Tracing Orpheus (Studies of Orphic Fragments) || 54. ἀμουσότερος Λειβηθρίων...

54. (OF 1069)*

Fernando Garca RomeroUniversidad Complutense de Madrid

The figure of Orpheus is linked in several ways to the ancient city of Lei-bethra, near the modern village of Litochoros, which is situated at the foot of Mount Olympus on its Macedonian slope. Fritz Graf has even said that Leibethra is the central site for Orpheus.1 Several sources locate the birth-place of Orpheus in Leibethra (Orph. A. 5053 and 13731376; Tze. ad Lyc. 409; Suda s. v. = OF 937 I, II, IV, VII);2 other sources mention his stay or visit to this village (Eust. ad Il. 1235.16 = OF 937 VI, etc.); others suggest that Orphic rituals took place in Leibethra (Iambl. VP 28.146 = OF 507 I; Procl. in Ti. III 168.11 Diehl = OF 507 II; Conon 26 F 1, 45 Jacoby = OF 1039; cf. also Plu. Alex. 14 = OF 1084); finally, other sources indicate that Leibethra was the place where Orpheus death happened or even the place where lay his dismembered remains, after having been piously gathered up by the Muses ( , Eratosth. Cat. 24 = OF 1070, probably from Aeschylus Bassarai; see also the quoted fragment of Conon).3 Pausanias (9.30.911 = OF 1055) reports in detail the vicissitudes of the mortal remains of Orpheus in rela-tionship with Leibethra:

In Larissa I heard another story, how that on Olympus is a city Leibethra, where the mountain faces Macedonia, not far from which city is the tomb of Orpheus. The Leibethrans, it is said, received out of Thrace an oracle from Dionysus, stating that when the sun should see the bones of Orpheus, then the city of Leibethra would be destroyed by a boar. The citizens paid little regard to the oracle, thinking that no other beast was big or mighty enough to take their city, while a boar was bold rather than powerful. But when it seemed good to the god the following events

* This article forms part of the Proyecto de Investigacin Ampliacin del mnimo paremiolgico (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacin de Espaa FFI200802681/FILO).

1 Graf (1987: 87).2 Cf. Bernab (2008: 17).3 See Ziegler (1939: 1284 and 1292), Guthrie (1952: 32 ff.), Graf (1987: 87 ff.), Freier

(1991: 3839), Gartziou-Tatti (1999), Detienne (2003: 161), and Santamara (2008: 121122). Although Leibethra is not explicitly mentioned, the epigrammatic poet Damagetus (AP 7.9) also locates Orpheus tomb close to Mount Olympus.

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340 Fernando Garca Romero

befell the citizens. About midday a shepherd was asleep leaning against the grave of Orpheus, and even as he slept he began to sing poetry of Orpheus in a loud and sweet voice. Those who were pasturing or tilling nearest to him left their several tasks and gathered together to hear the shepherd sing in his sleep. And jostling one another and striving who could get nearest the shepherd they overturned the pil-lar, the urn fell from it and broke, and the sun saw whatever was left of the bones of Orpheus. Immediately when night came, the god sent heavy rain, and the river Sys (Boar), one of the torrents about Olympus, on this occasion threw down the walls of Leibethra, overturning sanctuaries of gods and houses of men, and drowing the inhabitants and all the animals in the city. When Leibethra was now a city in ruin, the Macedonians in Dium carried the bones of Orpheus to their own country [version by W. H. S. Jones].

Conon reports that Orpheus was dismembered by the women of Leibethra and that they threw his remains into the sea; as a result, a plague spread through the village and the oracle consulted by the Leibethrians answered that, in order to be saved from the plague, they had to find and bury Or-pheus head, which was later found in good condition by a fisherman.

Several authors mention another punishment suffered by the Leibethri-ans. The Leibethrians behaviour towards the mythical singer had regret-table effects on their future reputation either because of the circumstances of his death in Leibethra, or, as Himerius states (Or. 46.18 ff. Colonna = OF 1064), because Leibethrians were filled with envy when they heard Orpheus sing his divine melodies.4 Lesbians attribute their well-known talent for poetry and music to the fact that Orpheus head sailed up from the conti-nent to their island across the Aegean Sea (cf., among other sources, Aristid. Or. 24.55 Keil = OF 1067);5 on the contrary, Orpheus stay in Leibethria had the opposite effect: according to Libanius (Decl. 1. 182 [V 119, 13 Foerster] = OF 1064 I: ) and Himerius (loc. cit.: , , ), the inhabitants of Leibethria were con-sidered to have become stupid people with no talent for poetry and music as a result of the punishment they received from the Gods.

The fame of the Leibethrians awkwardness was so widespread that Leibethrians even became a proverbial paradigm of crudeness and stupid-ity. In fact, our paroemigraphical and lexicographical sources, and also some literary texts, pick up a proverb attested in two versions (OF 1069):

4 ,

5 , On the miracles brought about by Orpheus head, see Graf (1987: 92 ff.), Bernab (2008: 26), Santamara (2008: above all 125 ff.).



