I50 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
in some degree at least, illuminated.t The study of these new verses, 
some of which date from the fourth century B. c., has at any rate proved 
that the Orphic ideas of the soul and its destiny which are found in 
late writers like Proclus, highly colored though they are with the Neo- 
platonic mysticism, come from an early Orphic source, probably the 
same general source as the newly discovered Orphic lines. It has 
served, furthermore, to prove the close kinship between the mystic ideas 
in Empedocles, Pindar and Plato, and to establish the plausibility, if 
not the certainty, of the thesis that these authors drew their notions of 
metempsychosis and eschatology from a common Orphic source, perhaps 
an Orphic-Pythagorean ‘“‘ Book of the Dead,” and that to the circle of 
ideas which came from this source Vergil owes some of the features of his 
lower world.? 
In order to arrive at a view-point from which to examine more 
satisfactorily the Vergilian lines in question, I propose to pass in brief 
review the principal notions of the mystic teaching regarding the soul 
and its destiny which must have been familiar to Vergil. 
First is the mystic doctrine of original sin involved in the characteristic 
myth of the Orphic god, Dionysus-Zagreus. Zagreus, the son of Zeus, 
is slain by the wicked earth-born Titans and devoured by them. Zeus 
smites the Titans with the thunderbolt and consumes them with his 
lightning. From their ashes springs the human race. These ashes 
contain the essence of the earth-born Titans who rebelled and sinned 
against Zeus and of the divine Zagreus whom they devoured. Mortals 
are therefore compounded of the earthly and the heavenly, the carnal 
and the spiritual, the pure and the impure.3 In their origin from Zeus, 
through his son Zagreus, they are divine and immortal;* but as they 
contain also the earthly, Titanic element, they inherit the guilt of the 
t Rohde Psyche, in the revision of 1898; Dieterich Nekyia; Maas Orpheus; Gruppe, article on ‘‘Orphic 
Eschatology’’ in Roscher’s Lexikon; Norden’s learned edition of the sixth book of the Aeneid; Harrison’s 
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion; Weil “La croyance & l’immortalité de l’"Aame’’ in Journal des savants, 
April, 1895, published also in his volume of Etudes sur lantiquité grecque (Paris, 1900). 
2 The general view of Weil; see especially pp. 60, 93. Less conservative are Dieterich, p. 198, and Nor- 
den Aeneid vi, p. 20. 
3 Lobeck Aglaophamus, p. 565; Rohde Psyche II, p. 119; Weil Joc. cit., p. 38. 
4 In the gold tablets the soul’s claim to salvation is based on this divine origin. See especially the Petelia 
and the Caecilia Secundina tablets. Cf. Pindar, fr. 131. 
