Library › Greek: Philosophy › Testimonia
Testimonia gathers the ancient reports about Cercops, a shadowy early Pythagorean to whom certain Orphic poems were attributed. None of his work survives. Cicero, citing Aristotle, says the Pythagoreans ascribed an Orphic poem to him; Clement of Alexandria, citing Epigenes, credits him with the Descent to Hades and the Sacred Discourse; the Suda mentions him in its entry on Orpheus; and Diogenes Laertius names a Cercops as a rival of Hesiod.
These brief testimonies matter for the history of Orphic literature and for ancient debates about its authorship. They show that already in Aristotle's time some doubted Orpheus' existence and assigned the poems circulating under his name to later Pythagorean writers such as Cercops.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: DK 15). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ).