A Historical-Philosophical Analysis of the Concept of Metempsychosis in Ancient Greece (6th–5th centuries BCE)

This article proposes a reconsideration of the conventional scholarly use of the term “metempsychosis” in relation to Greek thought of the 6th–5th centuries BCE. We proceed from the assumption that the term is laden with a range of anachronistic meanings which, when applied to archaic sources, tend to distort their ideas and obscure their diversity. An analysis of early texts (Xenophanes, Pindar, Empedocles, Herodotus, the Orphics) shows that what is usually reduced to “transmigration of souls” in fact comprises a set of distinct and sometimes incompatible models of life, death, and subjectness, which cannot be integrated into a single doctrine. It is concluded that it is methodologically justified to adopt a more conceptually pure notion “proto-metempsychosis”, which denotes a minimal unity of two components: the idea of a continuous alternation of life and death, and the presence of a subject participating in this process. Such a definition allows for a more accurate description of archaic views, avoiding the projection of later frameworks onto earlier material and preserving their originality.