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75-547: Orphism (more rarely Orphicism ; Ancient Greek : Ὀρφικά , romanized :  Orphiká ) is the name given to a set of religious beliefs and practices originating in the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world, associated with literature ascribed to the mythical poet Orpheus , who descended into the Greek underworld and returned. This type of journey is called a katabasis and is the basis of several hero worships and journeys. Orphics revered Dionysus (who once descended into

150-543: A pitch accent . In Modern Greek, all vowels and consonants are short. Many vowels and diphthongs once pronounced distinctly are pronounced as /i/ ( iotacism ). Some of the stops and glides in diphthongs have become fricatives , and the pitch accent has changed to a stress accent . Many of the changes took place in the Koine Greek period. The writing system of Modern Greek, however, does not reflect all pronunciation changes. The examples below represent Attic Greek in

225-568: A commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics survives, and Proclus never criticizes his teacher in any of his preserved writings. The particular characteristic of Proclus's system is his elaboration of a level of individual ones, called henads, between the One which is before being and intelligible divinity. The henads exist "superabundantly", also beyond being, but they stand at the head of chains of causation ( seirai ) and in some manner give to these chains their particular character. He identifies them with

300-462: A commentary on the Enneads , of which unfortunately only fragments survive. At other times he criticizes Plotinus' views, such as the prime mover . Unlike Plotinus, Proclus also did not hold that matter was evil, an idea that caused contradictions in the system of Plotinus. It is difficult to determine what, if anything, is different between the doctrines of Proclus and Syrianus: for the latter, only

375-462: A few similarities. Others argue that the two traditions share a common origin and can even be considered a single entity, termed " Orphico-Pythagoreanism ." The belief that Pythagoreanism was a subset or direct descendant of Orphic religion existed by late antiquity, when Neoplatonist philosophers took the Orphic origin of Pythagorean teachings at face value. Proclus wrote: In the fifteenth century,

450-474: A fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Regarding the speech of the ancient Macedonians diverse theories have been put forward, but the epigraphic activity and the archaeological discoveries in the Greek region of Macedonia during the last decades has brought to light documents, among which the first texts written in Macedonian , such as

525-460: A mythological figure. Despite this, even these authors of the 5th and 4th centuries BC noted a strong similarity between the two doctrines. In fact, some claimed that rather than being an initiate of Orphism, Pythagoras was actually the original author of the first Orphic texts. Specifically, Ion of Chios claimed that Pythagoras authored poetry which he attributed to the mythical Orpheus, and Epigenes, in his On Works Attributed to Orpheus , attributed

600-501: A number of beliefs about the afterlife similar to those in the "Orphic" mythology about Dionysus ' death and resurrection. Bone tablets found in Olbia (5th century BC) carry short and enigmatic inscriptions like: "Life. Death. Life. Truth. Dio(nysus). Orphics." The function of these bone tablets is unknown. Gold-leaf tablets found in graves from Thurii , Hipponium , Thessaly and Crete (4th century BC and after) give instructions to

675-489: A one-year exile, to avoid pressure from Christian authorities. Marinus reports that he was writing seven hundred lines each day. One challenge with determining Proclus' specific doctrines is that the Neoplatonists of his time did not consider themselves innovators; they believed themselves to be the transmitters of the correct interpretations of Plato himself. Although the neoplatonic doctrines are much different from

750-509: A philosophical treatise that is an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem in hexameters, a theogony concerning the birth of the gods, produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras , written in the second half of the fifth century BC. Fragments of the poem are quoted making it "the most important new piece of evidence about Greek philosophy and religion to come to light since the Renaissance". The papyrus dates to around 340 BC, during

825-550: A prefix /e-/, called the augment . This was probably originally a separate word, meaning something like "then", added because tenses in PIE had primarily aspectual meaning. The augment is added to the indicative of the aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect, but not to any of the other forms of the aorist (no other forms of the imperfect and pluperfect exist). The two kinds of augment in Greek are syllabic and quantitative. The syllabic augment

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900-621: A proof, beginning from the existence of the One (divine Unity) and ending with the descent of individual souls into the material world. The Platonic Theology (Περὶ τῆς κατὰ Πλάτωνα θεολογίας) is a systematization of material from Platonic dialogues, showing from them the characteristics of the divine orders, the part of the universe which is closest to the One. We also have three essays, extant only in Latin translation: Ten doubts concerning providence ( De decem dubitationibus circa providentiam ); On providence and fate ( De providentia et fato ); On

