Pherecydes of Syros

Pherecydes of Syros (fl. c. 540 BCE), son of Babys, wrote the earliest Greek prose work on the gods, known in antiquity as the Pentemychos (“Five Recesses”) or Heptamychos. Its opening sentence survives: Zas and Chronos and Chthonie always were — three ungenerated principles, not a birth of gods from Chaos as in Hesiod. Chronos makes fire, breath and water from his own seed and disposes them in five recesses, from which the gods are born; Zas weaves a great robe embroidered with Earth and Ocean and gives it to Chthonie at their wedding, so that she becomes Ge; and a war of Kronos against the serpent Ophioneus, with Ocean as the losing side’s prize, settles who holds the heavens. Later writers read his recesses, pits and caves as an account of the soul’s descent, and credited him with the doctrine of its immortality.

Nothing of the book survives except through quotation. The tradition remembered him chiefly as a wonder-worker — predicting an earthquake from well-water, a shipwreck from a fair wind — and as the teacher of Pythagoras, who was said to have nursed him in his last illness. Damascius placed his theogony beside those of Orpheus and Epimenides as one of the three archaic accounts of the first principles. The passages below are every witness to Pherecydes now in the library; the robe (Clement, Stromateis VI.9), the Ophioneus battle (Origen, Against Celsus VI.42) and the Grenfell papyrus are not yet here.