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introducen elementos orientales. También es muestra de un interesante sincretismo entre
orfismo y judaísmo el Testamento de Orfeo, que conocemos en varias versiones, y que atribuye
una doctrina monoteísta al mítico poeta tracio. Pero el orfismo durante el helenismo no se
reduce a un fenómeno libresco. Muchas laminillas áureas encontradas en tumbas de Creta, de
Acaya y de Macedonia testimonian la esperanza en una vida dichosa post mortem como
retribución por haberse iniciado en los misterios órficos en honor de Dioniso. Estas mismas
creencias escatológicas se observan en varios epigramas de la época, en especial de Posidipo
de Pela. Por otro lado, en la literatura helenística se perciben numerosas alusiones a creencias
órficas, como el mito antropogónico de Dioniso y los Titanes, y ciertas concepciones
teogónicas y escatológicas que tuvieron expresión en diversos poemas atribuidos a Orfeo.
Carlo Santaniello, University of Napoli, Italy
Un mito babilonese e la colpa del demone in Empedocle B115 D-K
Wed 16 th , 17.20, Classroom 8
As a preliminary statement, the author is ready to acknowledge that he is no orientalist; and, of
course, he is persuaded that, although there is evidence that Enuma Elish was known to
Eudemus, a famous disciple of Aristotle’s, this can be no justification for supposing that the
story of the downgrading of one or more daimones in Empedocles B115 Diels-Kranz, ensuing
to a mysterious crime and a perjury, should even indirectly derive from the Accadian myth of
the making of man out of the killing of a god. In fact, not only there is no proof or clue that
Empedocles knew Enuma Elish in any form a century or more before Eudemus, but, even if it
were shown that he did, the myth included in the Babylonian poem is different from the story
of the fall of the daimones narrated by the great man from Akragas: apart from the uncertainty
as to whether the tale told by Empedocles should be considered “a traditional tale” (as sounds
the definition of myth worked out by G. S. Kirk and accepted by W. Burkert), the main
discrepancies are that in the Akkadian myth blood is spilt from a guilty god, who is regarded as
a rebel, whereas in Empedocles the guilt lies with the blood-spilling god; and that in Enuma
Elish there is no metempsychosis and wandering from the lowest condition (a stone) to the
highest (man, before becoming a god again) as in Empedocles, but the god Kingu is killed (or,
better said, executed) once and for all, in order that a man may be made out of the god’s blood.
It might be added that comparison with the story told in another, older Accadian poem,
Atrahasis, is also possible up a certain degree. So—one might ask—what is the use of
comparing Empedocles’ tale in B115 with Enuma Elish? First of all (as historians of religion
know very well, but some Empedoclists seem to forget), the spilling of divine blood is a way to
start life attested in myth also elsewhere (see the case of Indian Purusha, who is made to pieces
in order to generate the universe) — it is good to stress this point, as the emendation φόβ into
φόν in Emp. B115.3 (dating back to Stephanus’ happy insight in the xvi century, and
indirectly supported by other fragments and witnesses) has been recently put to question more
than once. Secondly, scholars are obviously right in comparing the punishment of the
delinquent god in Empedocles to the punishment of the perjured god in Hesiod’s Theogony, but
this leaves the spilling of blood in Empedocles with no correspondence, because there is no
blood-spilling in Hesiod, only a reference to «strife and quarrel»; whereas the Enuma Elish
myth provides a story in which the killing of a god allows for the making of man out of the