975-521: A shorter length composed in the Roman Imperial age. The Orphic Argonautica ( ‹See Tfd› Greek : Ὀρφέως Ἀργοναυτικά ) is a Greek epic poem dating from the 4th century CE of unknown authorship. It is narrated in the first person in the name of Orpheus and tells the story of Jason and the Argonauts . The narrative is basically similar to that in other versions of the story, such as

1050-542: A strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, as exemplified in the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar who wrote in Doric with a small Aeolic admixture. Thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek , spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either

1125-499: A third yet younger set ( Amyntas , Menaechmus and his brother Dinostratus , Theudius of Magnesia , Hermotimus of Colophon and Philip of Opus ). Some of these mathematicians were influential in arranging the Elements that Euclid later published. Proclus authored a theology of Plato, which is text concerned with the divine hierarchies and their complex ramifications. A number of his Platonic commentaries are lost. In addition to

1200-510: A vowel or /n s r/ ; final stops were lost, as in γάλα "milk", compared with γάλακτος "of milk" (genitive). Ancient Greek of the classical period also differed in both the inventory and distribution of original PIE phonemes due to numerous sound changes, notably the following: The pronunciation of Ancient Greek was very different from that of Modern Greek . Ancient Greek had long and short vowels ; many diphthongs ; double and single consonants; voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops ; and

1275-418: Is added to stems beginning with consonants, and simply prefixes e (stems beginning with r , however, add er ). The quantitative augment is added to stems beginning with vowels, and involves lengthening the vowel: Some verbs augment irregularly; the most common variation is e → ei . The irregularity can be explained diachronically by the loss of s between vowels, or that of the letter w , which affected

1350-448: Is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek . Among Indo-European branches with living descendants, Greek is often argued to have the closest genetic ties with Armenian (see also Graeco-Armenian ) and Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ). Ancient Greek differs from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and other Indo-European languages in certain ways. In phonotactics , ancient Greek words could end only in

1425-521: Is named after the legendary poet-hero Orpheus , who was said to have originated the Mysteries of Dionysus . However, Orpheus was more closely associated with Apollo than to Dionysus in the earliest sources and iconography. According to some versions of his mythos, he was the son of Apollo, and during his last days, he shunned the worship of other gods and devoted himself to Apollo alone. Poetry containing distinctly Orphic beliefs has been traced back to

1500-560: Is not certain. Orphic views and practices have parallels to elements of Pythagoreanism , and various traditions hold that the Pythagoreans or Pythagoras himself authored early Orphic works; alternately, later philosophers believed that Pythagoras was an initiate of Orphism. The extent to which one movement may have influenced the other remains controversial. Some scholars maintain that Orphism and Pythagoreanism began as separate traditions which later became confused and conflated due to

1575-567: Is the activity which can liberate the soul from a subjection to bodily passions, remind it of its origin in Soul, Intellect, and the One, and prepare it not only to ascend to the higher levels while still in this life, but to avoid falling immediately back into a new body after death. Because the soul's attention, while inhabiting a body, is turned so far away from its origin in the intelligible world, Proclus thinks that we need to make use of bodily reminders of our spiritual origin. In this he agrees with

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1650-541: Is unintended or there by chance", that "Plato's writings were divinely inspired" (ὁ θεῖος Πλάτων ho theios Platon —the divine Plato, inspired by the gods), that "the formal structure and the content of Platonic texts imitated those of the universe", and therefore that they spoke often of things under a veil, hiding the truth from the philosophically uninitiated. Proclus was however a close reader of Plato, and quite often makes very astute points about his Platonic sources. In his commentary on Plato's Timaeus Proclus explains

1725-706: The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius , on which it is probably based. The main differences are the emphasis on the role of Orpheus and a more mythological, less realistic technique of narration. In the Argonautica Orphica , unlike in Apollonius Rhodius, it is claimed that the Argo was the first ship ever built. The Derveni papyrus, found in Derveni , Macedonia (Greece) , in 1962, contains

1800-679: The Archaic or Epic period ( c.  800–500 BC ), and the Classical period ( c.  500–300 BC ). Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers . It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance . This article primarily contains information about

1875-606: The Epic and Classical periods of the language, which are the best-attested periods and considered most typical of Ancient Greek. From the Hellenistic period ( c.  300 BC ), Ancient Greek was followed by Koine Greek , which is regarded as a separate historical stage, though its earliest form closely resembles Attic Greek , and its latest form approaches Medieval Greek . There were several regional dialects of Ancient Greek; Attic Greek developed into Koine. Ancient Greek

