebus, the second triad. Then he produces the cosmic egg from which Phanes is born; the dual nature of the egg (containing both male and female) means that it takes up two places in the third triad, which is completed by Phanes.26 This is a departure from the scheme that the Neoplatonists typically applied to the Rhapsodies, where Chronos corresponds to the One, from which the egg, Aither, and Chaos are produced as the first triad.27 In both cases, the aim of the Neoplatonists is to make the Orphic theogony appear to agree with their own metaphysical scheme. Damascius departs from Proclus because he thinks his own interpretation of the Hieronyman theogony better represents the fact that the One is unspeakable and unknowable.28 But his basic method is the same: although they use these texts in slightly different ways, both Proclus and Damascius interpret Orphic theogonies as allegories that represent abstract metaphysical concepts.

The only two sources that tell us anything substantial about the Hieronyman theogony— Athenagoras and Damascius— approach their material from two opposing perspectives, and this influences their choice of what details to include. Like the Orphic poets (and all other Greek poets), Athenagoras and Damascius (and indeed, Hieronymus) are bricoleurs who decide what to incorporate into their own representations of Orphic myth. For Athenagoras, whose aim is to discredit the Greek pantheon, this means an emphasis on the birth of monsters and narratives in which deities commit immoral acts. For Damascius, whose aim is to demonstrate that the gods are allegories of triadic emanations from the One, this means an emphasis on both narrative and genealogical details that correspond to the particular level of the metaphysical system with which these deities are supposed to correspond. Both authors agree on the essential structure of the narrative, and this is how we know they are referring to the same text, but their presentation is quite different. Nevertheless, it will be worthwhile to bear in mind what the apologists and Neoplatonists had in common, since both approached Orphic texts in a way that was different from the earlier authors we saw in chapter 3. Rather than make passing allusions to a hubbub of books, both the apologists and the Neoplatonists provided detailed exegeses of specific texts. For Classical authors like Plato and Aristotle, Orpheus held a certain authority because of his antiquity, his descent from the Muses, and his association with mystery cult, but he was still just one of the ancient poets in the sense that he was not yet seen as representing the entire tradition of Greek myth. But for later authors, Neoplatonists and apologists alike, Orphic poetry was given a more elevated position, considered to be representative of all Greek tradition from its earliest roots.

Reconstruction: Athenagoras, Damascius, and Bernabé

Since Athenagoras and Damascius refer to the same theogony for different reasons, the details and order of their presentations are not the same. But Bernabé, in his collection of the Orphic fragments, has cut up the relevant passages and combined them into a single series of fragments that appear in a coherent chronological order. In a way, this is useful because it allows the reader to compare the two accounts detail by detail, but at the same time, it obscures the different contexts and presentations of the two authors. Bernabé represents a departure from Kern’s practice, which was to count an entire passage as one fragment. For example, Damascius’ account of the Hieronyman theogony is only one fragment in Kern, but it is split up into seven fragments in Bernabé.29 This is why one must always read Bernabé with the original text (or at least Kern) nearby, which is what I do in this section. After taking a close look at the Hieronyman theogony as it is revealed first in Damascius, then in Athenagoras, I observe how Bernabé has cut up the texts. Not only has he split both authors into several fragments, but he has also rearranged the order of events as they appear in Athenagoras in order to make them conform to Damascius and the basic chronological order of events. This serves to support the reconstruction that Bernabé wishes to promote: a lengthy, chronological narrative from the beginning of creation to the present order of things, like in Hesiod. After reviewing Damascius, Athenagoras, and then what Bernabé does with them, we will be in a better position to interpret the individual elements of the Hieronyman theogony and to see if this reconstruction is an accurate reflection of what is actually revealed in the texts.

Damascius brings the Hieronyman theogony into a wider discussion of first principles, beginning with the Rhapsodies. After recalling the narrative of Chronos and Phanes in “the common Orphic theology”30— that is, the Rhapsodies— he summarizes the contents of the theogony known to Hieronymus and Hellanicus. At each step, he draws correspondences between the deities in this Orphic theogony and the triads of Neoplatonic cosmogony. First he explains how the ineffable One, despite its not actually being mentioned in the poem, forms a triad with the water and mud:

"There was water, [Orpheus] says, from the beginning, and mud [or matter] from which the earth was made solid, and these he establishes as the first two principles, water and earth, the latter as capable of dispersion, and the former as providing coherence and connection for earth. He omits the single principle (before the two) [on the grounds that it is] ineffable; for to not speak about it demonstrates its unspeakable nature."31

This suggestion that creation began with two primordial elements (earth and water) sounds a little bit like Presocratic cosmogony, which would not be a surprising addition to a Hellenistic Orphic poem. From this fragment we can be sure that water and mud (or earth) appeared at the beginning of the Hieronyman theogony, but this ineffable One, from which the Many emanate, certainly did not appear in the original poem. Damascius explains this silence by appealing to the unspeakable nature of the One. By saying that the earth was “capable of dispersion,” but the water was “providing coherence and connection,” he interprets the primordial elements of the myth as an allegory of the processes of dispersal and mixing of matter that cause the Many to emanate from the One.

From Damascius we know that the next event in the Hieronyman theogony was the emergence of many- headed, winged Chronos, also called Herakles, from the water and mud:

"But as for the third first principle after the two, it arose from these, I mean from water and earth, and it is a serpent with the heads of a bull and lion grown upon it, and in the middle the face of a god, and it has wings upon its shoulders, and it is called Ageless Chronos and Herakles."32

Damascius calls Chronos “the third first principle,” which contradicts the Neoplatonic interpretation of the Rhapsodies. Both Proclus and Damascius equate Chronos in the Rhapsodies with the One. In his Timaeus commentary, Proclus explains that Chronos is in this position in the allegory because, in his view, time must logically precede generation.33 In De Principiis, Damascius offers an explanation for this apparent contradiction:

"I suppose that the theology in the Rhapsodies, leaving aside the first two principles, together with the one before the two, which is transmitted through [their very] silence [about it], and begins from the third first principle after the two, since that first principle is the first one that is somewhat speakable and appropriate to the hearing of humans."34

Damascius does not explain what is unspeakable or inappropriate about the water and mud, but he does offer a reconciliation between Neoplatonic interpretations of the Rhapsodies and his own reading of the Hieronyman theogony. Simply put, he argues that Chronos appears as the first principle in the Rhapsodies because he is the first principle that is “speakable and appropriate” (ῥητόν . . . καὶ σύμμετρον) to humans. The One is unspeakable and unknowable, as Damascius sees it, so the water and mud thus form with Chronos the first Intelligible triad. Chronos is not the One, but he is still an ἀρχή.

In this way, Damascius says that Chronos is a deity “who was much honoured in [the Rhapsodies],” and, following the narrative of the Hieronyman theogony, he interprets the “triple offspring” of Chronos as the second triad emanating from the first:

"Ageless Chronos the father of both Aither and Chaos: actually, according to this theology, too, this Chronos as a serpent produced a triple offspring: Aither, which he calls Intelligible, and boundless Chaos, and the third after these is misty Erebus. They transmit this second triad as analogous to the first, being of power [dynamic] as that first is of the father [paternal]."35

The first triad, consisting of water, mud, and Chronos, is πατρική, the “paternal” triad, and the second triad, consisting of Aither, Chaos, and Erebus, is δυναμική, the “dynamic” triad, but now Damascius needs a third triad, in order to make a triad of triads emanating from the One. This he finds in the cosmic egg and Phanes, so he must explain how the third triad adds up to three when it consists of only two things. He does this by splitting the cosmic egg into a dyad:

"Chronos produced an egg, and this tradition makes [the egg] the offspring of Chronos, and as birthed among these gods, because the third Intelligible triad also proceeds from them. What, then, is this [triad]? The egg. The dyad consists of the two natures in the egg, male and female, and the multiplicity [corresponds to] the various seeds in the middle of the egg; and the third after these is the two- bodied god."36

The cosmic egg, therefore, takes up two points in the third triad, since it represents both male and female fertility, and the third point of the third triad is the firstborn Phanes, who is both male and female.

This is different from Proclus’ and Damascius’ interpretations of the cosmic egg in the Rhapsodies: with Chronos as the One, the first triad that emanates from him consists of the egg, Aither, and Chaos, the first of three triads of Intelligible deities. Damascius is basically arguing that the Intelligible gods are distributed into three triads: the triads of Intelligible Being, Life, and Intellect. When these triads are mapped onto the Rhapsodies, the first triad (Intelligible Being) includes Aither, Chaos, and the egg; the second triad (Intelligible Life) includes the egg conceived, the egg conceiving, and a white robe (which Brisson suggests was an image of a cloud); and the third triad (Intelligible Intellect) includes Phanes, Erikepaios, and Metis— three different names for the same god. Brisson acknowledges that the first two triads are “problematic,” since the egg appears in both; and the second triad is indeed nebulous, consisting only of the cosmic egg at three different stages, or in three different aspects of its being. But the Hieronyman theogony, according to Brisson, presents Damascius with a more suitable “median term,” for it fills out the first triad (Intelligible Being) with the water, the mud, and Chronos from whom being first became intelligible; the second triad (Intelligible Life) with Aither, Chaos, and Erebus, described as “nebulous,” the power from which life sprung; and the third triad (Intelligible Intellect) with the egg as both male and female and the hermaphrodite Phanes, through whom life is dispersed into the lower levels of the Neoplatonic metaphysical system.37 These are just the first three triads in the Neoplatonists’ overall metaphysical scheme, which we do not need to discuss here in its entirety, but only enough to point out that Damascius includes and interprets the details of both the Hieronyman theogony and the Rhapsodies (not to mention the Eudemian theogony, etc.) in a way that suits his exposition of Neoplatonic philosophy. Every detail of each of these theogonies is mapped onto the system of triads as an allegory that explains one aspect of the process by which the Many emanate from the One.

