The contents of the surviving roll present a particular thematic and structural division, which makes this work a unicum among what we possess of the literary production of the period. Naturally, one of the main efforts of scholars was and is to classify this highly particular text. The first six columns (three are badly damaged by fire, as they were written on what became the outer part of the roll) refer to propitiatory rituals aimed at appeasing souls. Column VII forms the transition to the other thematic unit, in which the author adduces verses of a poem of Orpheus and offers an interpretation, in the form of what most scholars call by anachronism a “commentary.” Orpheus’s name appears clearly in the papyrus—twice in column XVIII—and also is conjectured in column VII.

Our understanding of the text is progressing steadily. New and important points arise as a result of the reconstruction of column I presented by Bernabé and Ferrari in this volume: a religious authority (probably Orpheus) constructs a ritual whose meaning is revealed by semeia. The central addressees here are the {xi|xii} Erinyes. Erinyes/Eumenides are of utmost importance in the P.Derv. text: they are mentioned in all surviving columns related to ritual, except column V. The exegesis of the chthonic ritual is of a most peculiar kind compared to what we know. Supernatural entities receive well-known traditional names—daimones, Erinyes, Eumenides—but as description and explanation of the ritual merge, the relation of those entities to souls is not clear. It is as if the author describes the ritual acts only to subordinate them to his hermeneia, and this is extremely rare in the period under consideration. For instance, when he says that Eumenides are souls (VI 9), it is not clear if he is voicing his own opinion or that of a larger group, religious/spiritual or intellectual or both. As Tsantsanoglou puts it, the author corrects the popular concept of Erinyes—as avengers only of perjury and homicide—by upgrading their jurisdiction from social to cosmic. The ritual acts described are sacrifice, libation, incantation, singing, prayer. Bernabé’s reading, ὀ̣[ρ]ν̣ί̣θ̣[ε]ιομ…[χρὴ λύειν instead of καίειν, in column VI, line 11 (“liberate a bird” instead of “burn a bird”) removes a major difficulty regarding the classification of the ritual as Orphic, given that Orphics do not sacrifice living beings. While stressing, as Henrichs did in 1984, that ritual acts themselves seem “native,” Johnston believes that the P.Derv. author’s ritual definitions are mostly innovations. In fact, there is nothing to allow us to define ritual space and time, as Sistakou stresses in her paper.

Furthermore, the absence of gods in this first part, especially the infernal ones, is a paradox which Bernabé explains as a rationalizing effort, probably linked to the monistic tendency of the author, to suppress multiple gods as addressees of the ritual (one can as well think of the unspeakable orgia related to the death of Dionysus and compare the reluctance of Herodotus to recount such myths). Nevertheless, following Martín-Hernández, Bernabé considers that the myth of the titanic crime against Dionysos is “the very ground of the ritual” and that ποινὴν̣ ἀποδιδόντες in column VI 5 refers to the ritual atonement of this act.

Who then are the performers of ritual in the Derveni Papyrus? The author, the magoi, the mystai? Is the author referring to a specific occasion, or is he giving a general overview of ritual practices suiting his complex arguments? We can say for sure that the author pictures two types of officiants—mystai and magoi—linked in an interesting manner, which makes the magoi the prototype of the action of the mystai. Mystai, says the author, address to the Eumenides a preliminary sacrifice in the manner of the magoi. Column VI, the best-preserved one in the first part, contains eight lines presenting the magoi as “able” (ἐπ̣[ωιδὴ δ]ὲ̣ μάγων δύν[α]ται) to “push away” or “make change” (depending on the translation chosen for μεθιστάν̣αι), by their incantations, the daimones who are “enemies” of souls or “avengers.” Janko’s new rearrangements of columns II and {xii|xiii} III have produced another mention of the magoi in column III (accepted by Tsantsanoglou), where they are quoted as the authority asserting that the daimones who observe the honors of the gods are their servants. In both cases, column III and column VI, the magoi appear as prestigious authorities in religious matters, as Bernabé and Graf show in their papers.

Who the magi are is one of the major zetemata in P.Derv. scholarship: Persian priests or Greek sorcerers? According to Graf, who evokes possible Eastern con-texts, the Derveni magi are religious specialists claiming the Persian title for themselves. “It might be that after the Persian conquest of Lydia in 547 BCE … enterprising Persian μάγοι began to serve the needs of Greeks and even adapted their ritual repertoire to Greek demands for mystery cults” (p. 83). An overview of divergent opinions (Persian magoi, Orphic priests, charlatans?) can be found in Bernabé’s paper, where he opts finally, as Calame and Bierl do, for Orphic officiants, “orpheotelestai”; this term is attested outside “Orphic” literature in Greece, thus representing probably the “external,” sometimes hostile perspective found in historians of religion, for instance, while “magos” could be used within Orphic circles positively for the same type of officiant. Tsantsanoglou maintains his position: the P.Derv. text refers to Persian magoi. Important information on this topic has appeared following a new arrangement by Ferrari and an ingenious supplement by Piano: the word Πέρσαι appears in column V, line 11. Furthermore, by a rearrangement of column VI, Ferrari replaces ψυχαί (souls), in line 1, with ἀρτάδας (the Greek “transliteration” of artavan, the Persian word for “the Just, the Heroes”), thus adding one more Persian reference to the debate—which is nevertheless still open, as other contributions in this volume show.

