BE DOCTRINES OF THE ORPHIC: MYSTERIES: 
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORDS 
OF VUANCHISES IN: VERGIL’S: SIXTH 4ARNETD 
724-51" | 
By GEORGE NORLIN 
The sixth book of the Aeneid is a composite picture drawn mainly 
from Greek models. Popular descriptions of the lower world in the 
Greek epic, philosophical ideas, and the fantastical beliefs of the mystery 
cults are here combined into a splendid, though not altogether har- 
monious effect. It is easy enough, in spite of Eduard Norden’s defense? 
of Vergil’s consistency, to point out the confusion which has resulted 
from this mixture of discordant elements; but the thesis of Vergil’s care- 
lessness has, perhaps, been pushed too far. Where inconsistencies 
appear to exist the editors have been too prone to dismiss them with the 
ready explanation that the poet had no chance to work over and revise 
this difficult attempt to fuse into a consistent whole conceptions borrowed 
from such different sources. 
It is the purpose of this paper to attempt an interpretation of the 
most troublesome passage of all, lines 724-51, as it stands in the MSS, 
without resorting to the usual tour de force of deleting a portion or 
rearranging the lines. 
The discovery of the new Orphic verses,+ mainly in southern Italy, 
inscribed on thin gold plates buried with the dead, has served to recall 
the attention of scholars to the mystic ideas of the Orphic-Pythagorean 
psychology and eschatology, with the result that the field has been 
reworked, and difficulties have been cleared away; and among them 
some of the harder problems of the sixth book of the Aeneid have been, 
t Reprinted from The Classical Journal, Vol. III, No. 3, January, 1908, with permission of the editor. 
2 Hermes XXVIII. 372 ff. and XXIX. 313 ff.; later his edition of Aeneid, book vi. 
3 Following, and supplementing, the general line of Norden’s explanation, pp. 16 ff. of his edition, but 
differing from it in an important particular. 
4 Collected with text, translation, and commentary by Gilbert Murray in the appendix to Harrison’s 
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. 
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