Athenagoras approaches the texts in a much simpler way by citing examples from Orphic myth in order to demonstrate that the Greek gods were inferior to the Christian god, and that they committed worse deeds than anything the Christians were accused of doing. As Herrero demonstrates, these were typical apologetic strategies. The way most apologists used Greek myth, in particular those found in Orphic texts, was to take myths literally and to reject “any allegorical interpretation that might make them more acceptable.” A part of their basic strategy was to demonstrate that the gods are “unworthy of this divine rank,” not in the sense that they are “entirely non- existent,” but in the sense that they “do not deserve to be considered divine.” Athenagoras refers to the Hieronyman theogony “to criticize the materiality of gods who, having originated in water and earth, cannot be eternal.” The gods are presented in such a way as to incite a negative reaction like “indignation or laughter,” which involves “monstrous images” like those Athenagoras finds in the Hieronyman theogony.38 Another part of apologetic strategy is to refer to the immoral behaviour of the gods, and this ethical criticism goes back to Xenophanes, Plato, and Isocrates. Eventually this method of reading scandalous myths literally became a staple argument of most of the Christian apologists, including Athenagoras.39

When Athenagoras wants to make the point that “not from the beginning, as they say, did the gods exist, but each of them has come into existence like ourselves,” he cites both Homer and Orpheus as evidence. First he quotes Iliad 14.201, where Ocean and Tethys are said to be the parents of the gods, and then he quotes a similar line of Orpheus, but as an interesting aside, he claims greater authority for Orpheus than for Homer, based on the belief in his greater antiquity:

"Of Orpheus, who also was the first to discover their names, and described their births in detail, and told what was done by each, and is believed by [the Greeks] to speak more truthfully about the gods, whom Homer in many things follows especially about the gods, and he has established their first origin to be from water: “Ocean, who has been made the origin of everything.”40

Here Athenagoras seems to be responding to Herodotus’ claim that the Greeks learned about the gods from Homer and Hesiod. He claims a greater antiquity and therefore authority for Orpheus.41 The Orphic texts found their authority for telling tales about the gods from their perceived extreme antiquity, based on the belief that Orpheus was “the first to discover [the gods’] names.” Thus
Athenagoras imagines Orpheus to be one of Homer’s sources, and he appeals to the greater antiquity of Orphic poetry to strengthen his argument, citing one line that calls Ocean “the origin of everything.”

Athenagoras does not identify at any point which Orphic text is his source— he simply names Orpheus— so if this reference to Ocean were all we had, then we might think he is referring to one of the early Orphic theogonies. Although Damascius never mentions Ocean by name, what Athenagoras says next indicates that he might be relying on the Hieronyman theogony:

"For water was the beginning of all things, according to [Orpheus], and from the water mud was formed, and from both was produced a creature, a serpent having the head of a lion growing on it [and another of a bull], and through the middle of these the face of a god, named Herakles and Chronos."42

Athenagoras’ use of the same words for water (ὕδωρ) and mud (ἰλύς), their role as the beginning of all things in an Orphic theogony, and the bizarre description of the many- headed Chronos who is also called Herakles, indicate that he was familiar with the same theogony as Damascius. Whether he had actually read the Orphic poem, or like Damascius was reading the work of Hieronymus and Hellanicus, is unclear. Certainly his approach to the text is different: Damascius cites genealogy to draw correspondences between the Orphic theogony and Neoplatonic metaphysics, but Athenagoras cites genealogy to argue that the Greek gods are not real gods simply because they are born. After summarizing the genealogy of the Hieronyman theogony, he asks, “In what are the gods superior to matter, having their composition from water?”43 But, unlike Damascius, Athenagoras reads the Orphic theogony as literally as possible, attempting at all points to expose how ridiculous the myths of the Greeks seemed to him. Whereas Damascius includes only the details that suit his allegorical interpretation, Athenagoras includes only the details that point literally to the monstrosity of the Greek gods, and one consequence of this is that he provides us with genealogical information that is different from Damascius:

"This Herakles generated an extremely huge egg, which . . . broke into two. The part at the top of it was brought to completion to be Ouranos, and in the bottom part Ge was held. And a third, two- bodied god came forth. Ouranos had sex with Ge and produced daughters— Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos— and sons— the Hundred- handers Kottos, Gyges, Briareon— and the Cyclopes— Brontes and Steropes and Arges. And having bound them he sent them down to Tartarus, having learned that he himself would fall out of rule by his children. So, also enraged, Ge gave birth to the Titans:

"Revered Gaia gave birth to young Ouranian boys, whom indeed they also call Titans as a surname, because they took vengeance on great starry Ouranos."44

Athenagoras and Damascius are consistent with regard to Chronos/ Herakles, the egg, and the “two- bodied god” Phanes, who emerged from the egg. However, Athenagoras omits the children of Chronos (Aither, Chaos, and Erebus) and adds details that Damascius leaves out. The idea that the top half of the egg is the sky and the bottom half is the earth is completely ignored by Damascius, who prefers to concentrate on the double sexes of the egg and Phanes because these characteristics best fit his allegorical scheme. Because Damascius is interested only in first principles, perhaps he omits the sky- and- earth aspect of the egg because he considers it irrelevant to his topic. The children of Ouranos and Ge appear too late in the narrative to have held any interest for Damascius, but Athenagoras continues with the genealogy because it suits his argument to show that these gods were born too. He concentrates on the offspring of Ouranos and Gaia, perhaps because of the more monstrous or frightening aspects of the Fates, the Hundred- handers, the Cyclopes, and finally the Titans. Every reference to the Hieronyman theogony in Athenagoras is intended to discredit the Greek gods, who “were born and have their composition from water,” and thus are seen to be inferior to the creator god of the Christians.45

The next point in Athenagoras’ argument is that because the gods are created, the Greeks depict them as having physical bodies, and these bodies are ugly. Beyond the fact that as a Christian he would generally reject the anthropomorphism of the gods, Athenagoras concentrates on those descriptions of gods that make them appear monstrous or terrifying. First he returns to the description of Chronos in the Hieronyman theogony, and then he jumps forward in the genealogy to another narrative, this time about the births of Persephone and Dionysus:

"In addition to this, their bodies were described, calling one Herakles, because he was as a god a winding serpent, and naming the others Hundred- handed, and the daughter of Zeus, whom he produced from his mother Rhea, and Demeter . . . having two eyes by nature, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and also having horns, so that Rhea, frightened at her monster of a child, fled from her, and did not give her the breast, whence mystically she is called Athela, but commonly Persephone and Kore."46

With both Chronos and Persephone (and indeed the Hundred- handers), it is not only their anthropomorphic nature, but also their monstrous forms that Athenagoras brings to the forefront of his argument. Although he gives fewer details of the description of Chronos than Damascius, he focuses especially on his serpentine nature perhaps because, obviously, snakes represent something bad in Christianity.47

He finds more ammunition of this sort from the story of Zeus having sex with Rhea/ Demeter in the form of a snake. Here we find a rare version of the myth in which Kore has horns and six eyes, so she is such a frightening monster that her mother flees from her. Athenagoras is more than willing to mock these frightening aspects of Persephone, but generally the stories that seem to interest him most are those in which the gods take on the form of snakes. After briefly discussing the immoral actions of some of the gods, he returns once again to the theme of Greek gods in the form of snakes:

"[Zeus] pursued his mother Rhea when she refused to marry him, and she became a serpent, and he himself was changed into a serpent, and . . . he had sex [with her] . . . and again that he had sex with his daughter Persephone, having in the form of a serpent forced this girl also, from whom the child Dionysus [was born] to him."48

Chronos, Rhea, and Zeus are all envisioned as serpents, leading Athenagoras to ask rhetorically what is “sacred or useful in such a story.”

In the opinions of the Greeks who told these stories, there was indeed something sacred and useful to be found. The multiform descriptions of Chronos and Phanes with their serpentine features probably have their origin in Near Eastern myths of deities with theriomorphic features. An important Greek precedent is the myth of Typhoeus/ Typhon in Hesiod and Apollodorus, a monstrous sea serpent with whom Zeus engages in an epic battle. Lane Fox demonstrates that in the eighth century bc, the Greek succession myth was amplified by creatively misunderstanding Hittite and Phoenician stories about a battle between the storm- god and a serpent.49 This led to the proliferation of stories about Zeus and Typhon, but there also seems to have been a story about Kronos and a sea serpent. Pherecydes mentions a primordial serpent named Ophion/ Ophioneus, to which Orpheus himself alludes when singing to the Argonauts in Apollonius’ Argonautica. After defeating Ophion in battle, Kronos secures his rule over the Titans.50 As for the appearance of Zeus in the form of a snake, there are plenty of stories in which Zeus shape- shifts to mate with a lover (e.g., Leda and the swan, Europa and the bull). The snake is a chthonic creature, so it makes sense for Zeus to change into a snake to mate with the earth goddess Rhea. There was also the precedent of the cult of Zeus Meilichios, the chthonic Zeus who was represented as a giant snake.51 But in the opinion of Athenagoras, all of this meant that these were not gods but demons. Like Clement of Alexandria, who views the serpent as the incarnation of evil that causes lust,52 Athenagoras interprets the serpentine forms of Chronos, Rhea, and Zeus as evidence that Pagan myths are full of wickedness.

