Note 110 — Chapter IX · DIONYSIAC RELIGION IN GREECE ITS AMALGAMATION WITH APOLLINE RELIGION. ECSTATIC PROPHECY. RITUAL PURIFICATION AND EXORCISM. ASCETICISM

Hdt. iv, 15, Thpomp. ap. Ath. 13, 605 C: the bronze laurel was set up κατὰ τὴν Ἀριστέα τοῦ Προκοννησίου ἐπιδημίαν ὅτε ἔφησεν ἐξ Ὑπερβορέων παραγεγονέναι. This is not said by Hdt. but is compatible with his account. Acc. to Hdt. Aristeas told the people of Metapontum that they alone of all the Italiots had been visited by Apollo and that he, Aristeas, had been in the god’s train in the shape of a raven (sacred to Apollo). This last feature allows us to conclude that Hdt., too, knew of the wanderings made by the soul of Aristeas while his body remained at home as though dead. The raven is clearly the soul of Aristeas: Plin., NH. vii, 174.—The ἐπιδημία of Aristeas in Metapontum fell acc. to Hdt.’s own calculation (ὡς συμβαλλόμενος . . . εὕρισκον) 240 years (not 230) after the second ἀφανισμός of Aristeas from Prokonnesos. As Aristeas had in his poem spoken of the beginning of the Kimmerian invasion (Hdt. iv, 13) his first ἀφανισμός cannot have been before 681 (the first year of Ardys’ reign, when the Kimmerian invasion began acc. to Hdt. i, 15: Prokonnesos was, too, first founded under Gyges: Str. 587). Taking this as a starting point (and it is the earliest admissible terminus) and subtracting 240 + 7 years (Hdt. iv, 14 fin.) we should arrive at the year 434. This, however, cannot possibly have been meant by Hdt. as the year of the miraculous presence of Aristeas in Metapontum. We seem to have one of Hdt.’s errors of calculation to which he is prone. We cannot indeed make out when exactly he intended to date the various scenes of the Aristeas story.—In any case, Hdt. never intended to make Aristeas the teacher of Homer, as Bergk following others thinks. He makes Homer’s flor. about 856: see Rh. Mus. 36, 397; and puts the Kimmerian invasion much later. Aristeas could only be regarded as teacher of Homer (Str. 639; Tat. Gr. 41) by those who made Homer a contemporary of the Kimmerian invasion, Thpomp. esp.: see Rh. Mus. 36, 559.—We do not know what grounds those Chronologists had who made Aristeas contemp. with Kroisos and Kyros and put his flor. in Ol. 58, 3 (Suid.). The reason may possibly have been “identification”—this is hardly likely—“or conjunction with Abaris” (Gutschmid ap. Niese, Hom. Schiffskat., p. 49, n.). Unfortunately nothing is known of such a conjunction with Abaris (very problematical conjectures by Crusius in Myth. Lex. i, 2814 f.). Possibly those who favoured this view held that the Ἀριμάσπεια had been foisted upon Aristeas; cf. D. H., Thuc. 23; π. ὕψους, 10, 4. This work was certainly regarded as having been composed at the time of the Kim. invasion. The historical reality of Aristeas was never doubted in antiquity and in spite of the many legends that gathered about his name there is no need for us to do so. The stories of Aristeas’ extremely prolonged lifetime (from the Kim. invasion to the evidently much later period in which he really lived) appear to have been derived chiefly from fictions in the Ἀριμάσπεια which probably also gave reasons of a mysterious kind for this marvellous extension of his existence. We cannot tell whether Aristeas himself wrote the poem and provided his own halo of marvel or whether someone else, coming later, made use of this name so famous in legend. If there was any basis for the account in Suid. Πείσανδρος Πείσωνος fin. we might be justified in attributing the composition of the Ἀριμάσπεια to Aristeas himself. In any case the poem was already in existence at the beginning of the fifth century: it can hardly be doubted that Aeschylus modelled upon it his picture of the griffins and Arimaspoi in Pr. 803 ff.