Orpheus

Several etymologies for the name Orpheus have been proposed. A probable suggestion is that it is derived from a hypothetical PIE root *h₃órbʰos 'orphan, servant, slave' and ultimately the verb root *h₃erbʰ- 'to change allegiance, status, ownership.'[4] Cognates could include Greek: ὄρφνη (órphnē; 'darkness')[5] and ὀρφανός (orphanós; 'fatherless, orphan')[6] from which comes English 'orphan' by way of Latin.

Fulgentius, a mythographer of the late 5th to early 6th century AD, gave the unlikely etymology meaning "best voice," "Oraia-phonos".[7]

It was believed by Aristotle that Orpheus never existed, but to all other ancient writers he was a real person, though living in remote antiquity. Most of them believed that he lived several generations before Homer.[8] The earliest literary reference to Orpheus is a two-word fragment of the 6th century BC lyric poet Ibycus: onomaklyton Orphēn ('Orpheus famous-of-name'). He is not mentioned in Homer or Hesiod.[9] Most ancient sources accept his historical existence; Aristotle is an exception.[10][11] Pindar calls Orpheus 'the father of songs'[12] and identifies him as a son of the Thracian king Oeagrus[13] and the Muse Calliope.[14]

Orpheus (left, with lyre) among the Thracians, from an Attic red-figure bell-krater (c. 440 BC)[15]

Greeks of the Classical age venerated Orpheus as the greatest of all poets and musicians; it was said that while Hermes had invented the lyre, Orpheus had perfected it. Poets such as Simonides of Ceos said that Orpheus' music and singing could charm the birds, fish and wild beasts, coax the trees and rocks into dance,[16] and divert the course of rivers.

Orpheus was one of the handful of Greek heroes[17] to visit the Underworld and return; his music and song even had power over Hades. The earliest known reference to this descent to the underworld is the painting by Polygnotus (5th century BC) described by Pausanias (2nd century AD), where no mention is made of Eurydice. Euripides and Plato both refer to the story of his descent to recover his wife, but do not mention her name; a contemporary relief (about 400 BC) shows Orpheus and his wife with Hermes. The elegiac poet Hermesianax called her Agriope; and the first mention of her name in literature is in the Lament for Bion (1st century BC)[8]

Some sources credit Orpheus with further gifts to mankind: medicine, which is more usually under the auspices of Asclepius (Aesculapius) or Apollo; writing,[18] which is usually credited to Cadmus; and agriculture, where Orpheus assumes the Eleusinian role of Triptolemus as giver of Demeter's knowledge to mankind. Orpheus was an augur and seer; he practiced magical arts and astrology, founded cults to Apollo and Dionysus[19] and prescribed the mystery rites preserved in Orphic texts. Pindar and Apollonius of Rhodes[20] place Orpheus as the harpist and companion of Jason and the Argonauts. Orpheus had a brother named Linus, who went to Thebes and became a Theban.[21] He is claimed by Aristophanes and Horace to have taught cannibals to subsist on fruit, and to have made lions and tigers obedient to him. Horace believed, however, that Orpheus had only introduced order and civilization to savages.[22]

Strabo (64 BC – c. AD 24) presents Orpheus as a mortal, who lived and died in a village close to Olympus.[23] "Some, of course, received him willingly, but others, since they suspected a plot and violence, combined against him and killed him." He made money as a musician and "wizard" – Strabo uses αγυρτεύοντα (agurteúonta),[24] also used by Sophocles in Oedipus Tyrannus to characterize Tiresias as a trickster with an excessive desire for possessions. Αγύρτης (agúrtēs) most often meant charlatan[25] and always had a negative connotation. Pausanias writes of an unnamed Egyptian who considered Orpheus a μάγευσε (mágeuse), i. e., magician.[26]

