In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a Thracian bard, legendary musician and prophet whose song could charm animals, trees and even stones. He sailed with Jason and the Argonauts, descended into the underworld to recover his wife Eurydice, and was torn apart by maenads. The Greeks also venerated him as founder and prophet of the Orphic mysteries and credited him with theogonies and ritual poems; shrines holding purported relics of Orpheus were treated as oracles.
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I.Etymology
The name Orpheus (Ὀρφεύς) has no certain etymology. One plausible proposal links it to Proto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos ("orphan, servant, slave") and the verb root *h₃erbʰ- ("to change allegiance, status, ownership"), with Greek cognates órphnē ("darkness") and orphanós ("fatherless, orphan"). Fulgentius, writing in late antiquity, gave the unlikely gloss "best voice" (Oraia-phonos).
II.Background
Although Cicero reports that Aristotle did not believe Orpheus had existed, most other ancient writers treated him as a real person of remote antiquity, living several generations before Homer. The earliest literary reference is a sixth-century BC fragment of Ibycus calling him "Orpheus famous-of-name"; he is absent from Homer and Hesiod. Pindar calls him "the father of songs" and names him son of the Thracian king Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope.
Classical Greeks ranked him the greatest of poets and musicians: Hermes invented the lyre, but Orpheus perfected it. Simonides and others said his music could charm birds, fish and beasts, make trees and rocks dance, and divert rivers. He was one of the few Greek heroes to visit the underworld and return. The earliest known visual reference to that descent is a painting by Polygnotus described by Pausanias, which does not mention Eurydice; Euripides and Plato allude to the recovery of a wife without naming her, and the name Eurydice first appears in literature in the Lament for Bion.
Some sources also credit him with gifts of medicine, writing or agriculture, and with founding cults of Apollo and Dionysus and prescribing mystery rites preserved in Orphic texts. Pindar and Apollonius of Rhodes place him among the Argonauts as harpist and companion of Jason.
III.Early life and Argonautica
According to Apollodorus and a Pindaric fragment, Orpheus's father was Oeagrus; his mother is most often Calliope, though alternatives include Polymnia, a daughter of Pierus, or Menippe daughter of Thamyris. A scholium on Pindar records Asclepiades of Tragilus making him son of Apollo and Calliope. His birthplace and residence are placed at Pimpleia near Olympus, where Apollonius locates Oeagrus and Calliope's wedding. Apollo is said to have given him a golden lyre; his mother taught him verse. Diodorus makes Musaeus of Athens his son.
In Apollonius's Argonautica, Chiron warns Jason that without Orpheus the Argonauts cannot pass the Sirens. When the Sirens sing, Orpheus plays louder and more beautifully, drowning their song so the ship can sail on. The Hellenistic elegist Phanocles adds that Orpheus loved the Argonaut Calais, son of Boreas.
IV.Eurydice
The most famous Orpheus story concerns his wife Eurydice (also Argiope in Hermesianax). In the developed Roman form, she dies of a serpent bite — Virgil has Aristaeus pursue her; Ovid places the bite while she dances with naiads on her wedding day. Overcome with grief, Orpheus descends to Hades; his music softens Hades and Persephone, who allow Eurydice to follow him back on condition that he not look behind until both have reached the upper world. At the threshold he turns too soon, and she vanishes forever.
Earlier Greek treatments are harsher or thinner. In Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus says the underworld gods showed Orpheus only a phantasm of his wife because he lacked the courage to die for love, like Alcestis, and that he was later punished by death at women's hands. Some modern scholars have argued that Eurydice may be a relatively late addition to Orpheus's myths, noting that her name ("she whose justice extends widely") echoes cult-titles of Persephone.
V.Death
A Late Antique summary of Aeschylus's lost Bassarids says that late in life Orpheus honored only Helios-Apollo, climbing Mount Pangaion at dawn; angry Dionysus sent the Bassarides (Thracian maenads), who tore him apart and scattered his limbs — a death paralleling that of Pentheus and of Dionysus-Zagreus. Ovid instead has Ciconian women, spurned because Orpheus after Eurydice's loss turned from women to young men, first fail to strike him because even sticks and stones are charmed by his music, then tear him apart in Bacchic frenzy.
His still-singing head and lyre floated down the Hebrus to Lesbos; the Methymnaeans buried the head near Antissa, where an oracle spoke until Apollo silenced it. The Muses carried the lyre to the stars and buried his body at Leibethra; after a flood the bones were taken to Dion. His soul rejoined Eurydice in the fields of the Blessed. Variant endings include suicide from grief, death by thunderbolt, or a tomb at Dion near Pydna.
VI.Orphic poems and rites
By the fifth and fourth centuries BC a body of hexameter poems circulated as Orphic and was treated as authoritative by those who followed the Orphic way of life. Plato quotes from the collection and refers to a "mass of books of Musaeus and Orpheus"; Aristotle doubted Orpheus's authorship and spoke of the "so-called Orphic epic," a skepticism later linked to the sixth-century redactor Onomacritus. Surviving whole works under the name include the Orphic Hymns and the late Orphic Argonautica; earlier material survives in fragments, including the Derveni papyrus commentary on an Orphic theogony (Europe's oldest surviving manuscript, buried c. 340 BC).
Orphic poetry was recited in mystery and purification rites. Plato describes vagrant priests offering purifications from books of Orpheus and Musaeus. Devotees often practiced vegetarianism, sexual abstention, and avoidance of eggs and beans — the Orphikos bios. W. K. C. Guthrie treated Orpheus as founder of mystery religions and first revealer of initiation rites.