Texts in Conversation
The philosopher Dio Chrysostom invokes the famous Greek image of Ixion whirled on a wheel as eternal punishment. The Apocalypse of Peter draws on this tradition, hanging sorcerers on wheels of fire that whirl them in a river of judgment.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Dio Chrysostom Discourse 4:123
Classical
122 Just so with this spirit of ambition: When he also puts his faith in weak and truly airy wings — I mean at honours and plaudits bestowed at haphazard by the general crowd — he floats away on his perilous and unsteady voyage, taking with him the man, his admirer and henchman, who now appears to many to be high and blessed, but now again seems low and wretched, not only to others, but first and foremost to himself. 123 But if there be anyone who does not care to conceive of and portray him as winged, let him liken him to Ixion, constrained to cruel and violent gyrations as he is rapidly whirled round and round on a wheel. Indeed, the comparison of the wheel with reputation would not be unfitting nor far inferior in truth to the clever and brilliant metaphors of the rhetoricians: by its shifting movement it very readily turns round, and in its revolutions forces the soul to assume all kinds of shapes, more truly than the potter’s wheel affects the things that are being shaped upon it. 124 Such a man, ever turning and revolving, a flatterer of peoples and crowds, whether in public assemblies or lecture halls, or in his so‑called friendship with tyrants or kings and his courting of them — who would not feel pity for his character and manner of living? I am not speaking of the man, however, who, having managed his own life admirably, endeavours by the persuasion of speech combined with goodwill and a sense of justice to train and direct a great multitude of men and to lead them to better things.
Date: 70-100 C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
Apocalypse of Peter 1:44
Revelation of Peter
Early Christian
43 Ezrael the angel of God will bring them forth out of this fire and establish a judgment of decision. This then is their judgment: a river of fire will flow, and all who are judged will be drawn down into the middle of the river. And Uriel will set them there. 44 There are wheels of fire, and men and women hung on them by the force of their whirling. Those who are in the pit will burn: these are the sorcerers and sorceresses. Those wheels will be in the judgment by fire without number. 45 After this, the angels will bring my elect and righteous, who are perfect in all uprightness, and bear them in their hands, and clothe them with the garments of the life that is above. They will see their desire on those who hated them, when he punishes them, and the torment of every one will be forever according to his works.
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Notes and References
“... Scourging was widely practised as a punishment, usually as non-lethal, but sometimes as deliberately killing someone by it (e.g. Suetonius, Gaius 27.7). From earthly use it had long ago entered the Greek Hades, where it was a thoroughly standard feature of the punishment of the dead (e.g. Virgil, Aeneid 6.556-557; Lucian, Menippus 14; Vera historia 2.29) and so must have migrated to the Jewish hell from the Greek. The wheel, on which sorcerers are stretched in 12:5-6, was an exotic form of human punishment, but famous as a feature of the Greek Hades. Ixion, punished by being fixed to a wheel, was one of the famous individual sinners featured in descriptions of the Greek Hades, along with Sisyphus, Tityos, Tantalus and others. The punishments of these famous mythological individuals had long come to be seen as representative punishments, which other sinners could also expect to suffer (compare Virgil, Aeneid 6.616-617). Ixion’s is the only one which appears in the Apocalypse of Peter ...”
Bauckham, Richard
The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses
(pp. 218-219) Brill, 1998
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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