"Orpheus...is repeatedly referred to by Euripides, in whom we find the first allusion to the connection of Orpheus with Dionysus and the infernal regions: he speaks of him as related to the Muses (Rhesus 944, 946); mentions the power of his song over rocks, trees, and wild beasts (Medea 543, Iphigenia in Aulis 1211, Bacchae 561, and a jocular allusion in Cyclops 646); refers to his charming the infernal powers (Alcestis 357); connects him with Bacchanalian orgies (Hippolytus 953); ascribes to him the origin of sacred mysteries (Rhesus 943), and places the scene of his activity among the forests of Olympus (Bacchae 561.)"[27] "Euripides [also] brought Orpheus into his play Hypsipyle, which dealt with the Lemnian episode of the Argonautic voyage; Orpheus there acts as coxswain, and later as guardian in Thrace of Jason’s children by Hypsipyle."[8]

"He is mentioned once only, but in an important passage, by Aristophanes (Frogs 1032), who enumerates, as the oldest poets, Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer, and makes Orpheus the teacher of religious initiations and of abstinence from murder..."[27]

"Plato (Apology, Protagoras),...frequently refers to Orpheus, his followers, and his works. He calls him the son of Oeagrus (Symposium), mentions him as a musician and inventor (Ion and  Laws bk 3.), refers to the miraculous power of his lyre (Protagoras), and gives a singular version of the story of his descent into Hades: the gods, he says, imposed upon the poet, by showing him only a phantasm of his lost wife, because he had not the courage to die, like Alcestis, but contrived to enter Hades alive, and, as a further punishment for his cowardice, he met his death at the hands of women (Symposium.)"[27]

"Earlier than the literary references is a sculptured representation of Orpheus with the ship Argo, found at Delphi, said to be of the sixth century B.C."[8]

Four other people are traditionally called Orpheus: "The second Orpheus was an Arcadian, or, according to others, a Ciconian, from the Thracian Bisaltia, and is said to be more ancient than Homer and the Trojan war. He composed fabulous figments called mythpoeai and epigrams. The third Orpheus was of Odrysius, a city of Thrace, near the river Hebrus; but Dionysius in Suidas denies his existence. The fourth Orpheus was of Crotonia; flourished in the time of Pisistratus, about the fiftieth Olympiad, and is, I have no doubt, the same with Onomacritus, who changed the dialect of these hymns. He wrote Decennalia, and in the opinion of Gyraldlus the Argonautics, which are now extant under the name of Orpheus, with other writings called Orphical, but which according to Cicero some ascribe to Cecrops the Pythagorean. But the last Orpheus [the fifth] was Camarinseus, a most excellent versifier; and the same, according to Gyraldus, whose descent into Hades is so universally known."[28]

On the writings of Orpheus, Freeman, in the 1946 edition of The Pre- Socratic Philosophers pp. 4–8, writes:[29]

"In the fifth and fourth centuries BC, there existed a collection of hexametric poems known as Orphic, which were the accepted authority of those who followed the Orphic way of life, and were by them attributed to Orpheus himself. Plato several times quotes lines from this collection; he refers in the Republic to a ‘mass of books of Musaeus and Orpheus’, and in the Laws to the hymns of Thamyris and Orpheus, while in the Ion he groups Orpheus with Musaeus and Homer as the source of inspiration of epic poets and elocutionists. Euripides in the Hippolytus makes Theseus speak of the ‘turgid outpourings of many treatises’, which have led his son to follow Orpheus and adopt the Bacchic religion. Alexis, the fourth century comic poet, depicting Linus offering a choice of books to Heracles, mentions ‘Orpheus, Hesiod, tragedies, Choerilus, Homer, Epicharmus’. Aristotle did not believe that the poems were by Orpheus; he speaks of the ‘so-called Orphic epic’, and Philoponus (seventh century AD) commenting on this expression, says that in the De Philosophia (now lost) Aristotle directly stated his opinion that the poems were not by Orpheus. Philoponus adds his own view that the doctrines were put into epic verse by Onomacritus. Aristotle when quoting the Orphic cosmological doctrines attributes them to ‘the theologoi’ ‘the ancient poets’, ‘those who first theorized about the gods ’.