Athenagoras asks if it is “the descriptions of their bodies” that are sacred or useful, and he questions what reasonable person “will believe that a viper was produced by a god.” To drive his point further, he returns to an earlier moment in the theogonic narrative, the birth of the viper Echidna from the belly of Phanes:

"And Phanes yielded up another terrible being from his sacred belly, Echidna with frightening face to look upon, whose hair flowing from her head and whose face were beautiful to look upon, and the rest of the parts, limbs of a frightening serpent from the top of her neck."53

Fortunately, Athenagoras has preserved what appear to be five authentic lines of the Hieronyman theogony. These lines describe Phanes giving birth to Echidna, a beautiful but “terrible being” with “limbs of a frightening serpent.” 54 The tantalizing ἄλλην (“another”) in the first line implies that in the Hieronyman theogony Phanes gave birth to other cosmic beings, which is not surprising for a creator deity, but there is no fragment that tells us who else is born. Athenagoras neglects to mention them, concentrating only on the most monstrous examples he can find, especially when it is a description of a deity with serpentine features. Narrative context and even chronological order are subordinated to Athenagoras’ conclusion that “if they differ in no respect from
the lowest beasts . . . [then] they are not gods.”55

The other major argument that Athenagoras supports with Orphic poetry is the traditional Greek criticism that the gods of myth are immoral. In his opinion, their actions are more scandalous than anything the Christians of his time were accused of committing. Having described Persephone’s monstrous form, Athenagoras goes on to discuss the monstrous actions of the gods:

"[The Greeks] have described [the gods’] deeds with precision, as they think, how Kronos cut off the genitals of his father, and hurled him down from his chariot, and how he murdered his children, swallowing the males, and that Zeus bound his father and cast him down to Tartarus . . . and fought with the Titans for the kingship, and that he pursued his mother Rhea . . . and again that he had sex with his daughter Persephone, having in the shape of a serpent forced this girl also."56

Unsurprisingly, Athenagoras finds plenty of examples of Greek gods doing violentor immoral things: Kronos emasculating his father and eating his children; Zeus overthrowing his father, battling the Titans, and committing incest with his mother and daughter. All of this serves the apologist’s rhetorical purpose, but it also seems to preserve evidence that the basic succession myth of Ouranos- Kronos- Zeus, as well as the births of Persephone and Dionysus, might have been told in the Hieronyman theogony. Athenagoras could have easily drawn the basic succession myth from elsewhere in the Greek tradition, but twice he specifically identifies Orpheus as his source for these stories, framing the narrative details with the name of Orpheus both at the beginning and at the end of his discussion. The first time, as we have seen, is when he introduces the birth of Chronos and claims that Orpheus is a more ancient source than Homer. The second time occurs later in his argument, when again he returns to the theme of the gods committing immoral acts:

"But it was necessary for them, if they intended to judge shameless and promiscuous intercourse as terrible, either to hate Zeus, who produced children from his mother Rhea and his daughter Kore, and took his own sister as wife, or the poet of these things, Orpheus, who made Zeus unholy and polluted."57

Therefore, Athenagoras explicitly attributes to Orpheus both the narrative of Chronos and Phanes and the narrative of Zeus having sex with Persephone. He does not specify that these narratives come from exactly the same Orphic text or that this text was a continuous chronological narrative like Hesiod, but he seems to indicate that this is so by referring to the succession myth that presumably appeared between Phanes and Persephone.

Like Damascius, Athenagoras refers to the Hieronyman theogony because he finds in it details that support his own argument, though his purposes are entirely different. He refers only to those details that support his claims that the Orphic gods are created, not creators; that as created beings, they are monstrous and beast- like, sometimes appearing in the form of snakes; and that their actions are more disreputable than the supposed crimes of the Christians. For his first argument, he summarizes the first few generations of the Hieronyman theogony and mocks the idea that the gods are made of water and mud. For his second argument, he focuses especially on gods in snake form and argues that if they are like beasts, then they are not real gods. And for his third argument, he briefly refers to the events of the succession myth to show that the gods are immoral. But his favourite point of reference is the birth of Dionysus from Persephone. Zeus in the form of a snake commits incest first with his mother Rhea and then with his daughter Persephone, who gives birth to Dionysus. This narrative serves all three of Athenagoras’ arguments by demonstrating that the traditional gods of the Greeks are born, they are monstrous, and they are immoral.

Despite their different perspectives, there is enough in common between Damascius and Athenagoras to allow the conclusion that certain elements of the narrative come from the same Orphic text: the water and mud, from which Chronos/ Herakles emerges in the form of a snake; and the cosmic egg, from which Phanes emerges. But each author adds details that are missing in the other. Damascius mentions Necessity and Nemesis existing with Chronos, and adds that Chronos gives birth to Aither, Chaos, and Erebus (OF 77– 78 B). Athenagoras mentions none of this, but he does attach the name of Ocean to the primordial water from which Chronos is born. He adds that the egg splits into earth and sky, Ouranos and Ge, from whom the Fates, Hundred- handers, Cyclopes, and Titans are born; and Echidna is born from Phanes. Damascius, interested only in first principles, stops at Phanes, but Athenagoras continues by mentioning the basic events of the succession myth, Zeus’ war with the Titans, his affairs with Rhea and Persephone, and the birth of Dionysus. When both sources are put together in a coherent fashion, they seem to yield a continuous narrative, from the water and mud to the god of wine, so various scholars have reconstructed the Hieronyman theogony as this type of continuous narrative.58 Its basic genealogy, setting aside minor genealogical details and the primordial water and mud, is Chronos- Phanes- Ouranos- Kronos- Zeus- Dionysus. This is the genealogy that Bernabé reconstructs in his edition of the Orphic fragments, beginning with a passage of Tatian, which ironically refers to the end of the narrative. Tatian says that “Zeus also had sex with his daughter, and his daughter became pregnant from him. Eleusis now bears witness to me and the mystic snake and Orpheus saying ‘shut the door’ to the non- initiates.”59 Because this fragment alludes to the familiar Orphic seal, Bernabé conjectures that some form of OF 1 B appeared at the beginning of the proem, so he places at OF 74 B the familiar words, “non- initiates, shut the door.” From there he begins his reconstruction of the narrative as it appears in Damascius and Athenagoras (OF 75– 89 B). Following the basic chronological order as found in Damascius, he splits the passage into seven fragments and arranges Athenagoras around these, but he cuts up Athenagoras even more, rearranging the order of events to suit his own chronological scheme, which attempts to reconcile the two sources into one continuous, chronological narrative.

Bernabé begins at OF 75 with water and mud as the beginning of everything, followed by the birth of Chronos from the water and mud in OF 76, which puts Damascius together with two different passages of Athenagoras and corroborating evidence from the scholia of Gregory of Nazianzus. The next two fragments simply continue the passage of Damascius, splitting into OF 77 with the co- existence of Necessity and Nemesis with Chronos and OF 78 with the birth of Aither, Chaos, and Erebus from Chronos. In OF 79 and 80, Chronos produces the cosmic egg, and the egg produces Phanes, as it is told in Damascius, in two different passages of Athenagoras, and again in the scholia of Gregory. The next three fragments (OF 81– 83) include genealogical information that is found in Athenagoras alone, but Bernabé reverses the order of their appearance: first the birth of Echidna from Phanes (OF 81) and then the offspring of Ouranos and Ge (OF 82), with the Titans being given a fragment of their own (OF 83). OF 84 simply takes us through Athenagoras’ brief reference to the basic succession myth of Ouranos- Kronos- Zeus, and OF 85 seems to contain a brief allusion to Zeus’ swallowing of Phanes. If indeed the Hieronyman theogony was a continuous narrative from Chronos to Dionysus, then perhaps it did contain the episode in which Zeus swallows Phanes and re- creates the cosmos, as he does in the Rhapsodies, for Athenagoras asks if Phanes “was swallowed by Zeus so that Zeus could become immovable.”60 At this point, Bernabé adds at OF 86 a statement of Damascius, which he takes to mean that the Hieronyman theogony “calls Zeus orderer of all things and of the whole cosmos, thus he is also called Pan.”61 The last three fragments of the Hieronyman theogony cut and mix three different passages of Athenagoras that talk about Zeus having sex with Rhea and the birth of Persephone (OF 87), the monstrous form of Persephone (OF 88), and the birth of Dionysus from Persephone and Zeus (OF 89), adding to OF 89 the corroborating evidence of Tatian on Zeus having sex with Persephone.

With the way Bernabé has arranged these fragments, it appears that the Hieronyman theogony was one continuous narrative. Damascius and Athenagoras do not contradict each other on any of the major details, although each includes a different set of details, so presumably there was more genealogical information in the original poem. The greatest advantage of Bernabé’s arrangement is simply practical: if one wishes to look up the specific fragment in which, for example, the cosmic egg is formed in the Hieronyman theogony, then it is easy to do so; and if one wishes to compare the way Chronos is described in both Athenagoras and Damascius, then again it is easy to do so. However, this approach also obscures the contexts in which the ancient authors discuss the text. By cutting the texts into smaller fragments, Bernabé leaves out statements by the two authors that indicate why they are talking about an Orphic theogony in the first place. This essentially hides the allegorical interpretations of Damascius and the apologetic arguments of Athenagoras, seeming to suggest that they transmit the contents of the poem without any ideological filter. This becomes particularly problematic when we consider whether Stoic ideas were contained in the Orphic narrative of the water and mud, as we will see in the next section. Also, as I argue at the end of this chapter, although the narrative of Zeus committing incest with Rhea and Persephone appears in the same text of Athenagoras as the details of the Hieronyman theogony, this does not necessarily mean that he found this narrative in the same text, despite the common assumption that he did. Overall, Bernabé’s presentation of these fragments is useful since it seems clear that Athenagoras and Damascius are referring to the same text, but to read these fragments without the original context in mind increases the risk of misinterpreting the narrative of the Hieronyman theogony.

The Narrative Pattern of Chronos and Phanes

Out of the water and mud emerges the first god of the Hieronyman theogony: “ageless Chronos,” a winged serpent with the heads of a bull, a lion, and a god, who is also called Herakles (OF 75– 76 B). Chronos produces an egg, which forms Ouranos and Ge when it is cracked, and out of this egg springs the “double- bodied” Phanes,62 also called Zeus and Pan. Both male and female, he has golden wings on his shoulders, heads of bulls on his sides, and a shape- shifting serpent on his head (OF 79– 80, 86 B). In the Hieronyman theogony, the primordial goddess Night is displaced by a personification of Time, who emerges from the raw materials of creation to give birth to the demiurge. Chronos retains this position in the Rhapsodies, so the Hieronyman theogony represents a major shift in the structure and emphasis of Orphic myth. Damascius attempts to make the Hieronyman theogony fit with his metaphysical scheme of triads, and Athenagoras attempts to make these deities appear monstrous and false, but in this section I attempt to look beyond these allegorical and apologetic interpretations in order to understand the meaning of Chronos and Phanes in the Orphic text itself.

