The aim of the article is to shed new light on Alcman 5, fr. 2, ii-iii Page/Davies, Alcman’s cosmogonical poem in which Thetis, Poros and Tekmor appear as principles of world formation. In the first part of the article the author refutes a serious thesis which claims that Alcman composed no cosmogony at all, and that modern scholars have been misled by the commentator’s allegorical method of interpretation. In the second part of the article a new reconstruction is offered. According to it, Alcman accounted for the origin of the world by means of a myth in which the Old Man of the Sea played a very prominent role. The evidence for this suggestion comes from epic poetry and from Laconian cult. In this way, Alcman appears to belong to Aristotle’s class of so-called ‘mixed theologians’. The last part of the article draws some inferences concerning Alcman’s place in the history of cosmogonical ideas in Archaic Greece.
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