Orpheus

Also Known As: Greek Orpheús; son of Oeagrus, called Oeagrides in poetry
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: His playing and singing move animals, trees, stones, rivers and the dead, and can override the will of gods who have no reason to yield.
Role in Mythos: He is the archetypal poet and musician of Greek myth, the one mortal who talked his way into the underworld and back out, and the legendary author of the poems and initiations that carry his name.
Relation to Humans: Living people came to him for song, for initiation and, in Thrace, for teaching, and the mysteries that bore his name were still being practised centuries after anyone claimed to have met him. He was also killed by people, torn apart by women in a rite, which is the detail the tradition never softened.

The oars went in together because a man in the bow told them when. He sat with a tortoiseshell lyre across his knees and played the stroke, and fifty rowers, half of them heroes with short tempers and long grudges, pulled like one animal. At night, when the arguments started around the fire on the beach, he did not raise his voice over them. He played, and sang about how the world had been made, and the arguments stopped. Later, in the water where the Sirens sang and men steered onto rocks to hear them better, he did the simplest possible thing and played louder and better. The Argo went past. One man, Butes, went over the side anyway and swam for the voices, and Aphrodite lifted him out of the sea before he reached them.

He came from Pieria, under Olympus, born in a cave in the country between Pimpleia and Leibethra. His mother was Calliope, eldest of the Muses. His father was Oeagrus, a Thracian king, though a persistent strand of the tradition gives that place to Apollo instead, and either way it is Apollo who hands him the lyre. He is old in the record. Ibycus names him in the sixth century BCE as the one of famous name, Simonides has the beasts and the birds and the trees coming to listen, and a carved metope from the Sicyonian treasury at Delphi, cut around 560 BCE, already shows him aboard the Argo with the instrument in his hands. Whatever he was, he was not invented late.

What he looked like is a blank. Not one surviving text gives his face, his height, his colouring, or his age. The images fill the gap and cannot agree: on Attic vases he is a beardless young Greek in a plain himation, seated, head tilted back, mouth open; on others he is surrounded by Thracians and wears their patterned cloak and fox-skin cap; Roman work puts him in a Phrygian cap and sets him among attentive lions. The one constant is the object. Seven strings of twisted gut over a bridge, the sound box a tortoise shell with the skin stretched across it, two curved horn arms, and a plectrum in the right hand. The shell would have been cool and slightly greasy under the left forearm where it rested.

Eurydice enters the story and the sources immediately disagree about how she leaves it. Virgil has her running headlong along a riverbank to escape Aristaeus, who wanted her, and a water snake lying unseen in the deep grass at her feet. Ovid gives her a wedding day, a walk through the meadows with a crowd of naiads, and a snake that catches her ankle mid-celebration. The versions share the animal and the outcome. She died on the ground with the wedding torches still lit.

So he went down. He got past Charon and past the dog, and at the far end of it he stood in front of the throne of the dead and did the only thing he knew how to do. Ovid describes what happened in the room: the bloodless shades wept, Tantalus stopped reaching for the water that always retreats, Ixion’s wheel stood still, the vultures lifted off Tityos, the daughters of Danaus set down their jars, Sisyphus sat down on his stone to listen, and the Furies cried for the first time in their existence. Persephone and her husband called Eurydice up out of the new dead and let her go, on one condition, which was that he not turn to look at her until they were both out under the sky. The path up was steep, silent and completely dark. Close to the top, close enough to see the light, he turned. She was still inside the boundary. She said goodbye, a word he could barely hear, and slid back the way she had come.

He sat on the bank for seven days. Charon would not carry him a second time. Plato tells the story with the sympathy taken out: the gods never gave Eurydice back at all, only a phantom of her, because Orpheus was a soft kitharode who contrived to walk into Hades alive instead of dying for her the way Alcestis died for her husband, and the phantom was the price of the trick. That version also holds that the gods arranged his death at the hands of women as the rest of the bill. Plato thought he was a coward.

