Note 38 — Chapter X · THE ORPHICS

This explanation of the διαμελισμός of Zagreus is often put forward (though subtilized into a Neoplatonic sense) by those who use the Orphic Rhapsodiai: see Lob. 710 ff. But even Plutarch has something of the sort (E ap. D. 9, p. 389 A), and it cannot be doubted that this (apart from its Platonist wrappings) was the meaning of the legend in the mind of its first inventor. Nor can the conception that the separate existence (multiplicity) of things first came into the world by an act of impiety, have been strange to the theologoi of the sixth century: we must admit this at once on remembering the doctrine of Anaximander that the multiplicity of things which has arisen out of the original one ἄπειρον is in itself an ἀδικία for which it must pay “recompense and punishment” (fr. 2 Mull., 9 Diels). Such personification of the processes of nature and the reading of an ethical sense into them, combined as it was with a quietist tendency, was much more likely to have arisen in the fanciful minds of semi-philosophical mystics than to have been given to them by the philosophers.