Nothing is known of any ancient Orphic writings except a reference in the Alcestis of Euripides to certain ‘Thracian tablets’ which ‘the voice of Orpheus had inscribed’ with pharmaceutical lore. The Scholiast, commenting on the passage, says that there exist on Mt. Haemus certain writings of Orpheus on tablets. There is also a reference, not mentioning Orpheus by name, in the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, where it is said that the fate of the soul in Hades is described on certain bronze tablets which two seers had brought to Delos from the land of the Hyperboreans. This is the only evidence for any ancient Orphic writings. Aelian (second century AD) gave the chief reason against believing in them: at the time when Orpheus is said to have lived, the Thracians knew nothing about writing.

It came therefore to be believed that Orpheus taught, but left no writings, and that the epic poetry attributed to him was written in the sixth century BC by Onomacritus. Onomacritus was banished from Athens by Hipparchus for inserting something of his own into an oracle of Musaeus when entrusted with the editing of his poems. It may have been Aristotle who first suggested, in the lost De Philosophia, that Onomacritus also wrote the so-called Orphic epic poems. By the time when the Orphic writings began to be freely quoted by Christian and Neo-Platonist writers, the theory of the authorship of Onomacritus was accepted by many.

It is believed, however, that the Orphic literature current in the time of the Neo-Platonists (third century AD), and quoted by them as the authority for Orphic doctrines, was a collection of writings of different periods and varying outlook, something like that of the Bible. The earliest of these were composed in the sixth century by Onomacritus from genuine Orphic tradition; the latest which have survived, namely the Voyage of the Argonauts, and the Hymns to various deities, cannot have been put together in their present form until the beginning of the Christian era, and are probably to be dated some time between the second and fourth centuries AD.

The Neo-Platonists quote the Orphic poems in their defence against Christianity, because Plato used poems which he believed to be Orphic. It is believed that in the collection of writings which they used there were several versions, each of which gave a slightly different account of the origin of the universe, of gods and men, and perhaps of the correct way of life, with the rewards and punishments attached thereto. Three principal versions are recognized by modern scholars; all three are mentioned by the Neo-Platonist Damascius (fifth to sixth centuries AD). These are:

1. Rhapsodiae, epic lays, said by Damascius to give the usual Orphic theology. These are mentioned also in Suidas’ list, as ‘sacred discourses in twenty-four lays’, though he attributes this work to Theognetus the Thessalian (unknown) or Cercops the Pythagorean. This is now referred to as the Rhapsodic Theogony. It is the version usually quoted by ancient authorities, but was not the one used by Plato, and is therefore some-times thought to have been composed after he wrote; this question cannot at present be decided.
2. An Orphic Theogony given by Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus.
3. An Orphic Theogony ‘according to Hieronymus and Hellanicus’. Other versions were: a Theogony put into the mouth of Orpheus by Apollonius Rhodius in his Argonautica an Orphic Theogony quoted by Alexander of Aphrodisias; and a Theogony in Clement of Rome, not specified as Orphic, but belonging to the same school of thought.

A long list of Orphic works is given in Suidas (tenth century AD); but most of these are there attributed to other authors. They are:

1. Triagmoi, attributed to the tragic poet Ion, in which there was said to be a chapter called Sacred Vestments, or Cosmic Invocations. The title Triagmoi apparently referred to ‘the Orphic tripod of three elements, earth, water, fire’, referred to by Ausonius and Galen; the latter said that this doctrine was given by Onomacritus in his Orphic poems.
2. The Sacred Discourses, already discussed, usually identified with the Rhapsodiae.
3. Oracles and Rites, attributed to Onomacritus.
4. Aids to Salvation, ascribed to Timocles of Syracuse or Persinus of Miletus; both the work and these writers are otherwise unknown.
5. Mixing-bowls, ascribed to Zopyrus of Heracleia; and The Robe and The Net, also ascribed to Zopyrus, or to Brontinus the Pythagorean. The Net referred to is the net of the body, so called in Orphic literature. To Brontinus was also ascribed a Physica, otherwise unknown.
6. Enthronement of the Mother, and Bacchic Rites, ascribed to Nicias of Elea, of whom nothing else is known. ‘Enthronement’ was part of the rite of initiation practised by the Corybantes, the worshippers of Rhea or Cybele; the person to be initiated was seated on a high chair, and the celebrants danced round him in a ring. The title therefore apparently means ‘the enthronement-ceremonies as practised by the worshippers of the Great Mother’. Connected, perhaps identical with, this was a treatise on Corybantic Rites, quoted by the late Orphic poem Argonautica.
7. A Descent into Hades, ascribed to Herodicus of Perinthus, or to Cercops the Pythagorean, or to the unknown Prodicus of Samos.
8. Other treatises were: an Astronomy or Astrology, otherwise unknown; Sacrificial Rites, doubtless giving rules for bloodless sacrifices; Divination by means of sand, Divination by means of eggs; on Temple-building (otherwise unknown); On the girding on of Sacred Robes; and On Stones, said to contain a chapter on the carving of precious stones entitled The Eighty Stones; a version of this work, of late date, survives. It treats of the properties of stones, precious and ordinary, and their uses in divination. The Orphic Hymns are also mentioned in Suidas’ list, and a Theogony in 1200 verses, perhaps one of those versions which differed from the Rhapsodiae. There was also an Orphic Word-book, doubtless a glossary of the special terms used in the cult, some of which were strange because of their allegorical usage, others because of their antiquity; this also was said to have been in verse.

Such was the list of works finally classed as Orphic writings, though it was known in early times that many of them were the works of Pythagoreans and other writers. Herodotus said of the so-called ‘Orphic and Bacchic rites’ that they were actually ‘Egyptian and Pythagorean’; and Ion of Chios said that Pythagoras himself attributed some of his writings to Orpheus. Others, as has been said, regarded the earliest epics as the work of Onomacritus. The original Hymns were thought to have been composed by Orpheus, and written down, with emendations, by Musaeus. There were also other writers named Orpheus: to one, of Croton, said to be a contemporary and associate of Peisistratus, were attributed two epic poems: an Argonautica, and The Twelve-year Cycle (probably astrological); to another, Orpheus of Camarina, an epic Descent into Hades. These namesakes are probably inventions."[29]

Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1900) by John William Waterhouse

A number of Greek religious poems in hexameters were attributed to Orpheus, as they were to similar miracle-working figures, like Bakis, Musaeus, Abaris, Aristeas, Epimenides, and the Sibyl. Of this vast literature, only two works survived whole: the Orphic Hymns, a set of 87 poems, possibly composed at some point in the second or third century, and the epic poem Argonautica, composed somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries. Earlier Orphic literature, which may date back as far as the sixth century BC, survives only in papyrus fragments or in quotations. Some of the earliest fragments may have been composed by Onomacritus.[71]

Nymphs Listening to the Songs of Orpheus (1853) by Charles Jalabert

In addition to serving as a storehouse of mythological data along the lines of Hesiod's Theogony, Orphic poetry was recited in mystery-rites and purification rituals. Plato in particular tells of a class of vagrant beggar-priests who would go about offering purifications to the rich, a clatter of books by Orpheus and Musaeus in tow.[72] Those who were especially devoted to these rituals and poems often practiced vegetarianism and abstention from sex, and refrained from eating eggs and beans — which came to be known as the Orphikos bios, or "Orphic way of life".[73]

The Derveni papyrus, found in Derveni, Macedonia (Greece) in 1962, contains a philosophical treatise that is an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem in hexameters, a theogony concerning the birth of the gods, produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras, written in the second half of the fifth century BC. Fragments of the poem are quoted making it "the most important new piece of evidence about Greek philosophy and religion to come to light since the Renaissance".[74] The papyrus dates to around 340 BC, during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, making it Europe's oldest surviving manuscript.

