Trophonios

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Trophonios ( Greek  Τροφώνιος ) was a Greek hero with an ancient oracle in the Boiotic city ​​of Lebadeia .

Trophonios

Etymology and Similar Cults

The name is derived from the Greek word "trepho" = "to feed". Strabo and various inscriptions call one "Zeus Trephonios". Other chthonic Zeus deities with similar titles were known in the Greek world, e.g. B. Zeus Meilichios (the "honey-sweet" Zeus), or Zeus Chthonios (the "underground" Zeus).

There were similar deities in the Roman world, e. B. In Lavinium in Latium there was an altar of Aeneas under the title Iuppiter Indiges (Jupiter under the earth).

Trophonios in mythology

According to Greek mythology Trophonios was the son of Erginos . According to the Homeric hymn to Apollon, Trophonios built the oracle temple at Delphi together with his brother Agamedes . When it was finished, the oracle told them to indulge in every conceivable joy for six days, and on the seventh day their greatest longing would be fulfilled. After seven days they were found dead in their beds. The proverb, "Whoever the gods love, dies young" is based on this story.

Pausanias tells of the brothers that they had built a treasury for King Hyrieus of Boeotia. They would have stolen his wealth through a secret passage that only they knew. The king set a trap for the thieves by laying snares in the treasury. Agamedes got caught in it and could not break free. Trophonios then cut off his head and took it with him so that the king could not identify the body. Then Trophonios fled to the Lebadeia cave and was never seen again.

A long time later, when the inhabitants of Lebadeia suffered from an epidemic, they asked the Oracle of Delphi for advice. The Pythia's response was that an unnamed hero was upset because he was not worshiped, so citizens should find his grave and establish a cult for him. The citizens searched in vain for a long time, until finally a shepherd boy in search of honey followed by bees into a cave. Instead of honey he found Trophonios, with which Lebadeia defeated the plague and won a popular oracle for it.

In Euripides ' tragedy Ion , the childless Xythos consults the oracle of Trophonios on his way to Delphi.

After visiting the sanctuary, Apollonios of Tyana reported that Trophonios was a representative of the teachings of Pythagoras in philosophical matters .

The Trophonios cult

Pausanias describes the Trophonios cult in numerous details in his book on Boeotia (9.39). For several days, visitors to the oracle had to prepare with cleansing rituals and offerings. Then he was taken to the Herkyna River by two thirteen-year-old boys, bathed and anointed, and clad in a simple robe. He was given water from two sources called Lethe (forgetting) and Mnemosyne (remembering). Only then was he allowed to enter the oracle shrine. There he found a ladder that he had to climb down to a narrow hole in the ground through which he had to stick his feet. From below he was pulled down suddenly by his feet, then he received a blow on the head that made him half unconscious. In the darkness of the cave his future was revealed to him by a voice. Then the visitor was pulled up again by the feet. At the top he had to sit on the "chair of remembrance" and repeat what the oracle had told him. In the "House of the Good Spirit" the visitor could then relax and "find laughter again".

Vision of timarchus

In De Genio Socratis, Plutarch narrates a dream vision about the cosmos and life in the hereafter, which was received in the oracle of Trophonios by Timarchus, a disciple of Socrates who died early.

According to Plutarch, this timarchus wanted to find out what the daemon of Socrates was all about, and for this purpose he climbed into the oracle cave, where he stayed for two nights and a day, so that his companions lost him. Then he reappeared after all, seemed very happy and after the final ritual gave the following report:

As soon as he was in the cave, he was surrounded by thick darkness, he was praying, sprawled on the ground, not sure whether he was awake or dreaming. Then it seemed to him as if a hard blow hit his skull, which cracked open and released his soul from the broken seams. His soul felt as if it had been freed from a suffocating dungeon and expanded like a sail that is filled by the wind. Then he heard a very graceful noise like a slight whirl around his head and, looking up, saw no earth, but shining islands, shining in changing, fiery colors, nothing but islands, numerous and large and all round in shape. Between the islands was a lake or sea, shimmering in various shades of blue. The islands moved, were drifted, rose and fell.

The sea seemed partly very deep, partly very shallow, two fiery rivers filled the water with white light, but in the middle he saw an abyss, deep, roaring and filled with darkness, from which the howling and barking of animals, weeping of children and groans of men and women and all sorts of other terrible sounds came up, but as if muffled and from a great distance, which, however, terrified him very much.

Finally he heard the voice of an invisible being asking him what he wanted to know, to which Timarchus replied: “Everything! for what is there that is not wonderful and surprising? ”To which the being replies that heaven is not his region, but that he would like to show him the kingdom of Persephone , namely the earthly world as underworld or hell. And he begins a philosophical representation of the world divided into four parts by the Styx , as there is life , movement , reproduction and decay . Let life be connected with movement through an invisible bond, movement with reproduction through understanding and the sun, and reproduction with decay through nature and the moon, and over each of these connections one of the moirs is placed, namely atropos over the first, clotho over the second and Lachesis on the third.

Now the moon represents a border area in which the underworld and the overworld meet periodically, namely every 177 revolutions. At every such encounter, souls from the overworld can be sucked down into sublunar hell; conversely, souls who have completed the circle of rebirths can ascend into the overworld. Timarchus then remarks that he actually only sees stars moving this way and that, whereupon his guide explains to him that these are the daimones. The souls are partly woven into the flesh and matter and thus the world of desires, but partly outside the flesh, connected to the body like a cord, this part of the soul outside the body is the mind or daimon. The greater the share of the daimon, the more purposeful the movement of the soul and those points of light that he sees walking a very quiet walk, that is, the souls of the prophets and philosophers.

Timarchus then returned to his body and to this world after the voice had announced that in three months he would understand everything better. In fact, Timarchus died suddenly after 3 months.

Trophonios in the classical tradition

“To go down into the cave of Trophonios” became a saying for “to suffer great fear” - this is alluded to in Aristophanes ' comedy The Clouds .

Various ancient philosophers, e.g. B. Herakleides Pontikos , wrote commentaries on the Trophonios cult that are lost today.

The Lethe and Mnemosyne sources are very similar to the myth of Er narrated in Plato's Politeia , with texts by the Orphics , and with passages on remembering and forgetting in Hesiod's theogony .

Since the god of the sanctuary was once a human being, in Roman times the customs tenants refused the tax exemption that is otherwise common in temples, arguing that even an apotheosis would not result in any tax exemption.

In 1785 Giambattista Casti wrote the libretto "La grotta di Trofonio", which was set to music by Antonio Salieri (1785, Vienna) and, in a version arranged by Giuseppe Palomba , again by Giovanni Paisiello (1786, Naples). The opera was successful and was also translated into German, French and Portuguese.

The Hellfire Club set up a “Cave of Trophonios” with obscene wall paintings, where the members celebrated their orgies.

Friedrich Nietzsche describes himself in the preface to his book Dawn as “Trophonios” because he descended into the subterranean abyss of moral ideas.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Plutarch Moralia VII, 46 Περί του Σωκράτους δαιμονίου 21-23 ( English translation )
  2. ↑ That corresponds to the number of days in the semester, the shortest eclipse cycle of 6 lunar months.
  3. ↑ Cicero De natura deorum 3.19
  4. ↑ http://digital.onb.ac.at/OnbViewer/viewer.faces?doc=ABO_%2BZ177953808