A Traditional Form in Religious Language

Abstract

Eduard Norden, in the second half of his Agnostos Theos, has maintained with great learning and ingenuity the thesis that predications in the style ‘Thou art (Isis),’ ‘I am (the supreme god),’ are due to Oriental influence; purely Greek religious language does not go beyond ‘Thou dost (illuminate the earth),’ ‘We are indebted to thee for (the fruits of the earth).’ This view appears to be substantially correct. To Oriental influence we may, I think, trace also the custom of stringing together a series of brief predications in or of the second person, for the most part not connected by conjunctions, and producing the effect of a rapid fire of assertions. The earlier Greek examples are not, as a rule, asyndetic. In the Hellenistic age and later we see the other style, as in Catullus 34. 13: ‘tu Lucina dolentibus Iuno dicta puerperis, tu potens Triuia et notho es dicta lumine luna, tu cursu dea menstruo … exples’ 61. 51: ‘te suis tremulus parens inuocat, tibi uirgines zonula soluunt sinus, te timens cupida nouus captat aure maritus’; in Lucretius' proem; in Ovid, Met. IV. 17: ‘tibi enim inconsumpta iuuenta est, tu puer aeternus, tu formosissimus alto conspiceris caelo, tibi cum sine cornibus adstas, uirgineum caput est’; in the invocation of Apollo (identified with Osiris and Mithras) at the end of the first book of Statius' Thebaid; in Capaneus' prayer to his strong right arm (ib. IX. 548-): (‘ades o mihi, dextera, tantum; tu praesens bellis et ineuitabile numen, te uoco, te solum superum contemptor adoro’); in the Orphic hymns, II. 10-, though they consist mostly of accumulations of epithets; in Menander Rhetor περ πιδειкν (IX., p. 330, ed. Walz, an address to Apollo): περ [al. Θο⋯ραι], περ σ Θνδες, παρ σο⋯ кα σελνη τν ετῖνα λαμβνει; in Valerius Maximus VI.