Orpheus
（
Ὀρφεύς). A mythical personage, regarded by the Greeks as
the most celebrated of the early poets, who lived before the time of Homer. His name does not
occur in the Homeric or Hesiodic poems; but it had already attained to great celebrity in the
lyric period. There were numerous legends about Orpheus, but the common story ran as follows:
Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus and Calliopé, lived in Thrace at the period of the
Argonauts, whom he accompanied in their expedition. Presented with the lyre by Apollo and
instructed by the Muses in its use, he enchanted with its music not only the wild beasts, but
the trees and rocks upon Olympus, so that they moved from their places to follow the sound of
his golden harp. The power of his music caused the Argonauts to seek his aid, which
contributed materially to the success of their expedition; at the sound of his lyre the Argo
glided down into the sea; the Argonauts tore themselves away from the pleasures of Lemnos; the
Symplegades, or moving rocks, which threatened to crush the ship between them, were fixed in
their places; and the Colchian dragon, which guarded the Golden Fleece, was lulled to sleep;
other legends of the same kind may be read in the
Argonautica, which bears the
name of Orpheus. After his return from the Argonautic expedition he took up his abode in a
cave in Thrace, and employed himself in the civilization of its wild inhabitants. There is
also a legend of his having visited Egypt. The legends respecting the loss and recovery of his
wife, and his own death, are very various. His wife was a nymph named Agriopé or
Eurydicé. In the older accounts the cause of her death is not referred to. The
legend followed in the well-known passages of Vergil and Ovid, which ascribes the death of
Eurydicé to the bite of a serpent, is no doubt of high antiquity; but the
introduction of Aristaeus into the legend cannot be traced to any writer older than Vergil
himself. He followed his lost wife into the abodes of Hades, where the charms of his lyre
suspended the torments of the damned, and won back his wife from the most inexorable of all
deities; but his prayer was only granted upon this condition: that he should not look back
upon his restored wife till they arrived in the upper world; at the very moment when they were
about to pass the fatal bounds, the anxiety of love overcame the poet; he looked round to see
that Eurydicé was following him; and he beheld her caught back into the infernal
regions. (See illustration, p. 643.) His grief for the loss of Eurydicé led
him to treat with contempt the Thracian women, who, in revenge, tore him to pieces under the
excitement of their Bacchanalian orgies. After his death the Muses collected the fragments of
his body, and buried them at Libethra at the foot of Olympus, where the nightingale sang
sweetly over his grave. His head was thrown into the Hebrus, down which it rolled to the sea,
and was borne across to Lesbos, where the grave in which it was interred was shown at Antissa.
His lyre was also said to have been carried to Lesbos; and both traditions are simply poetical
expressions of the historical fact that Lesbos was the first great seat of the music of the
lyre; indeed, Antissa itself was the birthplace of Terpander, the earliest historical
musician. The astronomers taught that the lyre of Orpheus was placed by Zeus among the stars
at the intercession of Apollo and the Muses. Orpheus is spoken of as the first diviner, the
first to employ the rites of expiation, the inventor of letters and of the heroic
metre—in fact, as the first civilizer of early Thracia and Greece. In these legends
there are some points which are sufficiently clear. The invention of music, in connection with
the services of Apollo and the Muses, its first great application to the worship of the gods,
which Orpheus is therefore said to have introduced, its power over the passions, and the
importance which the Greeks attached to the knowledge of it, as intimately allied with the
very existence of all social order, are probably the chief elementary ideas of the whole
legend. But here comes in one of the dark features of the Greek religion, in which the gods
envy the advancement of man in knowledge and civilization, and severely punish any one who
transgresses the bounds assigned to humanity. In a later age the conflict was no longer viewed
as between the gods and man, but between the worshippers of different divinities; and
especially between Apollo, the symbol of pure intellect, and Dionysus, the deity of the
senses; hence Orpheus, the servant of Apollo, falls a victim to the jealousy of Dionysus and
the fury of his worshippers. The story of Orpheus and Eurydicé is found in a
reversed form in the ancient Keltic tale of the three daughters of King O'Hara. (See Curtin,
Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland [Boston, 1890].) It has been the theme of many
works of modern literature, of which (in English) may be mentioned the following poems:
Wordsworth,
The Power of Music; Browning,
Orpheus and
Eurydicé; W. Morris,
Orpheus and the Sirens; R. Lowell,
Eurydicé; Dowden,
Eurydicé; Gosse,
The Waking of Eurydicé; and R. Buchanan,
Orpheus the
Musician. The story of Orpheus is the subject of a series of ten fine paintings by
Burne-Jones. For the so-called Orphic sect, see
Orphica.