The historian William Mitford wrote in 1784 that the very earliest form of a higher and more cohesive ancient Greek religion was manifest in the Orphic poems.[75] W. K. C. Guthrie wrote that Orpheus was the founder of mystery religions and the first to reveal to men the meanings of the initiation rites.[76]

• Aornum
• Argonautica Orphica
• Katabasis
• Leibethra
• List of Orphean operas
• Pierian Spring
• Pimpleia
• Sir Orfeo
• 3361 Orpheus

• Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheke I, iii, 2; ix, 16 & 25;
• Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica I, 23–34; IV, 891–909.
• Bernabé, Albertus (ed.), Orphicorum et Orphicis similium testimonia et fragmenta. Poetae Epici Graeci. Pars II. Fasc. 1. Bibliotheca Teubneriana, München/Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2004. ISBN 3-598-71707-5. review of this book
• Guthrie, William Keith Chambers, Orpheus and Greek Religion: a Study of the Orphic Movement, 1935.
• Kerenyi, Karl (1959). The Heroes of the Greeks. New York/London: Thames and Hudson.
• Mitford, William, The History of Greece, 1784. Cf. v.1, Chapter II, Religion of the Early Greeks.
• Moore, Clifford H., Religious Thought of the Greeks, 1916. Kessinger Publishing (April 2003). ISBN 978-0-7661-5130-7
• Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, Orpheus, a sonnet about his trip to the underworld.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 1–105; XI, 1–66;
• Christoph Riedweg, "Orfeo", in: S. Settis (a cura di), I Greci: Storia Cultura Arte Società, volume II, 1, Turin 1996, 1251–1280.
• Christoph Riedweg, "Orpheus oder die Magie der musiké. Antike Variationen eines einflussreichen Mythos", in: Th. Fuhrer / P. Michel / P. Stotz (Hgg.), Geschichten und ihre Geschichte, Basel 2004, 37–66.
• Rohde, Erwin, Psyche, 1925. cf. Chapter 10, The Orphics.
• Segal, Charles (1989). Orpheus : The Myth of the Poet. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-3708-1.
• Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Orpheus"
• Taylor, Thomas [translator], The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, 1896.
• West, Martin L., The Orphic Poems, 1983. There is a sub-thesis in this work that early Greek religion was heavily influenced by Central Asian shamanistic practices. One major point of contact was the ancient Crimean city of Olbia.
• Wise, R. Todd, A Neocomparative Examination of the Orpheus Myth As Found in the Native American and European Traditions, 1998. UMI. The thesis explores Orpheus as a single mythic structure present in traditions that extend from antiquity to contemporary times and across cultural contexts.
• Wroe, Ann, Orpheus: The Song of Life, The Overlook Press, New York, 2012.

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Greek Wikisource has original text related to this article: Ὀρφεύς

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• Greek Mythology Link, Orpheus
• Theoi Project: online text: The Orphic Hymns translated by Thomas Taylor
• The Life and Theology of Orpheus by Thomas Taylor, including several Orphic Hymns and their accompanying notes by Taylor
• Orphica in English and Greek (select resources)
• Leibethra – The Tomb of Orpheus (in Greek)
• Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (ca. 400 images of Orpheus)
• Greek Myth Comix: The Story of Orpheus A detailed comic-strip retelling of Orpheus by Greek Myth Comix
• Orphicorum fragmenta, Otto Kern (ed.), Berolini apud Weidmannos, 1922.
• Freese, John Henry (1911). "Orpheus" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. 20 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 327–329.