Regarding the water and mud, Damascius says that “there was water . . . from the beginning and mud, from which the earth was made solid,” while Athenagoras offers a simpler tale, merely saying that “from the water and mud [Chronos] was made.”63 Scholars have suggested that this motif of water and mud reveals the influence of Stoicism on the Hieronyman theogony, based upon a fragment of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. Zeno says that “Chaos in Hesiod is water, from the settling of which mud is formed, [and] from mud’s becoming fixed the earth becomes solid.”64 Zeno’s use of the words ὕδωρ and ἰλύς matches Athenagoras (whereas Damascius uses ὕλη for “mud,” which could also mean “matter”), and he places the water and mud at the beginning of creation by allegorically interpreting Hesiod’s Chaos as water. This Chaos is the process by which “the earth becomes solid,” similar to Damascius’ statement that “the earth was made solid.” Thus West concludes that this poem was a “Hellenistic Stoicizing adaptation” of an Orphic theogony, and Brisson agrees that the Orphic poet followed Zeno by interpreting Chaos as water. According to Brisson, this was a late attempt to reconcile Orpheus with Stoicism and with Homer and Hesiod: Ocean and Tethys in the form of water and mud were placed at the beginning of the theogony, as in Homer, and they were reinterpreted to also represent Chaos, as in Hesiod.65 If indeed the water and mud are a poetic representation of a Stoic concept, then the Hieronyman theogony represents a Hellenistic attempt to reconcile Orphic myth with current philosophy, or to explain Stoicism through Orphic narrative.

Alternatively, it might have been the case that Hieronymus applied a Stoic allegorical interpretation to the original Orphic poem and Damascius falsely took this to be the actual contents of the poem. This hypothesis is strengthened by Athenagoras’ identification of the water as Ocean, quoting an Orphic verse that refers to “Ocean, who is made the origin of everything.”66 Oddly, Bernabé has, without any explanation in his notes, left this passage out of his collection of the fragments of the Hieronyman theogony, but other scholars have speculated that Ocean was named in the original Orphic poem. Jaeger suggested that the water and mud were Ocean and Ge but West rejected this, noting that Ge appears later in the theogony as the bottom half of the cosmic egg; but West also notes that Ocean and Tethys were traditionally paired together.

As we saw in chapter 3, Ocean and Tethys appeared as the parents of the gods in the Iliad and at least one early Orphic theogony, so it is not impossible that they might have somehow continued in this role in the Hieronyman theogony. Nevertheless, West finds it “very puzzling” that Damascius does not actually name Ocean or Tethys, since he does name Chronos, Phanes, and other deities.67 Damascius mentions these gods by name even as he is applying allegories to them, so it seems inconsistent for him to not name these first two deities. But Damascius did not have access to the original poem: he was reading Hieronymus, whose commentary might have argued that Ocean and Tethys were allegories for the water and mud of which Zeno spoke. Damascius, transmitting a statement of Hieronymus that Chronos emerged from this water and mud, could have thus inadvertently created a false impression that this Stoic allegory was rooted in the poem, rather than in his secondary source.

If the water and mud are not the result of Stoic influence, then there are two other alternatives: either Near Eastern myths or Presocratic cosmogonies. First, there are indications in Philo’s Phoenician History of primordial water and mud in Phoenician cosmogony. Philo often conflates Greek myth with eastern myth and distorts it with Euhemeristic interpretations, but one recognizably Semitic deity is Mot.68 After a primordial time when the universe consisted of a “foul chaos, dark as Erebus,” creation begins when “Mot is born of the wind.” Philo notes that “some say [Mot] is mud,” but “others say he is the fermentation of a watery mixture.”69 He continues:

"And from this [ fermentation] was born every seed of creation and the origin of all things. And there were some living things that had no sense perception, from which living beings possessed of intellect were born, and they were called Zophasemin, that is observers of the heavens. And it was formed like the shape of an egg. And Mot blazed forth the sun and the moon, the stars and the great stars."70

Baumgarten takes this to mean that “Mot was egg- shaped and blazed forth the heavenly luminaries,” but West asserts that it was “the whirling wind-driven cosmos that contained in it the seeds of all creation” that was egg- shaped.71 Either way, these parallels with the Hieronyman theogony— not only the water and mud, but also the motif of the egg— indicate that the primordial mud of the Orphic poem could have been influenced or inspired by earlier Near Eastern myth. A Greek poet who was familiar with Mot in Phoenician cosmogony could have assimilated details of the story into an Orphic theogony and changed the name to Ocean or Tethys. This possibility is not sufficient to disprove the influence of Stoicism on the poem— it is basically a matter of weighing a fragment of Zeno against a fragment of Philo— but the hypothesis of eastern influence can be strengthened by considering how other elements of the Hieronyman theogony might relate to Near Eastern myths or iconography.

As we have already seen with the cosmic egg, there are significant parallels between the story of Chronos and Phanes in the Orphic theogonies and eastern myths from India, Persia, and the Levant, which also talk about a personified time- god creating a cosmic egg. Unlike Aristophanes’ Birds, which merely makes a passing allusion to the egg, in the Hieronyman theogony the parallels
are more comprehensive. As we saw in the previous chapter, there were three eastern myths that featured a personified time- god who gives birth to a demiurge, and in each version an egg is somehow involved. In the Atharvaveda and the Upanishads, the Vedic deity Kala, whose name, like Chronos’, is also a common noun meaning “time,” is associated with the creation of the universe
in statements like “Time generated yonder sky, Time also these earths” and “the great sky in Time is set.” The latter statement reveals the association of time with the rotation of the sun, the means by which time is measured.72

In Persian myth, the time- god Zurvan Akarana, whose name means “Infinite Time” (virtually a translation of Χρόνος ἀγήραος, “Ageless Time”), produces Ahriman and Ohrmazd. For three thousand years, the physical universe consists of unformed matter “in a moist state like semen”— or, one might say, it was wet and sticky like water and mud— until Ohrmazd creates the world out of it. Similarly, in Sidonian myth, the demiurge is born when Oulomos, whose name means “time” (Phoenician ulom, Hebrew olam), has sex with himself to produce the demiurge Chousoros.73

In each of these stories, an egg plays a central role: Vedic Kala produces the demiurge, Prajapati, who in some versions is born from an egg; when Persian Ohrmazd creates the world, the sky appears in the form of an egg; and Phoenician Oulomos creates an egg along with Chousoros, who opens the egg to create the earth and sky.74 In the Hieronyman and Rhapsodic theogonies, Chronos produces an egg, out of which Phanes is born, and Phanes plays a role parallel to that of Prajapati, Ohrmazd, and Chousoros as the creator who forms the present universe out of the raw materials of the water, the mud, and the egg. Each of these time- gods coexists with, creates, or is born from the raw materials of creation, but instead of creating the universe out of these raw materials, the time- god gives birth to the demiurge by parthenogenesis; and it is the demiurge who in turn creates the universe out of these pre- existing materials.

As West has made clear, the narrative of Chronos and Phanes follows patterns of action that are seen in these earlier stories, which became known to the Greeks sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries bc, probably through sub- literary channels. West suggests that these three eastern myths come from a “common source,” which he argues is the Egyptian sun- god, Re. In early Egyptian myth, Re is called “lord of eternity” and “traverser of eternity,” linking his solar aspect with his identity as a time- god. Like Phanes, Re is born from an egg and called “firstborn of the gods,” so West sees him as a parallel to Protogonos in the Orphic myth. Re also produces gods without the use of a partner, by means of (as West so tastefully puts it) “self- directed fellatio,” followed by spitting out his semen.75 Because of these similarities, West concludes that the three eastern myths of the time- god and demiurge “developed out of the figure of the Eternal Sun, whose worship was particularly ancient and important in Egypt.” West clarifies that the source of this narrative to the Greeks was not “a literary source but a newly- evolved cosmogonic myth to the effect that Time was the first god, and that he generated out of his seed the materials for the world’s creation.”76

The elements of this basic cosmogonic myth eventually found their way into the Orphic theogonies, resulting in a narrative that appears in its full form for the first time in the Hieronyman theogony. Once again, where Orphic myth departs from Hesiodic myth it tends to do so with myths that have eastern parallels, suggesting that Orphic bricoleurs assimilated the elements of eastern myths in different and creative ways. But the Hieronyman theogony was not the first Greek text in which Chronos appeared as a personification of time. In the sixth century bc, Pherecydes of Syros wrote a prose cosmogony that began with the primordial deities Chronos, Zas, and Chthonie. In this cosmogony, “Zas and Chronos always were and Chthonie; and Chthonie became named Ge when Zas gave her the earth as a gift of honour.”77 West suggests that the triad of Chronos, Zas, and Chthonie was parallel to the Sidonian cosmogonic triad of Chronos, Pothos (“primeval wind”), and Omichle (“liquid chaos”) that Damascius found in the text of Eudemus. Whether or not there is any relation between these two triads, it is clear that Pherecydes portrayed Chronos as a creator god parallel to the eastern myths we have seen.78 In Pherecydes’ cosmogony, Chronos is the first principle who creates the elements of fire, air, and water “from his own seed,” and from the mingling of these elements the gods are created.79 Here personified Time creates by parthenogenesis the raw materials from which the physical universe will be formed.

Another parallel between Pherecydes and the Hieronyman theogony might be found in Pherecydes’ idea of μυχοί (“nooks”), of which there are either five or seven. Schibli is careful to clarify that these μυχοί are not the elements that Chronos creates, but “the places in which the elements are distributed.”80 In the Hieronyman theogony as Damascius transmits it, in addition to the production of the egg by parthenogenesis, Chronos mates with Necessity, who gives birth to Aither, Chaos, and Erebus— upper air, gap, and darkness— and it is “in these” that he creates the egg.81 Like the μυχοί in Pherecydes, the relationship between the children of Chronos and the creation of Chronos is that the upper air (Aither), the gap (Chaos), and the darkness (Erebus) are the spaces within which the physical universe will be formed. In Pherecydes, Chronos fills the μυχοί with air, water, and fire, but in the Hieronyman theogony, the primordial elements used to fill those spaces are water and earth (i.e., mud). Pherecydes seems to have been operating within the same milieu as the Presocratic philosophers, each of whom was suggesting a different element or set of elements as the ἀρχαί, or first principles from which the universe was formed. Like the Derveni author, Pherecydes found cosmogonic myth to be a useful mode of expression for this metaphysical process. This reflects a lack of distinction between mythical and philosophical thought at the time when both Presocratic philosophy and Orphic poetry were first emerging. In his formulation of cosmogony, Pherecydes drew upon myths of a personified time- god who produces the raw materials of creation, and he identified these materials as three of the four elements with which the Presocratics were concerned.