The death itself comes down in two shapes. The summary of Aeschylus’s lost Bassarids has him abandon every god but Apollo, climb Mount Pangaion before dawn to greet the sun, and be met on the mountain by the Bassarids, whom Dionysus had sent for exactly that purpose; they tore him apart and scattered the pieces. Ovid stages it in daylight with Ciconian women who throw first stones and then spears, and for a while nothing lands, because the missiles fall gentle at his feet, disarmed by the sound. Then the drums start, and the horns, and the shrieking, and the noise swallows the lyre, and the first stone finds him and comes away red. Music has an upper limit and the limit is volume.

His head and his lyre went into the Hebrus and floated out to sea, and the head was still singing. Both came ashore on Lesbos. The people of Methymna buried the head, an oracle grew up around it near Antissa, and it gave prophecy until it started drawing crowds away from Delphi, at which point Apollo told it to be quiet. The Muses gathered what was left of the body and buried it at Leibethra, and the lyre went into the sky as the constellation Lyra.

Even the grave has a story, and it ends badly. Pausanias records an oracle given to the people of Libethra: when the sun should see the bones of Orpheus, a boar would destroy their city. Nobody took it seriously, since it named an animal. Then a shepherd fell asleep against the tomb at midday and began singing Orpheus’s songs in his sleep, loudly and beautifully, and people came running from the fields and the pastures to hear him, and in the shoving the pillar went over, the urn broke, and the sun came down on the bones. That night a torrent came off the mountain and took the town away. The stream was called Sys, which is the Greek word for boar.

His power was never violence and never speed. It was persuasion made audible, and it worked on things that have no ears and no reason to care: oak trees pulling their roots out of the ground to follow him down the mountain, rocks shifting, rivers stopping to listen, and the ruling couple of the dead handing back what death had properly taken. The corpus of hexameter poems, cosmogonies and initiation texts that circulated under his name for a thousand years is an extension of the same claim, that the right words in the right order rearrange the world. Aristotle did not believe he had ever existed, and held that the poem credited to him was written by Cercops the Pythagorean.

His limits are precise and they are all the same limit. He could persuade anything except himself, which is why the one instruction he was given, a simple instruction with no difficulty in it beyond patience, was the thing he could not carry out. His music could not survive being drowned out, so a crowd making enough deliberate noise reduced him to an unarmed man in a field. And it bought no exemption at all from the fact it kept postponing. He got her released and lost her, went back and was refused, and in the end the singer who had made the dead weep was scattered in pieces across a mountainside by worshippers of a god he had stopped honouring.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Orpheus in Greek mythology?

Orpheus was the greatest musician and poet of Greek myth, the son of the Muse Calliope and the Thracian king Oeagrus, though some accounts name Apollo as his father. His playing could move animals, trees, stones and rivers, and he is best known for descending into the underworld to bring back his dead wife Eurydice. He is also credited as the legendary author of the Orphic poems and mysteries.

What happened to Orpheus and Eurydice?

Eurydice died of a snakebite, and Orpheus went down into the underworld to retrieve her. His singing moved Hades and Persephone, who agreed to release her on the condition that Orpheus not look back at her until both had reached the upper air. Within sight of the light he turned to look, and Eurydice slipped back into the underworld permanently; Charon refused to ferry him across a second time.

How did Orpheus die?

Orpheus was torn to pieces by women in a Dionysian frenzy. In the version derived from Aeschylus’s lost play the Bassarids, he had abandoned the worship of Dionysus for Apollo, and Dionysus sent the Bassarids to kill him on Mount Pangaion. Ovid’s version has Ciconian women stone and dismember him after drums and shouting drowned out the music that had been deflecting their weapons.

What happened to Orpheus’s head?

After Orpheus was dismembered, his head and his lyre were thrown into the river Hebrus and floated out to sea, with the head still singing. Both washed up on the island of Lesbos, where the people of Methymna buried the head and an oracle grew up around it near Antissa. The oracle prophesied until it began rivalling Delphi, at which point Apollo silenced it.

Was Orpheus a real person?

There is no evidence that Orpheus existed as a historical figure, and doubt about him is ancient rather than modern: Aristotle held that the poem attributed to Orpheus was actually written by Cercops the Pythagorean. He is named in Greek poetry as early as the sixth century BCE and appears on a carved metope at Delphi from around 560 BCE, so the legend itself is very old, but it is a legend.