The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)
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* The Getae, in Greek Tirai, were, according to ^lius Spartianus, and according to the author of le Monde primitif (t. ix., p. 49), the same peoples as the Goths. Their country called Getae, which should be pronounced Ghoetie, comes from the word Goth, which signifies God in most of the idioms of the north of Europe. The name of the Dacians is only a softening of that of the Thracians in a different dialect.
Moesia, in Greek MoUria, is, in Phoenician, the interpretation of the name given to Thrace. The latter means, as^we have seen, ethereal space, and the former signifies divine abode, being composed from the word tt»N (aish), whose rendering I have already given, before which is found placed the letter a (M), one of the hemantigues, which according to the best grammarians serves to express the proper place, the means, the local manifestation of a thing.
' Voyez Court de Gobelin, Monde primitif, t. ix., p. 49.
1 6 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras resided upon a mountain that d'Anville believes he has recognized, between Moldavia and Transylvania.
The Thracians had also a sovereign pontiff instituted in the same manner as that of the Getae, and residing likewise upon a sacred mountain.* It was, no doubt, from the heights of these mountains that the divine oracles, the laws and teachings which the great pontiffs had composed in verse, were at first spread throughout Greece; so that it might be said, literally as well as figuratively, that poetry, revered as the language of the gods, production of an Eternal Being, descended from the ethereal abode and was propagated upon earth for the instruction and delight of mortals.
It appears to me very certain that the temple of Delphi, erected upon the famous mountain of Parnassus, differed not essentially at first from those of Thrace; and what confirms me in this idea is that, according to an ancient tradition, it was Olen who, coming out from Lycia, that is to say from the light, caused all Greece to recognize the cult of Apollo and Diana; composed the hymns which were chanted at Delos in honour of these two divinities and established the temple of Delphi of which he was the first pontiff.
' Thus the temple of Delphi rivalled those of Thrace. Its foundation, doubtless due to some innovator priest, was attributed by a poetic metaphor to the divinity which had inspired it. At that time a schism arose and two cults were formed, that of the Thracians consecrated to Bacchus and Ceres, or Dionysus the divine spirit, and Demeter the
* This mountain was called K6-Kaj6n, according to d'Anville. This learned geographer has clearly seen that this name was the same as that of Caucasus, a generic name given to all the sacred mountains. It is known that Caucasus was for the Persians, what Mount Merou had been for the Indians and what Moimt Parnassus became afterwards for the Greeks, the central place of their cult. The Tibetans have also their sacred mountain distinct from that of the Indians, upon which still resides the God-Priest, or immortal Man, similar to that of the Getae. {MSm. de I'Acad. des Inscript., t. xxv., P- 45-)
' Bailly, Essai sur les Fables, ch. 14. Conf^rez avec H^rodote, I. iv.; et Pausanias, 1. ix., p. 302, 1. x., p. 320.
The Essence and Form of Poetry 17 earth-mother*; and that of the Greeks, properly speaking, consecrated to the sun and the moon, adored under the names of Apollo and Diana. It is to this schism that one should ascribe the famous dispute which was raised, it is said, between Bacchus and Apollo concerning the possession of the tripod of Delphi. ' The poetic fable woven from this subject was made to preserve the remembrance of the moral incident and not of the physical event; for at this remote epoch, when verse only was written, history, ever allegorical, treated only of moral and providential matters, disdaining all physical details deemed little worthy of occupying the memory of men.
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