A Late ‘Orphic’ Underworld Amulet

Abstract

The tablet contains portions of the so-called ‘Orphic’ (or ‘Orphic-Dionysiac’) verses, often corrupt hexameters otherwise preserved exclusively on a group of gold leaves of late classical and Hellenistic date (see Zuntz 1971:277–393); see further, S. G. Cole, “New Evidence for the Mysteries of Dionysius,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 21 (1980), pp. 223–238, on the new Hipponion leaf and its implications for the study of Dionysus; and R. Janko, “Forgetfulness in the Golden Tablets of Memory,” Classical Quarterly 34 (1984), pp. 89–100, for a reconstructed archetype. For the newest published ‘leaves,’ see K. Tsant-sanoglou & C. M. Parássoglou, “Two Gold Lamellae from Thessaly,” ‘Eλληνικά 38 (1987), pp. 3–16; R. Merkelbach, “Zwei neue orphisch-dionysische Totenpässe, “ Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 76 (1989), p.l5f. Here the older hexametric formulas of the gold leaves have been adopted for use as an amulet (Zuntz 1971:334; Kotansky 1991:114). Apart from this late example, the other gold ‘Orphic-Dionysiac’ lamellae fall outside the chronological and typological delimitations of this corpus.