Therefore, despite the fact that Pherecydes of Syros does not tell the entire narrative of Chronos, the cosmic egg, and Phanes, he does provide us with a missing link between early eastern cosmogonies and the later Orphic theogonies, and one that links these with Presocratic philosophy; so Schibli suggests that the Orphic poets “very likely came under [Pherecydes’] sway.”82

This is possible, but there were other Greek authors who personified Chronos. Scattered references to Chronos appear in Greek literature from the Archaic Period onward, but it is not always clear whether the author refers to a personified Time or to the basic concept of time. For example, Anaximander says that justice is rendered “according to the ordering of Chronos,” and Pindar mentions “Chronos the father of all.”83 In later periods (and the Neoplatonists are partly to blame for this), Chronos was either confused or equated with Kronos: one of the extant Orphic Hymns addresses “Kronos all- father of time,” and Macrobius refers to “Saturn who is himself the originator of time.”84 The Hieronyman theogony is a product of the time between these two periods, most likely the Hellenistic Period, and the inclusion of Chronos as a primordial god is the product of a wider pattern of eastern influence on Greek myths. From the Egyptian and Vedic myths of time- gods, through Pherecydes and other Greek authors to the Orphic theogonies and beyond, we do not see a direct line of literary transmission, but traces of the evolution of narrative patterns. The basic pattern of action in which a time- god gives birth to a demiurge was passed from eastern predecessors through early authors like Pherecydes to the Orphic poets of the Hellenistic Period.

This time- god myth was developed into a uniquely Greek form by Greek writers, achieving its fullest form in Orphic myth, yet significant eastern parallels have been detected in the Orphic descriptions of the appearance of Chronos and Phanes. Chronos emerges from the water and mud as a winged serpent with the heads of a bull and a lion on his sides, and the head of a god between them (OF 75– 76 B). Firstborn Phanes, the two- bodied god, is both male and female, has golden wings on his shoulders, heads of bulls on his sides, and on his head is a serpent that changes into the shapes of different beasts (OF 79– 80 B). Like the narrative patterns that influenced the Orphic poems, eastern images of monstrous deities with wings and many heads influenced the descriptions of Chronos and Phanes in the Hieronyman theogony. Guthrie and Bernabé compare the descriptions of Chronos and Phanes with the fourheaded, four-winged creatures who were described by the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel. The four faces of these supernatural beings were those of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle.85 These descriptions might remind us of the monster Typhon/ Typhoeus, defeated by Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony. Typhon, himself the creation of interactions between Greeks and Syrians, is described as having a hundred snake heads projecting from his shoulders, and fire flashing from his eyes; he roars like a bull or lion and he hisses like a snake; and in Apollodorus, he has wings.86

Chronos and Phanes have been compared to the winged, lion-headed Persian time-god, Zurvan Akarana, as he is portrayed in a (perhaps) Mithraic relief at Modena, dated to the second century ad .87 In this relief, a young nude male figure with wings on his shoulders stands with hooves instead of feet, in the bottom half of a broken eggshell, while the top half of the shell hovers over his head. The heads of a ram, a deer, and a lion in the center project out of his chest, and a serpent winds around his body, resting its head on the top half of the eggshell. In his hands he holds a lightning bolt and a sceptre, and rays of light are projected from his head, while the horns of a lunar crescent hover above his shoulders. The twelve signs of the Zodiac rotate around the deity in an oval, and the four winds fill out the corners. The winding serpent, multiple animal heads, and wings on his shoulders resemble the descriptions of both Chronos and Phanes in the Hieronyman theogony, but it is unclear to which deity he should be compared.

Since Zurvan Akarana (“Infinite Time”) corresponds in the narrative pattern to Ageless Chronos in the Orphic theogonies, it might be preferable to compare the relief to Chronos, as does Brisson.88 There are closer similarities in the imagery since, although both Chronos and Phanes have solar associations, wings, and winding serpents, it is Chronos who more clearly has the head of a lion. Both Damascius and Athenagoras say that Chronos has the heads of a lion, a bull, and a god (OF 75 I– II B). Phanes, on the other hand, “had heads of bulls attached on his sides,” and “upon his head was a mighty serpent appearing in the shapes of all kinds of animals” (OF 80 I B).89 Although all kinds of animals” could include lions, this is not made explicit, but there are other elements of the relief that more closely resemble Phanes, such as the eggshell from which he is born. West identifies the lightning bolt with Zeus and the hooves with Pan, which brings to mind the fragment of the Hieronyman theogony that equates Protogonos with Zeus and Pan (OF 86 B). He also connects the sceptre with Protogonos, since he is said to possess a royal sceptre in the Rhapsodies (OF 166, 168 B).90 Of course, the relief depicts neither Chronos nor Phanes but a Mithraic representation of Zurvan Akarana, an ancient Persian deity who predates both the Hieronyman theogony and Mithraism; but there are enough similarities that we may accept the general hypothesis of eastern influence.

Because of the relief’s association with Mithraism, Brisson concludes that the Hieronyman theogony was not written until the second century ad (i.e., later than the Rhapsodies), and that Chronos was a “transposition” or “adaptation” of the Mithraic version of Zurvan.91 However, aside from the fact that Phanes is described in a similar way in the Rhapsodies (OF 109– 137 B), which Brisson supposes to have been earlier, there is no reason to assume that the descriptions of Chronos and Phanes could not have been influenced by the same earlier precedents as the narratives themselves. The similarities between the relief and the Orphic text can be explained as an adaptation of Zurvan in ancient Persian myth, so rather than proposing Mithraism as a source for Orphic poetry, it might be more reasonable to propose ancient Zoroastrianism as a common source for both Orphic poetry and Mithraism. This argument might be strengthened by considering the astrological component. The signs of the Zodiac appear in an oval around the Zurvan figure, combining with the rays of light on his head and the horns of the moon above his shoulders to emphasize that this is a solar deity. Solar deities are ancient and common, but the signs of the Zodiac were a development that relied upon the background of Babylonian astrology. The Persian magi of the sixth century bc, whose myths spoke of Zurvan, were also interested in astrology,92 and as we saw in chapter 2, early Orphic practices were in some ways analogous to and influenced by the Persian magi. Both the orpheotelestai and the magi were groups of ritual specialists who shared techniques and ideas, so it is not unreasonable to suspect that the magi taught the Orphics astrology.

Brisson may or may not be correct in using the Modena relief to argue that the Hieronyman theogony was influenced by Mithraism, but his analysis of the astrological signs surrounding the Zurvan figure presents an interesting explanation of why Chronos is also called Herakles in the Hieronyman theogony (OF 76 B). Based on a passage of Porphyry that equates the sun with Herakles,93 Brisson conjectures that the signs of the Zodiac could be assimilated to the twelve labours of Herakles— for example, the skin of the Nemean lion represents the sign of Leo, when the sun is at its highest point in the sky— so by this association, the sun could have become equated with Herakles. Regarding Chronos, although he is rarely (if ever) explicitly identified with the sun in Greek literature (indeed, Phanes is the better candidate for this, being the one who makes things appear), obviously the sun is a crucial means by which humans can measure time. According to Brisson, Chronos as a winding serpent may signify the course of the sun through the signs of the Zodiac, of which the bull and the lion are two.94 Thus, the association between Chronos and Herakles could be the result of these solar aspects, as they are sometimes expressed in Zodiac symbols. Brisson offers an explanation that relies on a lot of conjecture and is ultimately unprovable, but neither is his hypothesis impossible. From the sixth century bc, the influence of the magi on ritual specialists contributed to the assimilation of eastern ideas in Greek myth and practice, and astrology was one of these fields.

Based on this analysis of earlier parallels to the Orphic myth of Chronos, it appears that the primordial water and mud, the myth of the time- god who gives birth to the demiurge, the strange descriptions of Chronos and Phanes, and even the association with Herakles can be explained as Greek adaptations of Near Eastern ideas, images, and patterns of action rather than as poetic expressions of philosophical allegory. The water and mud find a parallel in both the Persian myth in which the universe was “in a moist state like semen,”95 and the Phoenician myth in which Mot represents the primordial mud. However, compared with Pherecydes’ narrative in which Chronos produces the basic elements of air, water, and fire, it appears that the water and mud of the Hieronyman theogony could have come from Presocratic speculations about ἀρχαί as easily as they could have come from Stoic allegories. The narrative of Chronos and Phanes is based on earlier myths about time- gods who give birth to demiurges, but the Greek idea of Chronos evolved within the wider tradition of Greek literature, apart from these narratives. Chronos appears as a creator-god in Pherecydes, associated with justice in Anaximander, and as the father of all things in Pindar, long before he appears as a creator- god in Orphic myth.

The Orphic narrative of Chronos and Phanes is an essentially Greek story, but the structure of the narrative pattern matches Vedic, Persian, and Phoenician myths. Likewise, the physical descriptions of these two gods combine a set of motifs that correlates with theriomorphic descriptions of Near Eastern deities and primordial Greek monsters, such as supernatural creatures in Semitic literature, Typhoeus in Hesiod, Persian-influenced Mithraic relief sculpture, and perhaps even the twelve signs of the Zodiac.

Therefore, based on the information Damascius and Athenagoras give us about the Hieronyman theogony, we may read the narrative of Chronos and Phanes, through the theoretical lens of bricolage, as a Greek adaptation of earlier Near Eastern myths about a time- god who gives birth to a demiurge by means of an egg, which might have been combined with ideas from Presocratic or Stoic philosophy. However, according to the modern reconstruction of the Hieronyman theogony by scholars such as West and Bernabé, the text did not stop there. As Athenagoras seems to imply, the Hieronyman theogony continued with the succession myth from Ouranos to Zeus and the births of Persephone and Dionysus. Yet the question remains whether Athenagoras was indeed reading from only one extended theogonic narrative that continued to the sixth generation, or from two different Orphic poems: one about Chronos and Phanes, and another about Persephone and Dionysus.