1950-501: The Pella curse tablet , as Hatzopoulos and other scholars note. Based on the conclusions drawn by several studies and findings such as Pella curse tablet , Emilio Crespo and other scholars suggest that ancient Macedonian was a Northwest Doric dialect , which shares isoglosses with its neighboring Thessalian dialects spoken in northeastern Thessaly . Some have also suggested an Aeolic Greek classification. The Lesbian dialect

2025-563: The Sibyl . Of this vast literature, only two works survived whole: the Orphic Hymns , a set of 87 poems, possibly composed at some point in the second or third century, and the epic Orphic Argonautica , composed somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries. Earlier Orphic literature, which may date back as far as the sixth century BC, survives only in papyrus fragments or in quotations. The Orphic Hymns are 87 hexametric poems of

2100-572: The Titans to murder the child. Zagreus is then tricked with a mirror and children's toys by the Titans, who shred him to pieces and consume him. Athena saves the heart and tells Zeus of the crime, who in turn hurls a thunderbolt on the Titans . The resulting soot, from which sinful mankind is born, contains the bodies of the Titans and Zagreus. The soul of man (the Dionysus part) is therefore divine, but

2175-603: The epic poems , the Iliad and the Odyssey , and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects. The origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between

2250-501: The present , future , and imperfect are imperfective in aspect; the aorist , present perfect , pluperfect and future perfect are perfective in aspect. Most tenses display all four moods and three voices, although there is no future subjunctive or imperative. Also, there is no imperfect subjunctive, optative or imperative. The infinitives and participles correspond to the finite combinations of tense, aspect, and voice. The indicative of past tenses adds (conceptually, at least)

2325-1031: The 5th century BC. Ancient pronunciation cannot be reconstructed with certainty, but Greek from the period is well documented, and there is little disagreement among linguists as to the general nature of the sounds that the letters represent. /oː/ raised to [uː] , probably by the 4th century BC. Greek, like all of the older Indo-European languages , is highly inflected. It is highly archaic in its preservation of Proto-Indo-European forms. In ancient Greek, nouns (including proper nouns) have five cases ( nominative , genitive , dative , accusative , and vocative ), three genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ), and three numbers (singular, dual , and plural ). Verbs have four moods ( indicative , imperative , subjunctive , and optative ) and three voices (active, middle, and passive ), as well as three persons (first, second, and third) and various other forms. Verbs are conjugated through seven combinations of tenses and aspect (generally simply called "tenses"):

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2400-472: The 6th century BC or at least 5th century BC, and graffiti of the 5th century BC apparently refers to "Orphics". The Derveni papyrus allows Orphic mythology to be dated to the end of the 5th century BC, and it is probably even older. Orphic views and practices are attested as by Herodotus , Euripides , and Plato . Plato refers to "Orpheus-initiators" ( Ὀρφεοτελεσταί ), and associated rites, although how far "Orphic" literature in general related to these rites

2475-748: The Alcibiades, the Cratylus, the Timaeus, and the Parmenides, he also wrote commentaries on the remainder of the dialogues in the Neoplatonic curriculum. He also wrote a commentary on the Organon , as well as prolegomena to both Plato and Aristotle. Proclus exerted a great deal of influence on Medieval philosophy , though largely indirectly, through the works of the commentator Pseudo-Dionysius

2550-495: The Archaic period of ancient Greek (see Homeric Greek for more details): Μῆνιν ἄειδε, θεά, Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί' Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε' ἔθηκε, πολλὰς δ' ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ἡρώων, αὐτοὺς δὲ ἑλώρια τεῦχε κύνεσσιν οἰωνοῖσί τε πᾶσι· Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο βουλή· ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. The beginning of Apology by Plato exemplifies Attic Greek from

2625-522: The Areopagite . This late-5th- or early-6th-century Christian Greek author wrote under the pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite , the figure converted by St. Paul in Athens. Because of this fiction, his writings were taken to have almost apostolic authority. He is an original Christian writer, and in his works can be found a great number of Proclus's metaphysical principles. Another important source for

2700-476: The Bacchic One himself released you. Ancient Greek language Ancient Greek ( Ἑλληνῐκή , Hellēnikḗ ; [hellɛːnikɛ́ː] ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek ( c.  1400–1200 BC ), Dark Ages ( c.  1200–800 BC ),

