Orpheus

• 1. Introduction

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  Orpheus was a Thracian bard whose music, the ancient Greeks believed, could move rivers from their courses and coax rocks into dance. Pindar called him "the father of songs." His mother was the Muse Calliope, and according to some traditions his father was Apollo himself, the god of music. That parentage was fitting: Apollo, the story goes, handed Orpheus a golden lyre and personally taught him to play it. What Orpheus did with that instrument became the foundation of one of the most durable mythological traditions in all of Western culture.

  Three stories define him. First, his music was so powerful that it overcame every living thing, and even the inanimate world responded. Second, when his wife Eurydice died, he descended into the realm of the dead to bring her back. Third, he was torn apart by the Maenads of Dionysus, and his severed head floated singing down the River Hebrus toward the sea. Each of these stories opens onto a different question. What did the Greeks believe music could actually do? What did they think love demanded? And what happens when a mortal tries to cheat death, even with divine gifts? The answers, as ancient writers discovered, are darker than the myth first suggests.

• 2. Music That Moved Stones

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  Simonides of Ceos wrote that Orpheus' music and singing could charm birds, fish, and wild beasts, coax trees and rocks into motion, and divert the course of rivers. Those were not mere poetic compliments. For the Greeks, Orpheus represented the outermost limit of what art could accomplish.

  His half-divine parentage explained this power. While Hermes had invented the lyre, it was said that Orpheus perfected the instrument. Having grown up among his mother Calliope and her eight sisters on Parnassus, he had absorbed the full tradition of the Muses. The god Apollo completed the education.

  Aristophanes, in his play Frogs, lists Orpheus among the oldest and most venerated poets, placing him alongside Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer. Orpheus stands at the head of that list as the teacher of religious initiations and of abstinence from murder. Horace, skeptical of the supernatural, still acknowledged that Orpheus introduced order and civilization to savages. These were claims about the social and civilizing power of music, not just its aesthetic beauty.

  On the Argonaut expedition, his power took a concrete, life-saving form. Chiron told Jason that without Orpheus, the crew would never pass the Sirens. When the Sirens' voices reached the ship from their three rocky islands called Sirenum scopuli, Orpheus drew his lyre and played music that was louder and more beautiful, drowning out the deadly songs entirely.

• 3. Into the Underworld

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  Eurydice was bitten on her heel by a viper after fleeing a satyr into tall grass on her wedding day. Orpheus found her body, played such grief-stricken music that all the nymphs and gods wept, and then, on their advice, did something no living musician had attempted: he walked into the underworld to get her back.

  His music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone. They agreed to release Eurydice on a single condition. Orpheus must walk in front of her all the way to the surface and must not look back until both of them had fully crossed into the upper world. He set off. He climbed. He reached the upper world. And then, in his eagerness, he turned to look. Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold. She vanished for the second time, this time forever.

  The earliest known record of any descent into the underworld by Orpheus is a painting by Polygnotus, who worked in the 5th century BC, described centuries later by Pausanias. In that early version, Eurydice is not even mentioned. Euripides and Plato both reference the descent but do not give the wife a name. The first time her name appears in surviving literature is in the Lament for Bion, a text from the 1st century BC.

  Plato's version of the story is a rebuke, not a romance. In the Symposium, Plato has Phaedrus argue that the gods only showed Orpheus a phantom of his wife, as punishment for lacking the courage to die for love. Orpheus had tried to enter Hades alive rather than die like Alcestis did. His love, in Plato's reading, was not pure enough. That divine mockery, Plato suggests, is what ultimately led to his death at the hands of women.

• 4. Death and Its Aftermath

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  After losing Eurydice the second time, Orpheus turned away from the worship of all gods except Apollo. Each night before dawn he climbed Mount Pangaion to salute the sunrise, addressing the sun as Apollo. Dionysus, his former patron, took this as a betrayal. According to a surviving summary of Aeschylus's lost play Bassarids, Dionysus sent the Bassarides, who tore Orpheus apart and scattered his limbs.

  Ovid's account adds another dimension. Orpheus, having suffered through the loss of Eurydice, turned exclusively to the love of boys. The women of Thrace, followers of Dionysus, first threw sticks and stones at him while he played. His music was so powerful that even rocks and branches refused to strike him. Only when the frenzy of their Bacchic rites overwhelmed his music did they manage to tear him to pieces. In a drawing of this scene by Albrecht Durer, based on an original by Andrea Mantegna, a ribbon in the tree above Orpheus reads Orfeus der erst puseran, meaning "Orpheus, the first pederast."

