I never knew how Lamberton’s “secret doctrine” could have possibly survived as an oral tradition in Magna Graecia from Pythagoras in the fifth century BC to Plotinus in the third century AD. Until now. Is this Homeric fresco proof that subterranean rituals of death and rebirth not only flourished in southern Italy in the centuries before and after Jesus, but also entered paleo-Christianity through Greek speakers like the Aurelii?