The Succession Myth and the Incest of Zeus

Damascius is only concerned with Orphic theogonies as they relate to his own discussion of first principles, so when he has finished discussing Chronos and Phanes in the Hieronyman theogony, he stops there and gives no indication if the text went any further. Athenagoras, on the other hand, is concerned with Orphic theogonies insofar as they provide him with material with which he might slander the Greek gods. To this end, he does not care where in the genealogy this material is found, as long as it gives him material to work with. In addition to the first gods, he mentions Ouranos’ castration, Kronos swallowing his children, and Zeus committing incest, basically undermining the traditional succession myth in its entirety. From the evidence of Athenagoras, scholars have reconstructed the Hieronyman theogony to include these stories in one continuous theogonic narrative, analogous in its structure to Hesiod’s Theogony and most modern  reconstructions of the Orphic Rhapsodies. But there is another possibility, which is that Athenagoras could have used more than one Orphic text, and in certain cases he could have simply made allusions to the mainstream Greek tradition. Although he names Orpheus, he does not name the Hieronyman theogony; neither does he indicate whether he is reading one text or a few texts within a collection; he simply attributes it to Orpheus.

In order to argue that the gods are monstrous, Athenagoras mentions the birth of Persephone with six eyes and horns, but then he goes back in time to earlier events in the narrative. Alluding to the traditional succession myth, he makes the common, general point that not only the appearance of the gods, but also their deeds, are monstrous:

"[The Greeks] have gone through with accuracy as they think, how Kronos cut off the genitals of his father and overthrew him from his chariot and how he murdered his children by swallowing the males. But that Zeus bound his father and cast him into Tartarus and fought with the Titans over his rule, just as also Ouranos with his sons."96

Athenagoras makes brief allusions to the traditional tales of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus, including Zeus’ battle with the Titans. Each of these myths was wellknown in mainstream Greek tradition, so all he needed to do was to mention them in passing without much detail in the context of other descriptions and narratives that paint the gods as monstrous and immoral.

Because this passage seems to fill in the chronological gaps between the narratives of Phanes and Persephone, Bernabé has placed it in the fragments after the story of Phanes, envisioning the Hieronyman theogony as a continuous, chronological narrative. Along with two other brief sentences of Athenagoras, this passage is, according to Bernabé’s arrangement of the fragments, evidence
that the succession myth appeared in this theogony. The next of these fragments is just one of a series of rhetorical questions Athenagoras asks:

"What is there that is holy or useful in such a story, that we will believe Kronos, Zeus, Kore, and the rest to be gods? Is it the descriptions of their bodies? And what man of judgment and reflection will believe that a viper was produced by a god? . . . Or who might accept that Phanes himself . . . has either the body or shape of a serpent, or was swallowed by Zeus, so that Zeus might become immovable?"97

From this, Bernabé extracts only “or was [Phanes] swallowed by Zeus, so that Zeus might become immovable.”98 He takes the passing mention of Zeus swallowing Phanes as evidence that this happened in the Hieronyman theogony as it did in the Rhapsodies. Finally, Bernabé adds a phrase of Damascius, which (supposedly) states that the Hieronyman theogony “calls Zeus orderer of all things and of the whole cosmos, therefore he is also called Pan.”99 By Bernabé’s reasoning, the Hieronyman theogony narrated the following: Kronos castrating his father and swallowing his children; Zeus defeating Kronos and the Titans and binding them in Tartarus; Zeus swallowing Phanes; and Zeus (also called Pan) re- creating the cosmos.

Although the presentation of these three fragments in Bernabé’s collection seems to present a coherent narrative, all three are problematic. The third fragment, OF 86 B, seems to say that Zeus is called Pan, but Damascius’ statement has been taken out of context. What Damascius actually says, in the context of fitting Phanes into his scheme of triads, is that “this theology celebrates Protogonos in song, and it calls him Zeus the orderer of all things and of the whole cosmos, therefore he is also called Pan.”100 Bernabé has placed the phrase “this theology celebrates Protogonos in song” in a fragment describing Phanes (OF 80 I B), and cut out the rest of the sentence, reserving it for a fragment about Zeus (OF 86 B). But the sentence is about Phanes: according to Damascius, the Hieronyman theogony “celebrates in song” Protogonos, who is also called Zeus and Pan. Because Phanes gives order to the cosmos, he is associated with Zeus, who preserves the order of the cosmos as the god of justice; and because Phanes is the orderer “of all things,” he is also called Pan, whose name means “all.” In this case, Bernabé’s arrangement of the fragments is misleading because this fragment simply is not about Zeus.

The second fragment, OF 85 B, seems to rest on more solid ground, since Athenagoras clearly says that Phanes “was swallowed by Zeus,” but again the context of the fragment is not Zeus but Phanes. Athenagoras questions a story in which “a viper was produced by a god” and quotes five lines of poetry that he explicitly attributes to Orpheus, in which Phanes gives birth to Echidna. He goes on to criticize Phanes for being the firstborn from an egg, having the body of a serpent, and being swallowed by Zeus. Conceivably, a theogonic hymn to Phanes that did not continue with the traditional succession myth might still mention that Phanes was swallowed by Zeus, because this episode is a part of the story of Phanes. This entire passage comes immediately after Athenagoras recalls the events of the succession myth, so Bernabé cuts out all mention of Rhea and Persephone and splits the mention of Phanes and Zeus into two separate fragments (OF 80 I, 86 B) in order to fit his chronological scheme. Bernabé cuts sections 20.3 and 20.4 of Athenagoras into six scattered fragments and changes the order drastically.101 Athenagoras does say that Zeus swallowed Phanes, but he says this in the context of Phanes, not in the context of the traditional succession myth.

Athenagoras does indeed mention the basic events of the succession myth, so Bernabé arranges OF 84 B in a way that indicates the inclusion of these events in the Hieronyman theogony. However, it may not have been the case that an Orphic poem was his source for these events, for these stories were widely known from Hesiod’s Theogony. Athenagoras did not need an Orphic poem to be familiar with the succession myth, nor did he specifically attribute these events to Orpheus. Rather, he introduced them with plural verbs that seem to point to the general tradition, saying that “[the Greeks] have gone through [the following events] with accuracy as they think.”102 Unlike his detailed discussions and direct quotations of Chronos and Phanes and the incest of Zeus, Athenagoras merely mentions the events of the succession myth in passing, expecting his readers to be aware of this traditional narrative. He follows the same line of argument that was applied centuries earlier to the general tradition by Plato, when Euthyphro criticizes the morality of Zeus, who “put his father in bonds, because he devoured his children unjustly, and [Kronos] in turn had castrated his own father for similar reasons,” and by Isocrates, who criticizes Greek poets for narrating “eating of children and castrations of fathers and fettering of mothers and many other crimes.”103 The invocation of the succession myth as proof that the gods do immoral things in poetry was a traditional tactic in arguments of this type. By alluding to the succession myth, Athenagoras could have even drawn from prose authors like Plato and Isocrates, rather than from poets like Orpheus and Hesiod.

Therefore, it is possible that what we call the Hieronyman theogony was instead a theogonic hymn to Chronos and Phanes, and the births of Persephone and Dionysus were drawn from a different Orphic theogonic hymn entirely; and these he does attribute explicitly to Orpheus.104 He recalls the details of a strange myth in which Zeus in the form of a snake commits incest with his mother Rhea, who becomes his wife Demeter. She gives birth to Persephone, whose monstrous form frightens her, so Rhea flees from her daughter.

Zeus commits incest with Persephone in turn, who gives birth to Dionysus. Supposedly this is where the Hieronyman theogony ends. Zeus has sex with his mother who becomes his wife, and then he has sex with his daughter who also becomes (in a sense) his wife. This mixing of female roles was not new to this text. As we have already seen in chapter 2, the last remaining fragment of the Derveni poem says that Zeus “wanted to mingle in love with his own mother.”105 Neither was the Hieronyman theogony the last Orphic text to tell this tale for, as we will see in chapter 6, the Rhapsodies expanded upon it significantly. Athenagoras may not have even learned the story of Persephone and Dionysus from the Hieronyman theogony. He discusses both this and the story of Chronos and Phanes, but he keeps the two stories distinct, moving from one to the other, not chronologically, but as it suits his argument.

In addition to the Derveni Papyrus, there are two passages by Philodemus (first century bc/ ad) that also provide evidence of an alternative Orphic myth about Rhea/ Demeter that was circulating before the Hieronyman theogony. In one passage of De Pietate, Philodemus claims that Orpheus and many other poets agree with the Stoic Cleanthes (third century bc), who says that “Rhea is both the mother of Zeus and his daughter.”106 In another passage, Philodemus cites the Athenian historian Kleidemos (fifth/ fourth century bc), who says that “in the hieroi logoi some people have mentioned, Melanippides says that Demeter and [Rhea] the mother of the gods exist as one.”107 This might be a case of syncretism, for as Morand argues, references to intergenerational incest in Orphic poetry might be a consequence of the assimilation of deities; as Phanes is equated with Zeus and Pan, so Demeter is equated with Rhea and Kore.108 Bernabé has a different explanation: he links Philodemus with the Derveni Papyrus to explain how Rhea, the mother of Zeus, can become his daughter: after swallowing the phallus of Ouranos, Zeus “generated all the gods anew, so that Kronos and Rhea, the parents of Zeus, are born anew.”109 By this reasoning, since Rhea is reborn as a part of Zeus’ re- creation, she thus becomes his daughter. It is unclear if Philodemus is actually referring to the Derveni poem as Bernabé seems to suggest, but at least these passages present additional evidence that there were alternative versions to the more familiar myth of Demeter and Persephone, before the Hieronyman theogony and the Rhapsodies were written.

