Abstract

It is my endeavour in this paper to connect literary and philosophical texts with each other which all articulate the relation of the good sovereign to the supreme god. I try to show that despite the difference in age and genre these texts have some traits in common: the motiv of the eye looking benignly upon and/or bringing fertility to land and people, and the metempsychosis with the arrival of the king from the god and/or his return to the divine sphere. I suggest that the recurrence of these motifs cannot be accidental and might reveal some continuity of tradition. Although the nature of such conceptual development is bound to be very complex and its starting point hard to trace, I nevertheless argue for a Pythagorean origin for the metempsychosis and the eye of the king, attested by Empedocles and Pindar, which mixed with the old belief of the king assuring fertility, as evidenced in Homer.