2775-648: The Classical period of ancient Greek. (The second line is the IPA , the third is transliterated into the Latin alphabet using a modern version of the Erasmian scheme .) Ὅτι [hóti Hóti μὲν men mèn ὑμεῖς, hyːmêːs hūmeîs,   Proclus The primary source for the life of Proclus is the eulogy Proclus, or On Happiness that was written for him upon his death by his successor, Marinus , Marinus' biography set out to prove that Proclus reached

2850-545: The Dorians. The Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people – Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians (including Athenians), each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, and Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for

2925-407: The Greek gods, so one henad might be Apollo and be the cause of all things apollonian, while another might be Helios and be the cause of all sunny things. Each henad participates in every other henad, according to its character. What appears to be multiplicity is not multiplicity at all, because any henad may rightly be considered the center of the polycentric system. According to Proclus, philosophy

3000-491: The Neoplatonic Greek scholar Constantine Lascaris (who found the poem Argonautica Orphica ) considered a Pythagorean Orpheus. Bertrand Russell (1947) noted: Study of early Orphic and Pythagorean sources, however, is more ambiguous concerning their relationship, and authors writing closer to Pythagoras' own lifetime never mentioned his supposed initiation into Orphism, and in general regarded Orpheus himself as

3075-534: The Neoplatonic successor of the New Academy , where he was taught by Plutarch of Athens (not to be confused with Plutarch of Chaeronea ), Syrianus , and Asclepigenia ; he succeeded Syrianus as head of the Academy in 437, and would in turn be succeeded on his death by Marinus of Neapolis . He lived in Athens as a vegetarian bachelor, prosperous and generous to his friends, until the end of his life, except for

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3150-701: The Titans, and a divine spark or soul ( Ancient Greek : ψυχή , romanized :  psukhḗ ), inherited from Dionysus. In order to achieve salvation from the Titanic, material existence, one had to be initiated into the Dionysian mysteries and undergo teletē , a ritual purification and reliving of the suffering and death of the god. Orphics believed that they would, after death, spend eternity alongside Orpheus and other heroes. The uninitiated ( Ancient Greek : ἀμύητος , romanized :  amúētos ), they believed, would be reincarnated indefinitely. Orphism

3225-464: The Underworld and returned) and Persephone (who annually descended into the Underworld for a season and then returned). Orphism has been described as a reform of the earlier Dionysian religion , involving a re-interpretation or re-reading of the myth of Dionysus and a re-ordering of Hesiod 's Theogony , based in part on pre-Socratic philosophy . The suffering and death of the god Dionysus at

3300-550: The aorist. Following Homer 's practice, the augment is sometimes not made in poetry , especially epic poetry. The augment sometimes substitutes for reduplication; see below. Almost all forms of the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect reduplicate the initial syllable of the verb stem. (A few irregular forms of perfect do not reduplicate, whereas a handful of irregular aorists reduplicate.) The three types of reduplication are: Irregular duplication can be understood diachronically. For example, lambanō (root lab ) has

3375-419: The augment when it was word-initial. In verbs with a preposition as a prefix, the augment is placed not at the start of the word, but between the preposition and the original verb. For example, προσ(-)βάλλω (I attack) goes to προσ έ βαλoν in the aorist. However compound verbs consisting of a prefix that is not a preposition retain the augment at the start of the word: αὐτο(-)μολῶ goes to ηὐ τομόλησα in

3450-675: The authorship of several influential Orphic poems to notable early Pythagoreans, including Cercops. According to Cicero , Aristotle also claimed that Orpheus never existed, and that the Pythagoreans ascribed some Orphic poems to Cercon (see Cercops ). Belief in metempsychosis was common to both currents, although it also seems to contain differences. Where the Orphics taught about a cycle of grievous embodiments that could be escaped through their rites, Pythagoras seemed to teach about an eternal, neutral metempsychosis against which personal actions would be irrelevant. The Neoplatonists regarded

3525-648: The body (the Titan part) holds the soul in bondage. Thus, it was declared that the soul returns to a host ten times, bound to the wheel of rebirth . Following the punishment, the dismembered limbs of Zagreus were cautiously collected by Apollo who buried them in his sacred land Delphi . In Orphic theogonies, the Orphic Egg is a cosmic egg from which hatched the primordial hermaphroditic deity Phanes/Protogonus (variously equated also with Zeus , Pan , Metis , Eros , Erikepaios and Bromius ), who in turn created