Athenagoras refers to this myth three times. First, while discussing the monstrous forms of snake- like deities, he says that, somewhat like Chronos and Phanes, Persephone was described “as having two eyes by nature, and two in her forehead, and the face of an animal on the back part of her neck, and as also having horns.” Reacting to Persephone’s monstrous form, Rhea was frightened, so she fled “and did not give her the breast.”110 From here Athenagoras makes his next point, the typical argument about the disgraceful deeds of the gods, by briefly alluding to the traditional succession myth before describing in more detail how Zeus commits incest with both Rhea and Persephone.111 Third, a little further down in the text, Athenagoras argues again that the deeds of the gods are disgraceful, and he ridicules the fact that the Greeks “display as mysteries” these actions of the gods. He goes on to argue that if the Greeks wished to condemn incest, then they should have condemned Zeus, “who produced children from his mother Rhea and his daughter Kore, and took his own sister as wife.”112 Bernabé cuts up and rearranges these three passages to make them fit into a chronological order: in OF 87 B, Zeus has sex with Rhea; in OF 88 B, the monstrous Persephone is born and her mother flees; and in OF 89 B, Zeus has sex with Persephone so Dionysus is born.113

The story of Zeus having sex with Rhea, to which the Derveni Papyrus and Philodemus had already referred, was somehow transmitted to an Orphic poet who narrated this story more fully. Athenagoras found several features in this narrative that suited his argument, the most important of which was the theme of gods in serpentine forms. In the form of a snake, Zeus has sex with Rhea/ Demeter, who is also in the form of a snake. Their daughter, Persephone, is given a monstrous form, with multiple eyes, an animal’s head on her neck, and horns. Although her mother flees from her and refuses to nurse her, Zeus changes into the form of a serpent again to have sex with this strange manifestation of Persephone. Unlike the mating of Zeus and Rhea in the form of serpents, Persephone does not seem to have been in serpentine form, but her overall appearance is comparable to Chronos and Phanes in the Hieronyman theogony, who also have theriomorphic features.114 Athenagoras eagerly recalls the details of their descriptions with wings, multiple heads, and serpentine form because these support his attempts to discredit the Greek gods. In this narrative of Zeus, Rhea, and Persephone, he finds similar features in the descriptions of these deities, and their descriptions lend further weight to his argument.

After discussing the serpentine and monstrous features of these Orphic gods, Athenagoras argues that their actions are disgraceful. He repeats the usual criticism of the traditional succession myth with Kronos castrating his father and swallowing his children, and then conveniently finds more examples in the narrative that he has just been reviewing. The serpentine Zeus commits incest with both his serpentine mother and his monstrous daughter, and, what is more, he does so by force, “having bound [Rhea] with the knot that is called Herakleian” (i.e., with two serpents in spiral form), and again with Persephone, “having forced this girl also.”115 The consequences of Zeus’ committing forced incest are the births of Persephone and Dionysus, but there is no mention in Athenagoras of the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans, so there is not sufficient evidence to assume that this story was included in the Hieronyman theogony.116 It is reasonable to conclude that the incest narrative ended after the birth of Dionysus, but not necessarily with his death. The pattern of action seems to have been focused on the actions of Zeus in the form of a snake committing incest with his mother and then his daughter, resulting in the births of Persephone and Dionysus. It shares the pattern of action of wellknown tales of Zeus changing form so that he can mate with a lover.

Clearly, however, it was not just the sin of incest in this myth that interested Athenagoras. If he had wanted simply to show that Zeus committed incest, then all he needed to do (and he did) was to mention that in traditional Greek myth Zeus is married to his sister Hera. But there was more: it is not just incest, but incest that is intergenerational, violent, and bestial. Zeus does not simply have sex with his mother and daughter, but he does so by force, and in the form of a serpent. Rhea too is in the form of a serpent, and Persephone, though not serpentine, is in a monstrous form, with multiple eyes and horns. Like the narrative of Chronos and Phanes, the narrative of Zeus committing incest features deities in serpentine and monstrous forms, which Athenagoras found useful in his attempts to demonize the Greek gods. The serpentine features of these gods, not the supposed appearance of their narratives in the same text, were the most important factors in his decision to recall these two narratives in detail. Both narratives were found in Orphic poems, but not necessarily the same poem. Athenagoras chose to discuss both of these poetic narratives in his text because they fit into his own argument, and the focus of discussion was this argument— not a systematic exposition of an epic- length Orphic poem. Therefore, rather than attempt to reconstruct the Hieronyman theogony as a continuous narrative, with the traditional succession myth serving as the (virtually) missing link between these two narratives, it might be better to acknowledge the possibility that Athenagoras was reading two different, shorter narratives and that he merely alluded to the succession myth, as any other author would have done, because he knew his audience was familiar with it. He chose these two narratives because they shared certain features that contributed to his argument, notably the depiction of deities in serpentine features, which to a Christian like Athenagoras would have suggested demons.

A detailed study of the so- called Hieronyman theogony, as it appears in both Damascius and Athenagoras, reveals the complexities of reconstructing Orphic theogonies from their fragmentary state in the texts of late antiquity, and introduces the types of problems that will be relevant to our study of the Rhapsodies in the next two chapters. While apologists like Athenagoras and Clement of Alexandria read the myths literally in a polemic attack against Greek myth, Neoplatonists like Proclus and Damascius read the myths allegorically in an attempt to make traditional tales fit into the triadic schemes of their own metaphysical system. These contrary interpretative stances had consequences for the authors’ choices about what material to present and how to present it,
which in turn has had consequences on how modern scholars read (or misread) the Orphic fragments of the Hieronyman theogony, and, as we will see in the next two chapters, this applies to the Rhapsodies as well. Part of the purpose of this chapter’s detailed analysis of Damascius and Athenagoras has been to lay the groundwork for interpreting the Rhapsodies as they appear in other authors, such as Proclus and Clement. In the case of the Rhapsodies, the extant material is spread more widely, appearing in more than just two sources; and because the Rhapsodies were still extant in the time of the Neoplatonists and apologists, the extant material is much more abundant, being mentioned more than two hundred times by Proclus alone. Therefore, there is not enough room in the next two chapters to discuss every author and every fragment in as much detail as I have done in this chapter— all the more reason to use an analysis of the Hieronyman theogony to lay the methodological groundwork for an overview of the fragments of the Rhapsodies. This type of overview is the subject of much of chapters 5 and 6, where I have attempted to limit the discussion of apologetic and allegorical interpretations to places where they are relevant to the project of reconstructing the text(s) of the Orphic Rhapsodies.

