Orpheus

The singer from Thrace

Orpheus was a singer from Thrace whose music was said to move stones, trees and wild beasts. The ancient writer Apollodorus names his mother as the Muse Calliope. He gives two possible fathers: the river god Oeagrus, or the god Apollo.

The earliest writers who name Orpheus know him as a musician of extraordinary power. The poets Ibycus, Simonides and Pindar all mention him. Pindar calls him the father of songs and places him among the Argonauts, the heroes who sailed on the ship Argo. The poets Homer and Hesiod never name him at all.

None of these early writers tells the story that now defines him: his journey down to the dead to bring back his wife, Eurydice.

The journey to the dead

In Apollodorus, Orpheus goes down to Hades, the land of the dead. With his music he persuades its ruler to let his wife go. One condition governs the climb back. He must not turn to look at her before he reaches his own house. Orpheus turns, and she is taken back.

That sequence of persuasion, condition and failure is not clearly the oldest form of the story. The philosopher Plato, writing decades earlier, includes no persuasion at all. In his Symposium the gods of the dead show Orpheus only a phantom of his wife and send him back without her. They punish him for trying to enter Hades alive instead of dying for her, as Alcestis died for her husband Admetus.

The backward glance belongs to a later layer of the story. Earlier writers do not even agree that the journey failed.

Writers who say he brought her back

Some sources point the other way. In a play by Euripides, Admetus wishes for “the voice and music of Orpheus”. He is sure it would have charmed Persephone and her husband, the rulers of the dead, and brought Alcestis back to the light. The wish only makes sense if people believed that the journey had worked.

Other writers take the same view: Isocrates, pseudo-Heraclitus, Hermesianax, Moschus, Diodorus Siculus and the Orphic Argonautica. Across five centuries, they write as if Orpheus simply got his wife back. None of them has a backward glance or a second loss.

That glance, and the failure it causes, first appears in surviving writing in the first century BC. It is found in the Culex, a short poem of that time, and in the Georgics of the Roman poet Virgil. There the story finally takes the shape that people now assume it always had.

Two accounts of his death

Two ancient accounts give the death of Orpheus completely different causes, and neither mentions the other’s.

The first comes from the Bassarides, a lost play by the playwright Aeschylus whose outline survives through the scholar Eratosthenes. Orpheus stops honouring the god Dionysus. He decides that the sun is the greatest of the gods, calls it Apollo and climbs Mount Pangaion before dawn to watch it rise. The angry Dionysus sends his own followers, the Bassarides, to tear him apart. The Muses gather what is left of him and bury it at Leibethra, below Mount Olympus.

The second comes from a poem by Phanocles. There Orpheus loves Calais, son of Boreas, and women of Thrace kill him for being the first to turn men towards loving men instead of women. In this version his head and lyre survive the killing. They are tied together and thrown into the sea.

Where the head went

Three separate ancient accounts send the head of Orpheus to the island of Lesbos.

In Phanocles, the sea carries it there, still tied to the lyre, and the islanders bury it. The writer Lucian gives the same landing in different terms. The head is buried at a shrine of Dionysus, and the lyre is kept afterwards in a temple of Apollo.

The writer Philostratus goes further. In his account the buried head starts to speak. An oracle, a place where people came to hear a god’s answers, grows up around it. It becomes busy enough to draw worshippers away from Apollo’s own oracles at Delphi, Clarus and Gryneion. In the end the god appears to Orpheus and tells him to stop.

The poems in his name

The Roman writer Cicero reports that the philosopher Aristotle denied Orpheus ever existed. He adds that the Pythagoreans, followers of the thinker Pythagoras, said the poem going round under his name was the work of a man called Cecrops.

“Orphic” poetry means poetry credited to Orpheus, not written by him. It is a body of hymns, poems on the birth of the gods and instructions for the dead. Unnamed writers composed it over several centuries and put it out under one name, because that name carried authority about the world of the dead.

The Derveni papyrus was found in a grave near Thessaloniki in 1962. It copies a text a century older and is a philosophical commentary on one such poem about the birth of the gods. It is the oldest surviving book in Europe. Its date settles one argument by itself. Orphic poetry of this kind was already in circulation long before the editors of the later Hellenistic age, who are sometimes blamed for inventing it.