54. 341

the original and more frequent version less talented than Leibethrians ( ), and the secondary more stupid than Leibe-thrians ( ).6

I) is the more frequent version of the proverb and it is found in many paroemiographical and lexicographical sources, which offer the same explanation on its significance and origin (the death of Orpheus):

a) Zenobius Athous 3.1: , - [fr. 552 Rose]. , .

b) Zenobius Vulgatus 1.79 = Diogenianus Vindobonensis 1. 37 (slight-ly different text): . , . , .

c) Zenobius Athous 5.39: .

d) Collectio Bodleiana 107: . , .

e) Collectio Coisliniana 177 no 27: , .

f) Diogenianus 2.26 = Apostolius 2.67:7 . 8 , .

) The version is probably a secondary form that appears in the lexicographical tradition, specifically in Zonaras lexi-con (p. 1294 Tittmann): , .9 - .10 This version of the proverb is also found in the paroe-miographical collection of Apostolius (10.50), whose commentary comes from the lexicographical tradition: [ codd.] -

6 See above all Spyridonidou-Skarsouli (1995: 311 and 314316). Cf. also Mario-Garca Romero (1999: 88 and 289), Lelli (2006, ad Zen. Vulg. 1.79).

7 In Apostolius collection, the lemma is , and this form of the proverb appears, for example, in the passage of the Aristaenetus Epistles quot-ed below.

8 Manuscripts, probably by mistake, read instead of .9 Manuscripts read ; the name of the historian is a mistake instead of the

name of the comic poet Thugenides, as yet observed by Schaefer, apud Tittmann (Iohannis Zonarae Lexicon, Oxford 1808), p. cxlvi.

10 But Tittmann yet comments in his edition (p. cxlvi) that neque placet , quod apertum glossema est v. . Paroemiographi illud proverbium vul-go efferent, .



342 Fernando Garca Romero

. , , , .

The proverb is not frequent in the Greek liter-ary texts that have survived. It is found, as we have seen above, in the fr. 5 K-A of the comic poet Thugenides (5th century BC, according to the date accepted by Kassel-Austin). In the late imperial period, the proverb reap-pears in the Love Epistles of Aristaenetus, specifically in the epistle 1.27, where a woman refers to a suitor, who is serenading her, and she comments sarcastically: .11 Later, during the Byzantine period, in the 12th century, the proverb is found in the Epistles of Eustathius of Thessalonica (Opuscula, p. 331, 62 Tafel: , );12 and also, probably in the 11th century, in another corpus of epistles: a col-lection of anonymous epistles written by a Byzantine scholar and edited in Cramers Anecdota Graeca (3.188189):

, , , , , , , , , .13

During the following centuries, Leibethrians reputation for stupidity dies out slowly, which is a relief for todays inhabitants of Litochoros, finally free from the misfortune that the presence of Orpheus, alive or dead, had caused them for many centuries.

11 And he sings in vain with less talent than Leibethrians, and dont persuade my ears. Cf. Tsirimbas (1950: 4041).

12 I am ignorant in the rest, and not even the Leibethrians are so far from the wisdom. Quotes the passage Kurtz (1891: 314). See also Eustathius commen-tary on Il. 21.259, p. 1235, 61: , , , .

13 Because you know Soranus and Hippocrates works; and you are expert in the works of Galen and Herophilus, and in those of Herodianus, Trypho, Herodotus and Heron. And not only that, but also you are saying that you know well those works, and in your words there is neither irony nor blustering. Since some of them you know well because you are a physician, another ones because you are a philolo-gist, another ones because you are an engineer, and all of them because you are an excellent expert in many sciences. For if I didnt know that about you, I really would be sillier than Leibethrians, stranger than Stoics, emptier than Epicureans, and a man of very limited intelligence.



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Bibliography

Bernab, A. 2008: Orfeo, una biografa compleja, OTO, I, 1532.Detienne, M. 2003: The Writing of Orpheus: Greek Myth in Cultural Context, Baltimore.Freiert, W. K. 1991: Orpheus: a figure on the polis, Myth and the Polis, Pozzi D. C.

Wickersham, J. M. (eds.), Ithaca, 3248.Gartziou-Tatti, A. 1999: ,

Ancient Macedonia 6, 439451.Graf, F. 1987: Orpheus: a poet among men, Interpretations of Greek Mythology, Brem-

mer, J. (ed.), London-Sydney, 80106.Guthrie, W. K. C. 21952: Orpheus and Greek Religion, Princeton.Kurtz, E. 1891: Die Sprichwrter bei Eustathios, Philologus 6 = Supplementum ad

Paroemiographos Graecos, Hildesheim 1961, 307321.Lelli, E. (ed.) 2006: I proverbi greci. Le raccolte di Zenobio e Diogeniano, Soveria Man-

nelli.Mario Snchez-Elvira, E. R. Garca Romero, F. 1999: Proverbios griegos. Menandro:

Sentencias, Madrid.Santamara lvarez, M. A. 2008: La muerte de Orfeo y la cabeza proftica, OTO, I

105135.Spyridonidou-Skarsouli, M. 1995: Der erste Teil der fnften Athos-Sammlung griechi-

scher Sprichwrter, Berlin New York.Tsirimbas, D. A. 1950:

, Platon 2, 2585.Ziegler, K. 1939: Orpheus, RE XVIII.1, cols. 12001316.



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