Classical World

Since it was discovered in 1962, the Derveni Papyrus has had the air of a mystery accessible only to the initiated, owing to the slow unveiling of the text, whose official edition is still awaited, and to the cascade of specialized publications dealing with the many issues affected by a philosophical interpretation of an Orphic poem in the late fifth century B.C. The more urgent a comprehensive study was, the more unfeasible it seemed. Betegh's book, after Laks and Most's first steps in that direction in 1997, not only confirms the necessity of such synthesis, but also manages to present its difficult accomplishment as a straightforward task. Exhaustiveness and order are combined with agile style. The author's own opinions are usually complemented by a thorough status quaestionis, where the different views are presented and fairly weighed, and certainties are generally distinguished from probabilities and guesses. Thus, the book should be of interest not only for the many specialized scholars, but also for those more generally concerned with ancient religion, philosophy, and literature, for whom it means the opportunity of getting into a train which will now run considerably faster. [End Page 472]

The book starts with a text and translation which take into account most of the proposed readings and introduces some new ones. It deals successively with the rituals alluded to in the first six columns, the Orphic poem commented on in the other twenty, and the commentary itself, whose cosmological model constitutes Betegh's main interest. Only in the last chapters does he explore the relationship of the author with contemporary religious and philosophical currents (Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, Heraclitus, and "Orphism"), thus freeing himself from a priori positions regarding the author's identity or affiliation, which have tainted many previous studies. The lexicographical approach to some key words (e.g., in 270) makes much deeper and nuanced the traditional portrait of the commentator's thought. His affinity to Archelaus of Athens is emphasized for the first time, though, prudently enough, this is the final point, and not the starting hypothesis of the study.

The priority given to internal analysis has other consequences. A cornerstone of Betegh's approach is that the commentator's Weltanschauung is not too different from that of the Orphic poet. Both of them share notions such as an initial cosmogonic impulse due to separation, cosmological polarities, and a creationist model in which a Mind contrives the cosmos. Acknowledging the fluidity of the ideological boundary between poem and commentary entails, no doubt, some risks in the reconstruction of the poem, since the distinction between its original content and the prose interpretation rests on slippery ground. Betegh rightly avoids projecting back into the poem notions from the commentary or later Orphic poems: he refuses to see pneuma or pnoie in the poem (200ff.), and supports interpreting aidoion as "phallus" instead of "venerable," which integrates into Greek myth a unique case of phallophagy. Perhaps the bold suggestion that Aither was Night's partner is influenced by a desire to make a primeval couple correspond to the commentator's fundamental polarity of air and fire.

If the treatment of the poem and its commentary is all but superficial, some observations on the ritual aspects leave much space for deeper discussion (see now Henrichs in HSCP 101 [2003] 207–66 on hieroi logoi). Betegh makes many interesting points in chapter nine, however, where he speculates on the eschatological connexions suggested by the first columns. The attractive suggestion (348) that the excursus on ritual of column 20 springs from the discussion of Zeus' traditional epithet in the poem culminates a detailed study of the role of fire both in cosmology and in eschatology. As the illuminating comparison with doctors drawn in the last chapter shows, the commentator is as much a philosopher as a professional of the mysteries who wants to load them with...