previous next


ἀμφοτέρων: i. e. Dionysus and Pan; there is no construction, but πέρι may have fallen out before πάρεστι. If the text be sound, however, ἀμφοτέρων must mean ‘the Greek and the Egyptian views’; translate ‘A man can adopt whichever of these two’, &c.

ἀποδέδεκται: i. e. that Pan is the Egyptian god of Mendes (c. 46), and that Melampus brought the worship of Dionysus from Egypt (c. 49).

εἰ μὲν γὰρ κτλ. H.'s argument is that the cases of Heracles on the one hand and of Dionysus and Pan on the other were not parallel (κατά περ . κτλ.). Heracles (c. 43) was the son of Amphitryon, who after a long life had been identified with an Egyptian god; but as to Pan and Dionysus, their stories (§ 2) showed they had never existed as men. They had not become ‘famous’ (φανεροί) like Hercules, and so ‘taken the names of gods who had existed before’. The Greeks therefore, he thinks, borrowed them from Egypt, and made the date of the introduction of their worship (ἀπ᾽ οὗ ἐπύθοντο κτλ.) into the date of their birth. Stein ingeniously shows that this actually was done in the worship of Dionysus; Melampus, its mythical founder (49. 3), was a contemporary of Labdacus; for their respective great-grandsons, Amphiaraus (cf. Od. xv. 241 seq.) and Polynices, were both among the ‘Seven against Thebes’. But Labdacus and Dionysus were contemporaries, as both grandsons of Cadmus; therefore to the Greek genealogers, Melampus would be a contemporary of Dionysus (cf. App. XIV. 2).

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: