Having made an attempt to reconstruct the Derveni author's views on the supreme divine being and the formation of the present cosmic order on the basis of a close reading of the text, I shall now try to examine the place of this set of tenets in the context of Presocratic philosophy. The following survey – which is meant to further the project announced by Walter Burkert in his seminal paper ‘Orpheus und die Vorsokratiker’ published in 1968, so already thirty-five years ago – has two obvious objectives. On the one hand, it hopes to elicit the major doctrinal influences on the author. On the other hand, these systematic comparisons exhibiting both the similarities and the divergences will, I hope, enhance our understanding of the internal dynamics of the author's world-view.

This survey is certainly not exhaustive; I shall consider only those authors whose work I find particularly illuminating for the Derveni text. Thus, I shall not discuss the Atomists for example, since apart from a very few, and possibly accidental, verbal resemblances (of which the most notable is the use of κρούω) I do not think that they have much to do with the author's cosmology and physics. One might have expected a comparison also with Empedocles. I was, however, unable to establish doctrinal correspondences with Empedocles that could illuminate aspects of the Derveni author's teaching. I shall nevertheless come back to Empedocles in the last chapter where I discuss the Derveni author's overall intellectual outlook.

A word of caution is in order at this point. The following analyses necessarily involve dealing with Presocratic fragments and theories the understanding of which is highly controversial.