Note 84.1 — Chapter III · THE SECOND PERIOD, 900-500 B.C.

It is of more immediate importance for the religious history of the Greek people to determine—if we could—the measure of success that these missions achieved, how far they succeeded in capturing the masses or the élite of the people. They certainly did not succeed in penetrating the inner circle of the Eleusinian mysteries; there is no evidence that they even tried, though it is likely that they did; but we may surmise that their influence was at one time strong at Athens, as Aristophanes proclaims as a generally accepted tradition that Orpheus was the apostolic founder of all mysteries. They were evidently powerful in Crete; but the chief arena of their activity and the chief scene of their secular and political influence was ‘Western Hellas’ or Magna Græcia, where Pythagoras was their greatest convert and the Pythagorean clubs their militant orders. The career of these forms a page of general Greek history. Their downfall relieved Hellas from the danger of the establishment of Orphism as a secular power, which threatened the Hellenic spirit with a bondage to sacerdotalism and the pharisaic formalism of the purist. Henceforth, the Orphic religion was a private influence only, and we have no evidence to determine precisely how great it was at any particular epoch. Pindar was deeply touched by it. Æschylus and Sophocles, so far as we can see, remained unmoved, while Euripides may have been at times attracted and at times repelled but was in no sense its champion. Plato in a well-known passage84.1 protests strongly against the Orphic mystery-mongers as spiritual quacks destitute of any real morality, who dealt in magic and traded in promises and threats concerning the other world. Whether this moral estimate of Orphism was just or not, there is no doubt that Plato’s theory of the soul as expressed in the Phædrus was indebted to the Orphic metaphysic. And the part played by these preachers of purity and salvation in the later spiritual history of Greece was certainly of high importance. They mark the beginning of a new era of individualism and of what is called ‘otherworldliness’ in religion; for their concern was with the personal soul and its destiny.