Orpheus

Orpheus, a legendary Greek hero, son of Apollo by the Muse Calliope, was renowned as a musician, a religious leader, and a seer. He was reputed to have made trees and rocks follow his singing, been one of the Argonauts, visited Egypt, and founded mystery cults in several parts of Greece. He was eventually torn to pieces by Maenads (frenzied votaresses of Dionysus); and his head and lyre, thrown into the river Hebrus, drifted to Lesbos where the head became an oracle, while Apollo placed the lyre among the stars. The relationship of Orpheus to Dionysus remains puzzling. The Maenads are said to have attacked him because as a priest of Apollo he censured their orgiastic rites. Orphic beliefs seem however to have been rooted in the assumption that ‘the body is the tomb of the soul’, so that one's aim in life must be to free oneself from an endless series of reincarnations, not only by moral and physical purity, but also through certain rites which involved eating the flesh of a sacrifice that represented the god; and on such occasions the god in question was always Dionysus.

The legend which found most favour in later literature was the story of Orpheus going down into hell, persuading Hades to let him have back his wife Eurydice, and then losing her because he disregarded the instruction not to look back before they reached the light of day. The popularity of this legend was due perhaps to its presence in poems that were widely read in the Middle Ages: Virgil, Georgics, 4. 454–527, Ovid, Metamorphoses, 10. 1–85, and especially Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, iii. 12, so that it appears in the English Sir Orfeo, and in the 14th-cent. King Orfew. Opera has been the genre that has made most use of the Orpheus story in modern times.