In Greek mythology, Linus (Linos) is a legendary musician and master of lyric song, often cast as the elder brother of Orpheus and as the music teacher of Heracles at Thebes. Ancient sources give many parentages — most often a Muse (Calliope, Urania, or Terpsichore) by Apollo or Oeagrus — and more than one death: Apollo kills him as a rival singer in Boeotian tradition, while Apollodorus and others have Heracles strike him dead with the lyre. The atlas id linus-orpheus is the Orphic/Theban musician, not every local Linus tomb.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Linus of Thrace" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Musician and teacher
Linus was regarded as a first leader of lyric song and, in some accounts, inventor of melody, rhythm, or dirges. He is usually paired with Orpheus as brother or fellow pupil of the Muses; Apollodorus makes him son of Calliope and Oeagrus (or nominally of Apollo) and brother of Orpheus.
At Thebes he taught music (and in some versions letters) to the young Heracles. When the sluggish pupil mishandled the lyre and Linus chastised him, Heracles killed his teacher with the instrument — then escaped conviction by citing a law of Rhadamanthys on self-defence. Amphitryon afterward sent him to tend cattle.
II.Deaths and the Linus song
Boeotian tradition has Apollo shoot Linus for rivalling him in song; an image near Helicon received yearly funeral sacrifice before offerings to the Muses. Argos, Thebes, and Chalcis each claimed his tomb. Homer already knows a "beautiful Linus" song worked on Achilles' shield — the linos as a genre of lament that later writers treated as mourning for the youth himself.
Theban lore sometimes split an earlier Linus slain by Apollo from a later Linus slain by Heracles. The atlas node follows the Orpheus-linked Theban musician of Apollodorus.