Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

and the Soul-Ladder 121
— How, exactly, did the Orphist 'enter upon the lovely Crown'?
We have seen reason to believe that, with a view to apotheosis^ he
had 'fallen as a kid into milk-.' Now Attic vase-paintings of the
fifth century B.C. represent the Thracian women that slew Orpheus
as tattooed with various symbols including a small goat and a
ladder (fig. y6y. And Attic vases of the late fifth or the fourth
r^
f
V'" '?
V /
Fig. 76.
">v %
(see Athen. 202 A Kal fiera ravra Aios ijyeTo nofxirr) Kai aXXtoi' Traiii,Tr6Wioi> deiov, k.t.\.),
and Wieten's interpretation of the Pythagorean precept is confessedly different from
that of Porph. /oc. cit. Neither objection is necessarily fatal, but the whole hypothesis
is frail.
^ M. Radin 'Apotheosis' in the Class. Rev. 1916 xxx. 44— 46 acutely remarks that
' the term [ciTro^^uio-is] was intended to denote not merely the elevation of a mortal to
divinity [e/c^e'wo-i?], but to assert of such an elevation that it was a movement in the
Orphic cycle, a restitutio in pi-istinuiii statum.^
'^ Stipra i. 675 ff.
^ (i) A fragmentary kylix with white ground, found in 1888 on the Akropolis at
Athens (J. E. Harrison ' Some fragments of a vase presumably by Euphronios ' in the
/ourn. Hell. Stud. 1888 ix. 143—146 pi. 6, part of which = my fig. 76, G. C. Richards
ib. 1894 xiv. 381 f., W. Klein Die griechischen Vaseii init Liebliugsinschrifteii Leipzig
1898 p. 154 f., O. Gruppe in Roscher Lex. Myth. iii. 1184 fig. 9, Furtwiingler— Reichhold
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