of the archaic age defied assimilation. Late in the sixth century Pythagoras taught that souls migrated after death into other
bodies, both human and animal. Meat-eating was therefore an abomination, a form of cannibalism. As vegetarians, his
followers were excluded from the principal institutions of social life; they lived in closed communities of their own, subject
to strict rules of conduct. Probably in the same period poems began to be composed that bore the name of Orpheus, the
mythical singer. 'Orpheus' taught that man was a guilty and polluted being. The human race as a whole was descended from
'unjust ancestors', the wicked Titans who dismembered and ate the young god Dionysus. For Orphism, as for
Pythagoreanism, meat-eating was a further pollution, repeated day by day. The soul required 'purification' from these taints,
or it would pay the penalty in the next incarnation or the next world. In these two interconnected movements (best
illustrated for us by Empedocles' poem Purifications) we find a series of phenomena untypical of Greek religion: ascetism,
preoccupation with the afterlife, rejection of profane society, the concept of a special religious way of life, doctrines of guilt
and salvation. Herodotus believed that Pythagoras had imported his doctrines from Egypt, and external influence is not to
be excluded; another important factor was doubtless the growing individualism of archaic Greek society, which loosened
the traditional ties of kinship and encouraged the quest for individual salvation. Some of these ideas seem to have affected
the Eleusinian cult, and there was an important Pythagorean influence on Plato. But it was on the outskirts of the Greek
world, particularly in Italy and Sicily, that such movements had most adherents, and they remained marginal phenomena.
An abnormal approach not to the next life but to this one was offered, in particular to women, by certain forms of the cult of
Dionysus (best illustrated by Euripides' Bacchae). In myth and literature Dionysus is represented as an outsider, a stranger
from Lydia, and scholars used to believe that his cult had indeed been introduced to Greece at some date within folk
memory. The decipherment of Linear B showed that he was almost certainly already known in Mycenaean times, and it
now seems that the myth of Dionysus' arrival is not a reminiscence of historical fact but a way of saying something about
his nature. Dionysus Bacchius had to be a stranger because the ecstatic irresponsibility that he offered to women was unique
in Greek religion. All women's festivals were a release from domestic confinement, and most of them entailed a kind of
temporary repudiation of male authority (the fantasy of Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria has a real basis); but
their content was often austere, and they normally related in some way to woman's proper function as a fertile being (which
allowed her to promote the fertility of crops too, by sympathy). The votaries of Dionysus Bacchius, by contrast, laid down
their weaving and abandoned their children to follow the handsome god to the mountains. There as 'maenads' they would
dance, revel, and even (so it was said) tear apart live animals and eat them raw. Even in Greek states where such a flight to
the mountains was not practised, some form of ecstatic dancing by women in honour of Dionysus certainly took place. But
if this was a liberation it was only a temporary one, and indeed in an important sense it tightened the chains, since it
confirmed the belief that woman was a volatile and irrational being in need of close control. Maenadism could thus be
readily accommodated within public religion. Male bacchic ecstasy, on the other hand, seems to have been long confined to
disreputable private associations. (It was in time taken up by Orphism, another fringe movement, and given a novel
eschatological meaning.)