Unfortunately, the fragmentary state of the document deprives us of a fully structured text and does not always allow for proper connections between agents, actions, and concepts. Nevertheless we can say for sure that justice is a central theme. In column IV, for instance, Erinyes are Dike’s epikouroi; this is the same column where we find the famous quotation of Heraclitus about Sun having to face the Erinyes if he does not respect his own limits. In this Heraclitean quotation the Erinyes act as guardians of cosmic equilibrium, as assistants of Dike.

On the meaning of Ἅιδου δεινά, Johnston introduces important clarifications by examining the possible associations between the horrors of Hades and divination and by showing that the author refers not to punishments experienced during the afterlife but to miseries inflicted upon the living by the dead, a theme consistent with the previous ones (the theme of appeasement). Souls can ask the living, via dreams and oracles, to take care of neglected duties, such as funerary rites and the like. As to the author being a mantis, Johnston admits the possibility of understanding parimen (V 4) as a first-person plural referring not to the author and his fellow practitioners specifically but to the general practice of the divinatory effort “wasted” by the attitude of the nonbelievers (p. 91).

It seems difficult to reach an agreement on the question of whether the P.Derv. author is a ritual practitioner. A closer look at column XX might help. Up to now, scholarly analysis of this column has focused mostly on the possibility {xiv|xv} of a different authorial voice in the text marked by paragraphoi (after lines 10 and 13) and on the critique of private initiations expressed in those lines. In this volume, Rusten’s paper confirms his 1985 analysis (extensively explained on pp. 127–132), whereas Graf is opposed to the idea of these paragraphoi marking a quotation of a different author: “these paragraphoi…function as marginal signs to catch the attention of a reader who was browsing through the text” (p. 74).

Graf deals at length with the relation of legomena to initiation and opts for a religious entrepreneur interested in physics. I think, however, that the exegesis allows a different perspective about the profile of the author and his audience. A secret circle of gignōskontes and a restricted audience interested primarily in physics seem to me a plausible option. The key passage is not only column XX but the interpretation Air = Zeus in column XXIII (2–7); the two loci, read together, reveal the nature of what is mystic and what the interests of the gignōskontes might be. These theories are mystical, and they belong to the field of knowledge of the physiologoi, of the Peri physeos literature. In column XXIII mystic knowledge attached to theogony and ritual is physics, which might mean that the author is trying to initiate his audience into the theories of his time while preserving the prestige of the poetic lexis.

Pleading for the necessity of the onomatōn lusis, the author develops an exegesis “word by word,” on a poetry that he qualifies as “strange” and “enigmatic,” commenting upon the intentions of Orpheus, who expresses “great things” in a coded language (ainigma, ainizomai; studied in detail in this volume by Bierl). Twenty columns, better preserved than the first six, deal with the exegesis of verses quoted from the Orphic poem. These verses recount a version or an episode of the theogonic myth of succession focused on Zeus’ power and predominance, whereas their exegesis deals mainly with the theme of violence and aims at underplaying it. The tendency is monistic; the world of today is Zeus’ creation. The narrative stops abruptly at column XXVI with the theme of incest. It is possible, as Bernabé says, that the missing part, consumed by the funerary pyre, referred to the most mystic theme—Dionysos, the Titans, and the birth of Persephone—according to the principle of symmetry between the two parts (especially if ποινὴν̣ ἀποδιδόντες in col. VI is an elliptic reference to the Titans’ crime).

What are the implications of such a distinction between exoteric hermeneia, like that of the Ephesian rhapsode in Plato’s Ion, and esoteric exegesis for the “few” gignōskontes? In order to reconsider the question on a new basis, we should not just oppose public celebrations and private or public initiations. Rusten in this volume formulates nicely the paradox; public and private initiations are both unsatisfactory: “The reader is left to wonder, is there any way {xvii|xviii} to be initiated successfully?” (p. 129). I think that the Derveni Papyrus, namely its column XXIII, contains a possible answer, while offering a new perspective for understanding the relation between mystic and nonmystic in poetic performances.

It seems to me that the Derveni Papyrus offers another way of understanding the deep roots of such a controversy, a kind of precious missing link in the long chain where poetry, science, and philosophy evolve in close dialogue. The key locus is column XXIII, lines 1–7:

We can now revisit briefly the much-debated issue of the generic classification of the work contained in the papyrus, an open question relevant as well to the professional profile of the author. Although difficult to classify, is this text as unusual as it is claimed to be? Further progress on this subject could be made, though only if we suspended for a moment anachronisms, such as the term “commentary,” and tried to reconstruct a synchronic model of similar practices using terminology internal to our ancient sources.

As we saw, both parts of the P.Derv. treatise, drômena and legomena, including the author’s exegesis, link in a clearly didactic manner both traditional poetry and eschatological ritual with the theme of justice. Following this thread, we can spot decisive clues about “genre” in column V. The P.Derv. author’s critical stance in this column suggests that the Ἅιδου δεινά must have been a subject of vivid debate in that period and that the controversy must have been far-reaching, as δεινά coming from chthonic forces were traditionally considered to be crucial for the survival of the polis (cult of the ancestors, plagues, famines, etc.). As Johnston shows, sometimes the advice of an oracle was needed in order to remove the miseries that the dead were supposed to inflict upon the living, with Oedipus as the most famous literary example. Burkert offers important insights on the issue of “genre” with his article on Democritus’ interest in ghosts, souls, and afterlife. Protagoras and Democritus are said to have written treatises about Hades, but we have only indirect and scanty information about them. In a totally different setting, Aristophanes’ Frogs mirrors, in a superbly comic way, contemporary interests in otherworldly matters. {xix|xx}

Can we then imagine possible settings for such debates or treatises? The fact is that we do not even need to try very hard: the Republic of Plato offers a remarkable literary paradeigma of an extensive “treatise in the treatise” on Ἅιδου δεινά, which presents some “ingredients” shared with the Derveni Papyrus. Placed in its wider context within the same dialogue, the famous “critique of poetry” is in fact a detailed discussion of Homeric verses principally referring to gods, daimones, and heroes, and to death, lamentation, and the underworld. The “author” is Socrates himself. The time has come, I think, to reconsider the statement about an un-Platonic P.Derv. author, and consequently the relation between the Platonic dialogues and the Derveni text: the P.Derv. author can be “un-Platonic,” but he is not “un-Socratic.” The parallels prove interesting if we keep firmly in mind the distinction between what we moderns mean by “Platonic” and what Plato stages as clearly “Socratic.”

What Socrates does here is to criticize the ritual representations of traditional poetry during public festivals of the polis, rejecting as false the canonical image of Hades as staged in ritual enactments of traditional poetry or any other type of recitation or storytelling. Hence my first point: The terrors of Hades are not only ghosts, empousai, and all other forms of everyday superstition. The main target of Socrates is the canonical poetic image of the underworld endorsed by the civic religious authorities and by the average Athenian, as pictured in Aristophanes’ Clouds.

Of particular interest to the reader of the Derveni Papyrus is the fact that Kephalos mentions explicitly the existence of a frequently ironic attitude towards this kind of myth (I [333e]), as the P.Derv. author does in column V. Later on, Socrates will come back to this important issue in the section featuring his close reading of poetry, even if Kephalos is not there, having left a klēronomos logōn (331d–e) to replace him in the discussion. Let’s add to this Graf’s comments on old Axiochus (p. 85), tormented by the fear of postmortem punishments and receiving comfort from Socrates, who tells a story he himself has heard from an ἀνὴρ μάγος.

Even if their solutions diverge, Socrates and the P.Derv. author share a concern about poetic language not conveying the truth and about the need to handle in one way or another its provocative—literal—content. Nevertheless, even Socrates gives a last chance to the “ugly lies” of Homer and Hesiod on the megista.

Public performances of traditional poetry open to “all publics” should not be allowed, as the deeper meaning of such ceremonies is unaccessible to aphronas and neous, who accept literal meaning at face value. The violent myth of succession is for the ears of the oligistoi and demands a mystic setting and a costly sacrifice. Socrates asserts that for this type of legomenon a special ritual occasion should be created and a special public should be allowed to attend. The P.Derv. text could be the description of such an alternative setting.

Understanding divine names and their physical explanation is the second level of access to the meaning of the poetic hierologein. Plato in the Theaetetus stages a Socratic discourse interweaving poetry and physics, by detecting Heraclitean principles in the deeper meaning of the poetic divine names that relate to the concept of fluidity. The method differs, but some important topics are common: the P.Derv. author could be Socrates’ interlocutor, but we cannot locate him in time and space, any more than we can locate the rituals and the poetic performance he describes. His work, though, contributes greatly in testing the tools modern scholarship has used up to now to reconstruct ancient Greek religious and intellectual life. {xxiv|}