Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Herodotus reports that the Getae, whom he calls the bravest and most just of the Thracians, believe they do not die: the dead go to the daimon Zalmoxis (also called Gebeleizis by some). Every five years they send a messenger to Zalmoxis by lot, tossing him onto spear-points; if he dies, the god is thought favorable; if he lives, they blame the messenger. They also shoot arrows at thunder and lightning, threatening the god. Greeks of the Hellespont and Pontus told Herodotus that Zalmoxis was a man, once a slave of Pythagoras on Samos, who grew rich, returned to Thrace, and taught that neither he nor his guests nor their descendants would die but would come to a place of eternal goods. Meanwhile he built an underground chamber, vanished from the Thracians for three years while they mourned, then reappeared in the fourth year, and so persuaded them of his teachings. Herodotus declines to decide whether Zalmoxis was man or local daimon, noting only that he lived many years before Pythagoras if he was human. Catalogue this as the classical Greek ethnographic myth of Getic immortality and the staged return from the earth.