Orpheus

Orpheus is the mythical master of music, whose playing on the lyre was so surpassingly beautiful that it charmed wild beasts, moved stones and trees, and stilled rivers. His central story is one of the great myths of love and loss: when his wife Eurydice dies of a serpent's bite, Orpheus descends alive into the underworld and so moves its rulers with his song that they grant her return, on the one condition that he not look back at her until both have reached the light. At the threshold, in doubt or longing, he turns; and she is lost a second time, forever. He himself is later torn apart by the frenzied Maenads, and his severed head floats on, still singing.

Beyond the myth, Orpheus gave his name to Orphism, a current of Greek religious thought that circulated poems under his name and taught a distinctive doctrine: that the soul is divine and immortal, imprisoned in the body, and subject to a cycle of rebirths from which ritual purity and secret knowledge could free it. This made Orpheus not only a poet-hero but the legendary founder of a mystery tradition, and a bridge between Greek myth and the ideas of soul, purification, and afterlife that would run through Pythagoreanism and Platonism.

Beyond the story of his descent to the underworld, Orpheus is also the named source of Orphism, a current of ancient Greek religious and philosophical thought concerned with the soul's fate after death, purification, and a distinctive cosmogony describing the world's birth from a cosmic egg. The difficulty is that the texts carrying this material, the Orphic Hymns, the theogonies referred to by later philosophers, and the gold funerary tablets found in graves across the Greek world giving instructions for the afterlife, all postdate any period in which a historical bard named Orpheus could plausibly have lived, some by many centuries.

Ancient authors themselves already treated Orpheus's authorship of these works as an attribution rather than a settled fact, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Orphic literature is a retrospective corpus, produced by later poets and religious specialists who wrote under his name to lend their teachings the authority of a legendary founder. Whether a historical singer named Orpheus existed at all, as a real predecessor to Homeric bardic tradition, or whether he was from the outset a purely legendary culture hero invented to give a body of poetic and mystical practice a face and a name, cannot be settled from the surviving evidence, and both readings remain current among classicists.