NOTES

1. BNP, s.v. “Damascius”; he wrote De Principiis as head of the Academy, c. ad 515– 532.
2. Schol. Gregor. Naz. Or. 31.16 (OF 79 III, 80 IV B = 57 n. 3 K) says a little bit about Phanes, and Tatian Or. ad Graec. 8.6 (21 Marc.), 10.1 (24 Marc.) (OF 89 III– IV B = 59 K) refers to Zeus impregnating Persephone. For date of Athenagoras, see BNP, s.v. “Athenagoras.”
3. Brisson 1995: 162.
4. Unless one agrees with Brisson (1995: 37– 55) and KRS (1983: 24– 26) that the Hieronyman theogony was a revision of the Rhapsodies
5. OF 76 B = 54, 57 K; for Night in the Rhapsodies, see OF 103– 110 B. More precisely, Night is not removed from the theogony, but the story of Chronos, the cosmic egg, and Phanes is attached to the genealogy in the generations prior to her.
6. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 18.6, 20.4 (130, 136 Pouderon) (OF 81, 82 I, 83 B = 57 K).
7. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.3 (136 Pouderon) (OF 84 B = 58 K).
8. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.1, 3; 32.1 (134– 138 Pouderon) (OF 87– 89 B = 58– 59 K).
9. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.160.17 Westerink) (OF 69 B = 54 K). Bernabé adds to the text: (sc. Ὀρφέως Θεολογία).
10. Thus argues West 1983: 176.
11. Hellanicus father of Sandon: Suda, s.v. “Σάνδων” (4.320.20 Adler) (OF 70 B), or Scamon; cf. Fowler 2000: 366; 2013: 731; Hieronymus the Egyptian: Josephus, Antiquitates Iudaicae 1.94, 107 (Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 9.11.3, 9.13.5) (OF 71– 72 B); Hellanicus of Lesbos: Jacoby ad FGrH I A 130; Hieronymus of Rhodes: Lobeck 1829: 340; West 1983: 68, 176– 180; OF 70– 73 B and Bernabé ad loc.
12. Edmonds 2013: 18– 20; cf. Fowler 2013: 682– 689.
13. West 1983: 176, 182; Edmonds 2013: 20.
14. Brisson 1995: 45– 47, 2912.
15. This is the position of West (1983: 176– 177), and Bernabé ad loc., based on their assumption of Stoic influence in the poem.
16. Edmonds 2013: 28.
17. OF 377– 378 B = 245, 247 K.
18. Herrero (2010: 232) argues that the apologists were “direct heirs” of earlier Greeks who criticized the gods for their immoral acts (e.g., Plato and Isocrates, see OF 26 B). The original emergence of allegorical interpretations was in response to criticisms of this type (Lamberton 1986: 10– 21; Ford 2002: 68– 70).
19. Edmonds 2013: 33, but see Herrero 2010: 232– 242.
20. Edmonds 2013: 37; in pages 14– 43, he gives a detailed account of this pattern.
21. Proclus, Theol. Plat. 1.5.25– 26; Brisson 1995: 43– 54; Edmonds 2013: 39– 42.
22. See Brisson (1995: 164– 165), who has worked out many of the details of this Neoplatonic system as presented by Proclus (1995: 43– 103) and Damascius (1995: 157– 209).
23. Damascius, De Principiis 122– 125 (3.156– 167 Westerink).
24. Brisson 1995: 172– 173.
25. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.160.17 Westerink) (OF 75, 76 I B = 54 K).
26. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.161– 162 Westerink) (OF 78, 79 I, 80 I B = 54 K); Brisson 1995: 195– 201.
27. Brisson 1995: 70– 71, 168– 171.
28. Van Riel 2010: 671– 680.
29. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.160– 162 Westerink) (OF 69, 75 I, 76 I, 77– 78, 79 I, 80 I B = 54 K).
30. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.159.17 Westerink) (OF 90 B = 60 K).
31. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.160 Westerink) (OF 75 I B = 54 K); translations of De Principiis based on Ahbel- Rappe (2010), with some modifications. 32. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.160.7 Westerink) (OF 76 I B = 54 K).
33. Proclus, in Plat. Tim. 1.280.22– 26 Diehl (OF 109 V B); Damascius, De Principiis 123 (3.159.17 Westerink) (OF 109 VIII B = 60 K); cf. Brisson 1995: 70, 168– 169.
34. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.161 Westerink) (OF 54 K).
35. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.161 Westerink) (OF 78 B)
36. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.162 Westerink) (OF 79, 80 I B = 54 K).
37. Brisson 1995: 71– 72, 172– 174.
38. Herrero 2010: 232– 243.
39. Xenophanes 21 A1 D- K (Diogenes Laertius 9.18); for Plato and Isocrates, see OF 26 B; on the origins of allegorical interpretation, see Theagenes, fr. 8 A2 D- K (Schol. B Il. 20.67); Richardson 1975: 65– 81; Lamberton 1986: 10– 21; Ford 2002: 68– 70; on the apologists taking up this tradition of criticism, see Herrero 2010: 232– 243.
40. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 18.3 (128 Pouderon) (OF 57 K).
46. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.2 (OF 82 II, 88 B = 58 K).
47. Cf. Clement Alex., Protr. 2.12.3, 2.16.1; Jourdan 2006: 267.
48. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.3 (OF 87 I, 89 I B = 58 K).
49. Hesiod, Theogony 820– 868; Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.6.3; Lane Fox 2008: 280– 301.
50. Pherecydes of Syros, fr. 78– 80 Schibli (Origen, c. Cels. 6.42– 43; Philo apud Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 1.10.50); Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica 1.496– 511.
51. Parker 2011: 67– 69.
52. Jourdan 2006: 267.
53. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.4 (OF 81 B = 58 K).
54. Echidna appears in Hesiod (Theogony 298– 300) as the daughter of Callirrhoe.
55. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.5.
56. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.3 (OF 84, 87 I, 89 I B = 58 K).
57. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 32.1 (OF 87 II, 89 II B = 59 K). the hieronyman theogony 137
58. Ziegler 1942: 1349– 1350; Alderink 1981: 38– 42; West 1983: 180– 181; Ricciardelli 1993: 39–42; Brisson 1995: 2897– 2902; Sorel 1995: 41– 45; OF 69– 89 B and Bernabé ad loc.
59. Tatian. Or. ad Graec. 8.6 (21 Marc.) (OF 74, 89 III B = 59 K). Bernabé follows Kern, who associated Athenagoras with Tatian by including both in OF 59 K.
60. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.4 (138 Pouderon) (OF 85 B), cf. OF 240– 243 B.
61. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.162.15 Westerink) (OF 86 B).
62. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.162.5 Westerink) (OF 80 I B = 54 K); but see Bernabé ad loc.: δισώματον Westerink; ἀσώματον cod.
63. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.160.17 Westerink) (OF 75 I B = 54 K); Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 18.3– 4 (128 Pouderon) (OF 75 II B = 57 K).
64. Zeno, fr. 104 SVF (1.29.17 von Arnim) (Schol. Apoll. Rhod. 1.496– 498a = 44.4 Wendel); see West 1983: 183; 1994: 297; Bernabé ad loc.
65. Brisson (1995: 2912), following West (1983: 182– 183); Bernabé ad OF 75 B disagrees.
66. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 18.3 (OF 57 K).
67. West 1983: 183– 184.
68. Philo, FGrH 790 F2. Jacoby ad loc. estimates c. 54– 142; cf. A. Baumgarten 1981: 32– 35. The presence of Mot in Phoenician myth is attested by the appearance of “Divine Mot” in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle (KTU 1.4.7.45– 47, trans. Smith and Pitard 2009: 84– 86).
69. Philo, FGrH 790 F2 (Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 1.10.1); translations based on A. Baumgarten (1981: 96– 97), with some modifications. West (1994: 298) suggests that this watery mixture was not found in Philo but Eusebius “imported it from Porphyry”; but cf. “his town, the Watery Place” in the Ugaritic myth (KTU 1.4.10– 12).
70. Philo, FGrH 790 F2 (Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 1.10.1); compare the translation of A. Baumgarten (1981: 97): “and they were formed like the shape of an egg” with West (1994: 295): “And it was formed like the shape of an egg.” The singular ἀνεπλάσθη indicates that West’s translation is probably correct.
71. A. Baumgarten 1981: 123; West 1994: 299.
72. West 1971: 33; 1983: 103– 104; cf. Lujan 2011: 89.
73. West 1971: 29– 31; 1983: 103– 104.
74. Cf. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 18.5 (130 Pouderon) (OF 80 II B = 57 K), where the bottom of the egg is Ge and the top half is Ouranos.
75. West 1971: 34– 36; 1983: 103– 105. One may also note the Egyptian myth of Atum, who created the world by masturbating, since in later versions the Egyptians made the myth more palatable by depicting him “spitting” instead (Burkert 2004: 94). See also Schibli (1990: 37– 38), who relates the myth of Atum to Pherecydes of Syros.
76. West 1983: 104– 105.
77. Pherecydes of Syros 7 A1, B1 D- K (fr. 14 Schibli) (Diogenes Laertius 1.119); translation: Schibli 1990: 144.
78. Damascius, De Principiis 125 (3.166 Westerink); West 1971: 28– 36.
79. Pherecydes of Syros 7 A8 D- K (fr. 60 Schibli) (Eudemus, fr. 150 Wehrli) (Damascius, De Principiis 124 bis = 3.164 Westerink); as is the case with the Sidonian myth, it is possible that Damascius is drawing on Eudemus, rather than Pherecydes directly.
80. Schibli 1990: 20.
81. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.161.8– 162.1 Westerink) (OF 77, 78, 79 I B = 54 K).
82. Schibli 1990: 35.
83. Anaximander 12 B1 D- K; Pindar, Ol. 2.17; cf. Sorel (1995): 47– 49 and Noussia- Fantuzzi (2010: 325), who discuss these and other references to Chronos as a god in Greek literature; e.g.,Solon, fr. 14 Gentili- Pratico (Diogenes Laertius 1.49); Pindar, Ol. 10.53– 55. Nemesis (offspring of Chronos in the Hieronyman theogony) was personified in the Cypria, fr. 10 Bernabé = 11 West (Philodemus, de Piet. B 7369 Obbink).
84. OH 13.5; Macrobius, Sat. 1.22.8; cf. McCartney 1928: 187– 188.
85. Ezekiel 1:6– 13; Guthrie 1952: 96– 102; OF 76 B and Bernabé ad loc. Bernabé cites Revelation 4:6, which describes four winged creatures, resembling a lion, ox, man, and eagle. The Vedic god Kala is described as “thousand- eyed, unaging, possessing much seed” (West 1971: 33), and one might note theriomorphic images of the gods in Egyptian iconography.
86. Hesiod, Theogony 820– 868; cf. Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1.6.3; cf. Nonnus, Dionysiaca 1.478– 520; Lane Fox 2008: 280– 301.
87. Zurvan Akarana is compared to Chronos by van der Waerden (1953: 481– 482) and Brisson (1995: 37– 55), and to Phanes by West (1983: 253– 255).
88. Brisson 1995: 50.
89. See also Proclus, in Plat. Tim. 1.427.20 Diehl (OF 130 B = 79 K), who quotes a Rhapsodic line that speaks of Phanes “sending forth the might of a bull and a fierce lion.”
90. West 1983: 253– 254.
91. Brisson 1995: 37– 55.
92. Van der Waerden 1953: 483.
93. Porphyry, De imag. 8.23– 24.
94. Brisson 1995: 2913– 2914.
95. West 1971: 30– 31.
96. Athenagoras Pro Christ. 20.3 (136 Pouderon) (OF 84 B = 58 K).
97. Athenagoras Pro Christ. 20.4 (138 Pouderon).
98. Athenagoras Pro Christ. 20.4 (138 Pouderon) (OF 85 B = 58 K); this comes immediately after 20.4 (136 Pouderon) (OF 81 B = 58 K), which concentrates on the monstrous aspects of Echidna.
99. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.162.15 Westerink) (OF 86 B = 54 K).
100. Damascius, De Principiis 123 bis (3.162.1 Westerink) (OF 80 I, 86 B = 54 K).
101. The first part of 20.3 (the succession myth) becomes OF 84 B, and the second part of 20.3 (Rhea and Persephone) becomes OF 87 I and 89 I B. The first part of 20.4 is cut out except for the five lines about Phanes and Echidna, which become OF 81 B, but the second part is split between OF 80 III and 86 B (arranged so that they appear to be about first Phanes and then Zeus, although both are about Phanes).
102. It is unclear whether Athenagoras’ plural verbs refer to the Stoics or to the Greeks in general (since at 19.3 he mentions the Stoics), but usually where there is no subject he simply means the Pagan Greeks; or he could be using a generalizing plural, similar to the use of φασί (“they say”).
103. Plato, Euthyphro 5e– 6b (OF 26 I B = 17 K); Isocrates, Busiris 10.38– 39 (OF 26 II B).
104. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 18.3, at the beginning of the Chronos and Phanes narrative, and 32.1, at the last mention of the Persephone narrative.
105. DP 16.14, 18 passim = OF 18 B.
106. Philodemus, de Piet. (Herculaneum Papyrus 1428 VI 16– 17, pp. 80– 81 Gomperz) (OF 28 B = 30 K) = Cleanthes, fr. 1081 (SVF 2.316, 34 von Arnim).
107. Philodemus, de Piet. (Herculaneum Papyrus 248 II 7– 8, p. 23 Gomperz) (OF 29 B = p. 143 K) = Kleidemos, FGrH 323 F 25.
108. Morand 2001: 155– 156.
109. Bernabé ad OF 38 B; translation mine.
110. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.2 (OF 88 B = 58 K).
111. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.3 (OF 87 I, 89 I B = 58 K).
112. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 32.1 (OF 87 II, 89 II B = 59 K).
113. Bernabé adds two brief statements of Tatian, which corroborate the detail that Zeus had sex with Persephone in the form of snake: Tatian. Or. ad Graec. 8.6, 10.1 (21, 24 Marc.) (OF 89 III, IV B).
114. Neither does Persephone appear in serpentine form in the Rhapsodies (OF 276– 283 B); cf. West 1983: 97.
115. Athenagoras, Pro Christ. 20.3 (OF 87 I, 89 I B = 58 K); cf. Proclus, Theol. Plat. 6.11 (6.50.12 Saffrey- Westerink) (OF 281 II B = 195 K) (referring to the Rhapsodies); Kerényi 1951: 8– 9.
116. West 1983: 181– 182; see also Bernabé ad loc. According to Herrero (2010: 249, 355–357), cannibalism is a topic that Christian apologists conspicuously avoided, even in Clement of Alexandria’s discussion of the dismemberment myth in the Rhapsodies (Protr. 2.18.1), with the exception of Firmicus Maternus, de err. 6.3.

Written by Dwayne A. Meisner in "Orphic Tradition and the Birth of the Gods".Oxford University Press, UK, 2018, excerpts chapter 4 pp.119-157. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.