Simbolismul peșterii în Tracia și Grecia Antică

Abstract

The present study deals with the symbolism of the cave in ancient Greece and Thrace. For Greeks, the caves have multiple meanings; they are an allegory of human nature and illustrate the journey of the soul to the knowledge of the supreme Good. But caves can be also oracles of the dead because souls detached from their bodies had a clearer perception of all things and processes. In Antiquity, the consultation of the divine will through an oracle was the most powerful guidance that a human could get. For Thracians, caves where spaces where the immortal anthropodaimons had their eternal subterranean existence. The immortality of these characters is strange because they don't go to Olympus, but stay forever where the earth swallowed them. From there, they act as mediators between the worlds, as healers and, sometime, endow people with immortality. The Thracian imagined world of the dead points to this direction of interpretation.