Onomacritus

Onomacritus a celebrated religious poet of ancient Greece, lived at Athens in the time of the Pisistratidae. He collected and expounded — according to Herodotus — the prophecies or oracles of Musseus; but is said to have been banished from the city by Hipparchus, about B.C. 516, on account of interpolating something of his own in these oracles. He then, we are told, followed the Pisistratidae into Persia, and while there was employed by them in a very dishonorable way. They got him to repeat to Xerxes all the ancient savings that seemed to favor his meditated invasion of Greece. Some critics, among whom is Aristotle, have inferred from a passage in Pausanias that Onomacritus is the author of most of the so-called Orphic hymns. More certain, however, is the view which represents him as the inventor of the great Orphic myth of Dionysus Zagreus, and the founder of Orphic religious societies and theology. Pausafiias states that "Onomacritus established orgies in honor of Dionlysus, and in his poems represented the Titans as the authors of the sufferings of Dionysus." See Müller, Geschichte der Griech. Litteratur bis auf das Zeitalter Alexander's (Breslau, 1841); Grote, History of Greece, etc.