  His severed head, still singing, floated with his lyre down the River Hebrus and across the sea to the island of Lesbos, arriving at the city of Methymna. The inhabitants buried his head and built a shrine near Antissa. An oracle began to prophesy there and was eventually consulted by Greeks from Ionia and Aetolia. Its reputation spread as far as Babylon, until Apollo finally silenced it.

  The Muses gathered his scattered body and buried it at Leibethra below Mount Olympus, where nightingales sang over the grave. When the river Sys flooded Leibethra, the Macedonians moved his bones to Dion. His lyre was carried to heaven and placed among the stars.

• 5. The Orphic Tradition

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  In the 5th and 4th centuries BC, a body of hexametric poems circulated under the name of Orpheus and served as the accepted authority for those who followed what was called the Orphic way of life. Plato refers in the Republic to a "mass of books of Musaeus and Orpheus" and in the Ion groups Orpheus with Musaeus and Homer as the source of inspiration for epic poets. Alexis, a 4th-century comic poet, has the character of Linus offer Heracles a choice of books that includes Orpheus alongside Hesiod, Homer, and tragedies.

  Aristotle, however, did not believe the poems were actually by Orpheus. He referred to the "so-called Orphic epic." The philosopher Philoponus, writing in the 7th century AD, records that in a now-lost work Aristotle stated directly that the poems were not Orphic. Philoponus adds that the doctrines were most likely put into verse by Onomacritus. Aelian, writing in the 2nd century AD, gave the simplest reason for skepticism: at the time when Orpheus supposedly lived, Thracians had no knowledge of writing.

  The Orphic way of life involved vegetarianism, abstention from sex, and refusal to eat eggs and beans. Plato describes vagrant beggar-priests who carried stacks of books by Orpheus and Musaeus and offered ritual purifications to the wealthy. W. K. C. Guthrie wrote that Orpheus was regarded as the founder of mystery religions and the first to reveal the meanings of initiation rites.

  The most remarkable physical evidence of the tradition is the Derveni papyrus, found in Derveni, Macedonia in 1962. It contains an allegorical philosophical commentary on an Orphic poem, a theogony produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras, written in the second half of the 5th century BC. The papyrus itself dates to around 340 BC, during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, making it the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe.

• 6. Four Centuries of Reinvention

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  Jacopo Peri's Euridice, composed in 1600, is among the earliest musical treatments, its libretto drawn entirely from books X and XI of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Claudio Monteverdi followed in 1607 with L'Orfeo, and composers across the following centuries returned to the myth: Luigi Rossi in 1647, Marc-Antoine Charpentier in 1683 and 1686, Christoph Willibald Gluck in 1762, and Joseph Haydn in his final opera L'anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice in 1791.

  Jacques Offenbach turned the material to satire in 1858 with Orphee aux Enfers, while Franz Liszt composed a symphonic poem called Orpheus in 1854. Igor Stravinsky wrote a ballet titled Orpheus in 1948. Harrison Birtwistle worked on the subject across more than a decade, completing The Mask of Orpheus between 1973 and 1984, and returning with The Corridor in 2009.

  Literature and film found different angles. Jean Cocteau filmed the myth three times over thirty years, completing his Orphic Trilogy with The Blood of a Poet in 1930, Orpheus in 1950, and Testament of Orpheus in 1959. Philip Glass adapted the second film into the chamber opera Orphee in 1991. Vinicius de Moraes set the story in a Rio de Janeiro favela during Carnaval in his 1956 play Orfeu da Conceicao; Marcel Camus adapted it into the 1959 film Black Orpheus.

  Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his Sonnets to Orpheus in 1922. Margaret Atwood's Orpheus and Eurydice Cycle ran from 1976 to 1986 and gave Eurydice a more prominent voice. Neil Gaiman wrote Orpheus into the Sandman comics series, with art by Bryan Talbot, recasting Morpheus as the father of Orpheus. Anaïs Mitchell began developing her folk opera Hadestown as a concept in 2006, brought it Off-Broadway in 2016, and reached Broadway in 2019, where it won multiple Tony Awards. The oracle at Lesbos that once drew worshippers from Ionia, Aetolia, and as far as Babylon had, by a different channel, never really gone silent.