The Testament of Orpheus, Aristobulus, and the Derveni Papyrus: Between "Didactic" Hymnography and Alexandrian Exegesis

Starting from the analysis of The Testament of Orpheus as it is preserved by Aristobulus-Eusebius, this essay aims at demonstrating that the version attributed to the Hellenic-Jewish philosopher illustrates a theological and cosmological doctrine similar to the cosmosophia of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De mundo. In this paper the Author concludes also that the wider version of the Testament of Orpheus would actually be contemporary to Aristobulus. The Author recommends also to consider Aristobulus as the exegete of a previous/more or less contemporary hymn who attempts to lead the sense of this towards a more explicit ‘Aristotelian’ direction (as it emerges from De mundo) by adopting an exegetical practice largely used in Alexandria but already found in the historicizing allegoresis proposed in the Derveni Papyrus. About this preexisting hymn, Aristobulus (or the source he re-read and commented) has provided further elements that were somehow ascribable to Orpheus, perhaps interpreting the references to the figure of a son (almost certainly a collective or a bequest of a formulary of testamentary origin used in the Psalms and in some readings from Second Temple Judaism) as allusions to Musaeus, the Orpheus’s son. The passage mentioned by Aristobulus is not very clear (how could Musaeus’s subjection to Orpheus be explained since in other Jewish-Hellenic contexts Musaeus is considered to be Orpheus’s guide and/or father? Moreover, Musaeus is also clearly identified as the son of the shining moon). Instead, it is a fact that in the subsequent Christian tradition, where Musaeus belongings to Orpheus’s lineage appears as more solidified, there emerges an explicit identification of the persona loquens of the hymn with the protos heuretes of Greek poetry, a figure who is traditionally remembered as author of hymns.