Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets by Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The book by Radcliffe Edmonds deals with texts that relate a very similar tale of the journey to the underworld:the Orphic gold tablets, which describe the journey of the deceased to the realm of the dead, providing instructions for handling the dangers of the other world, • Aristophanes' Frogs, which tells of the journey of Dionysos to the underworld with the purpose of bringing back a tragic poet to save Athens, and • Plato's myth in the Phaedo, which also describes the journey of the deceased after death.These texts belong to very different literary genres and have very different purposes.The Orphic gold tablets are documents of a religious group (or groups), whose goal is that initiates (μῦσται) achieve a privileged status in the other world.Aristophanes tries to make the audience laugh.Plato places the tale in the frame of a philosophical analysis of the immortality of the soul.The Orphic tablets are therefore religious texts, the Aristophanic interpretation is a parody and the Platonic one, a philosophical adaptation.Edmonds tries to determine the particularities of each and the relationship between them.His book is organized in five chapters: 'Introduction: The Start of the Journey' [1--28], 'Roadmaps of Déviance: The "Orphic" Gold Tablets' [29--110], 'Descent to the Depths of Comedy: The Frogs of Aristophanes' [111--158], 'The Upward Path of Philosophy: The Myth in Plato's Phaedo' [159--220], and 'Conclusions: The End of the Road' [221--239].It also contains a very complete bibliography, an index locorum, and an index.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".