Note 172 — Chapter XIV · PART II POPULAR BELIEF

We know of a certain Nikagoras Minuc. f. (significantly enough an ardent admirer of Plato) temp. Const. δᾳδοῦχος τῶν ἁγιωτάτων Ἐλευσῖνι μυστηρίων, CIG. 4770. Julian, even as a boy, was initiated at Eleusis: Eunap., V. Soph., p. 53 (Boiss.). At that time, however, in miserandam ruinam conciderat Eleusina, Mamert., Act. Jul. 9. Here again Julian seems to have restored the cult. Valentinian I, on the point of abolishing all nocturnal festivals (see Cod. Theod. iii, 9, 16, 7), allowed them to continue when Praetextatus Procons. of Achaea represented to him that for the Greeks ὁ βίος would be ἀβίωτος, εἰ μέλλοιεν κωλύεσθαι τὰ συνέχοντα τὸ ἀνθρώπειον γένος ἁγιώτατα μυστήρια κατὰ θεσμὸν ἐκτελεῖν, Zosim. iv, 3. (Praetext. was a friend of Symmachus and, like him, one of the last pillars of Roman orthodoxy: princeps religiosorum, Macr., S. i, 11, 1. He was himself sacratus Eleusiniis, and hierophanta there: CIL. vi, 1779; probably the Πραιτέξτατος ὁ ἱεροφάντης of Lyd., Mens. 4, 2, p. 148 R. [p. 65 W.], is the same person.) In 375 A.D. we hear of a Nestorius (probably the father of the Neoplatonic Plutarch) as ἱεροφαντεῖν τεταγμένος at the time (Zos. iv, 18). In 396 during the hierophantia of a πατὴρ τῆς Μιθριακῆς τελετῆς (whose oath should have excluded him from that office) the temple of Eleusis was destroyed by Alaric, incited thereto by the monks who accompanied him (Eunap., VS., p. 52–3). The regular holding of the festival must then have come to an end.—Evidence of later celebration of the Eleusinia is not forthcoming. The expressions of Proclus, which Maass regards as “certainly” proving that the festival was still being held in the fifth century (Orpheus, 15), are quite insufficient to the purpose. Proclus speaks of various sacred ceremonies of initiation from which we μεμαθήκαμεν something: of a φήμη, i.e. written tradition, of certain unspecified Eleusinian θεολόγοι; of what the Eleus. mysteries ὑπισχνοῦνται to the mystai (just as we might speak in the present tense of the permanent content of Greek religion). These passages prove nothing: whereas the imperfects which he uses elsewhere clearly show that neither temple nor festival existed any longer in his time. (He speaks, in Alc., p. 5 Crz., of what used to be in the temple of Eleusis and still more of what formerly occurred ἐν τοῖς Ἐλευσινίοις ἱεροῖς—ἐβόων κτλ., in Ti. 293 C.) The festival moreover cannot have gone on without the temple and its apparatus.