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Sabazius cult

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2015 7:22 am
by Peter Kirby
Earl Doherty wrote:The Sabazius cult observed a communal supper which symbolized the heavenly banquet of the blessed which the initiates could look forward to after death.
Can someone help me with finding the primary sources on Sabazius?

Preferrably in English translation.

Re: Sabazius cult

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2015 11:02 am
by andrewcriddle
Peter Kirby wrote:
Earl Doherty wrote:The Sabazius cult observed a communal supper which symbolized the heavenly banquet of the blessed which the initiates could look forward to after death.
Can someone help me with finding the primary sources on Sabazius?

Preferrably in English translation.
There is a section on Sabazius in Cumont's Oriental Religions

IIUC the evidence for communal meals comes mainly from frescoes.

Andrew Criddle

Re: Sabazius cult

Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2015 6:05 pm
by Peter Kirby
Thanks, Andrew. Good stuff!

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007-04-52.html
The author has selected to study the cults of Sabazius, Bendis and Cotys as represented in five fragmentary comedies: Cratinus' Boukoloi (43-67) and Aristophanes' Horai (71-124) for Sabazius, Cratinus' Thraittai (147-206) and Aristophanes' Lemniai (209-48) for Bendis, and Eupolis' Baptai (267-333) for Cotys.

Any chance anyone knows of a translation, in a book is fine, of Aristophanes' Horai and Cratinus' Boukoloi? (Or is it just in the TLG?)

Re: Sabazius cult

Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2015 9:21 am
by Peter Kirby
Peter Kirby wrote:Any chance anyone knows of a translation, in a book is fine, of Aristophanes' Horai and Cratinus' Boukoloi? (Or is it just in the TLG?)
There's a Latin translation and Greek text here (Cratinus' Boukoli):

http://www.archive.org/stream/p1fragmen ... 6/mode/1up

And here:

http://www.archive.org/stream/comicorum ... 6/mode/1up

This might be Aristophanes' Horai:

https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_nTTgA ... 3/mode/2up

Showing the importance of some Greek and Latin :) ... plenty of stuff not translated out there.

Re: Sabazius cult

Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2015 3:52 am
by ficino
Hi Peter, all the plays you mention are lost to the Byzantine manuscript traditions of Greek dramatists. What survives of the plays you mention are only fragments, i.e. quotations in later writers (I don't know about scraps of papyrus). For fragments of Attic comedy, the standard collection is Kassel-Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci:

http://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/16621

The fragments are given in Greek, and explanations in Latin.

John Maxwell Edmonds did an edition of fragments of Attic comedy, published by Brill, with English translations. Scholars generally don't cite from his edition, but if you can get it, you'll get the translations. If you want to write a scholarly presentation, you should cite the fragments by number from Kassel-Austin.

Ian Christopher Storey has a new book w/ translations of the fragments of Eupolis. Google books doesn't give all the pages, but their search engine will reveal pages where Storey discusses Kotys:

https://books.google.com/books?id=-D6BP ... &q&f=false

Jeffrey Henderson's Loeb volume 5 of Aristophanes (2008) is devoted to the fragments of that comic writer:

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php? ... 0674996151

There is also a Loeb of the fragments of Cratinus. I haven't looked at it.

Eager to hear what you come up with!

You may want to poke around in commentaries on Plato's Republic, since that dialogue opens with Socrates describing how he went down to the Piraeus to the festival of Bendis.

Some recent books that talk about your "new" cults are:

https://books.google.com/books?id=T6Nma ... os&f=false

https://books.google.com/books?id=-2O84 ... os&f=false
(In the above, Robin Osborne argues that Euripides' Bacchae was not inspired by the advent of the cult of Sabazios in Athens.)