‘Decoding’ a literary text. The commentary of Derveni

Abstract

Abstract The author of Derveni Papyrus consider that the poem he commentates is like a riddle used by Orpheus to make it understandable to only a few. In our terms, he considers the poem an encoded text that he needs to decode in order to recover its true meaning. So he had to imagine a code in the text that once ‘decoded’ would yield the ‘true’ meaning that he wants to attribute to it. In the paper the way in which the commentator constructs the hypothetical process undertaken by Orpheus to express philosophical (presocratic) contents through a poetic mask is analyzed.