3600-409: The dead . Although these thin tablets are often highly fragmentary, collectively they present a shared scenario of the passage into the afterlife. When the deceased arrives in the underworld, he is expected to confront obstacles. He must take care not to drink of Lethe ("Forgetfulness"), but of the pool of Mnemosyne ("Memory"). He is provided with formulaic expressions with which to present himself to

3675-615: The dialect of Sparta ), and Northern Peloponnesus Doric (including Corinthian ). All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, and these colonies generally developed local characteristics, often under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BC, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed, largely based on Attic Greek , but with influence from other dialects. This dialect slowly replaced most of

3750-530: The dialects is: West vs. non-West Greek is the strongest-marked and earliest division, with non-West in subsets of Ionic-Attic (or Attic-Ionic) and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Often non-West is called 'East Greek'. Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian Greek had come under

3825-510: The divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek , but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not later than 1120 BC, at

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3900-540: The doctrines in Plato's dialogues, it's often difficult to distinguish between different Neoplatonic thinkers and determine what is original to each one. For Proclus, this is largely only possible with Plotinus, the only other Neoplatonic writer for whom a significant amount of writings survive. Proclus, like Plotinus and many of the other Neoplatonists , agreed on the three hypostases of Neoplatonism: The One ( hen ), The Intellect ( nous ) and The Soul ( psyche ), and wrote

3975-400: The doctrines of theurgy put forward by Iamblichus . Theurgy is possible because the powers of the gods (the henads ) extend through their series of causation even down to the material world. And by certain power-laden words, acts, and objects, the soul can be drawn back up the series, so to speak. Proclus himself was a devotee of many of the religions in Athens, considering that the power of

4050-498: The existence of evils ( De malorum subsistentia ). Proclus, the scholiast to Euclid, knew Eudemus of Rhodes ' History of Geometry well, and gave a short sketch of the early history of geometry, which appeared to be founded on the older, lost book of Eudemus. The passage has been referred to as "the Eudemian summary," and determines some approximate dates, which otherwise might have remained unknown. The influential commentary on

4125-461: The first book of Euclid 's Elements is one of the most valuable sources we have for the history of ancient mathematics, and its Platonic account of the status of mathematical objects was influential. In this work, Proclus also listed the first mathematicians associated with Plato: a mature set of mathematicians ( Leodamas of Thasos , Archytas of Taras , and Theaetetus ), a second set of younger mathematicians ( Neoclides , Eudoxus of Cnidus ), and

4200-411: The gods could be present in these various approaches. The majority of Proclus's works are commentaries on dialogues of Plato ( Alcibiades , Cratylus , Parmenides , Republic , Timaeus ). In these commentaries, he presents his own philosophical system as a faithful interpretation of Plato, and in this he did not differ from other Neoplatonists, as he considered that "nothing in Plato's corpus

4275-510: The guardians of the afterlife. As said in the Petelia tablet : I am a son of Earth and starry sky. I am parched with thirst and am dying; but quickly grant me cold water from the Lake of Memory to drink. Other gold leaves offer instructions for addressing the rulers of the underworld: Now you have died and now you have come into being, O thrice happy one, on this same day. Tell Persephone that

4350-440: The hands of the Titans has been considered the central myth of Orphism. According to this myth, the infant Dionysus is killed, torn apart, and consumed by the Titans. In retribution, Zeus strikes the Titans with a thunderbolt, turning them to ash. From these ashes, humanity is born. In Orphic belief, this myth describes humanity as having a dual nature: body ( Ancient Greek : σῶμα , romanized :  sôma ), inherited from

4425-522: The influence of Proclus on the Middle Ages is Boethius 's Consolation of Philosophy , which has a number of Proclus principles and motifs. The central poem of Book III is a summary of Proclus's Commentary on the Timaeus , and Book V contains the important principle of Proclus that things are known not according to their own nature, but according to the character of the knowing subject. A summary of Proclus's Elements of Theology circulated under

4500-407: The intent of pursuing a judicial position like his father. Before completing his studies, he returned to Constantinople when his rector, his principal instructor (one Leonas), had business there. Proclus became a successful practicing lawyer. However, the experience of the practice of law made Proclus realize that he truly preferred philosophy. He returned to Alexandria, and began determinedly studying

4575-470: The name Liber de Causis ( Book of Causes ). This book is of uncertain origin, but circulated in the Arabic world as a work of Aristotle, and was translated into Latin as such. It had great authority because of its supposed Aristotelian origin, and it was only when Proclus's Elements were translated into Latin that Thomas Aquinas realised its true origin. Proclus's works also exercised an influence during

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4650-508: The older dialects, although the Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language , which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek . By about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosed into Medieval Greek . Phrygian is an extinct Indo-European language of West and Central Anatolia , which

4725-561: The other gods. The egg is often depicted with the serpent-like creature, Ananke , wound about it. Phanes is the golden winged primordial being who was hatched from the shining cosmic egg that was the source of the universe. Called Protogonos (First-Born) and Eros (Love) an ancient Orphic hymn addresses him thus: Ineffable, hidden, brilliant scion, whose motion is whirring, you scattered the dark mist that lay before your eyes and, flapping your wings, you whirled about, and through this world you brought pure light. There are two Orphic stories of

4800-620: The peak of virtue and attained eudaimonia . There are also a few details about the time in which he lived in the similarly structured Life of Isidore written by the philosopher Damascius in the following century. According to Marinus, Proclus was born in 412 AD in Constantinople to a family of high social status from Lycia , and raised in Xanthus . He studied rhetoric , philosophy and mathematics in Alexandria , with

4875-487: The perfect stem eilēpha (not * lelēpha ) because it was originally slambanō , with perfect seslēpha , becoming eilēpha through compensatory lengthening. Reduplication is also visible in the present tense stems of certain verbs. These stems add a syllable consisting of the root's initial consonant followed by i . A nasal stop appears after the reduplication in some verbs. The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing ( c.  1450 BC ) are in

4950-486: The primordial succession: But there are other differences, notably in the treatment of Dionysos: In later centuries, these versions underwent a development where Apollo's act of burying became responsible for the reincarnation of Dionysus, thus giving Apollo the title Dionysiodotes (bestower of Dionysus). Apollo plays an important part in the dismemberment myth because he represents the reverting of Encosmic Soul back towards unification. Surviving written fragments show

5025-400: The rebirth of Dionysus : in one it is the heart of Dionysus that is implanted into the thigh of Zeus ; in the other Zeus has impregnated the mortal woman Semele , resulting in Dionysus's literal rebirth. Many of these details differ from accounts in the classical authors. Damascius says that Apollo "gathers him (Dionysus) together and brings him back up". The main difference seems to be in

5100-523: The reign of Philip II of Macedon , making it Europe's oldest surviving manuscript. The Orphic theogonies are works which present accounts of the origin of the gods, much like the Theogony of Hesiod . These theogonies are symbolically similar to Near Eastern models. The main story has it that Zagreus , Dionysus' previous incarnation, is the son of Zeus and Persephone . Zeus names the child as his successor, which angers his wife Hera . She instigates

5175-649: The role the Soul as a principle has in mediating the Forms in Intellect to the body of the material world as a whole. The Soul is constructed through certain proportions, described mathematically in the Timaeus , which allow it to make Body as a divided image of its own arithmetical and geometrical ideas. In addition to his commentaries, Proclus wrote two major systematic works. The Elements of Theology (Στοιχείωσις θεολογική) consists of 211 propositions, each followed by

5250-517: The syllabic script Linear B . Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period. Modern editions of ancient Greek texts are usually written with accents and breathing marks , interword spacing , modern punctuation , and sometimes mixed case , but these were all introduced later. The beginning of Homer 's Iliad exemplifies

5325-466: The theology of Orpheus, carried forward through Pythagoreanism, as the core of the original Greek religious tradition. Proclus , an influential neoplatonic philosopher, one of the last major classical philosophers of late antiquity, says (trans. Thomas Taylor, 1816) A number of Greek religious poems in hexameters were attributed to Orpheus, as they were to similar miracle-working figures, like Bakis , Musaeus , Abaris , Aristeas , Epimenides , and

5400-467: The time of the Dorian invasions —and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BC. The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians . The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with

5475-465: The works of Aristotle under Olympiodorus the Elder . He also began studying mathematics during this period as well with a teacher named Heron (no relation to Hero of Alexandria , who was also known as Heron). As a gifted student, he eventually became dissatisfied with the level of philosophical instruction available in Alexandria , and went to Athens , philosophical center of the day, in 431 to study at

5550-480: Was Aeolic. For example, fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos are in Aeolian. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric (including Cretan Doric ), Southern Peloponnesus Doric (including Laconian ,

5625-452: Was a pluricentric language , divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic , Aeolic , Arcadocypriot , and Doric , many of them with several subdivisions. Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms in literature , while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek (derived primarily from Ionic and Aeolic) used in

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