Orpheus sang his way into the underworld and lost everything with one glance
Greeks called Orpheus the greatest musician who ever lived, a Thracian singer whose lyre could make rocks dance and rivers change course. He charmed the rulers of the dead into releasing his wife, on a single condition. The famous ending, where he turns too soon, is younger than most people assume.
Pindar called him the father of songs and made him the son of Oeagrus, a Thracian king, and the Muse Calliope. Legend said Hermes invented the lyre but Orpheus perfected it, after Apollo handed him a golden one and taught him to play. Poets such as Simonides of Ceos claimed his music could enchant birds, fish and wild animals. He sailed with Jason's Argonauts, and when the ship passed the Sirens he played so loudly and beautifully that he drowned out their deadly song.
In the best-known version, his bride Eurydice fled a satyr at her wedding, stumbled among vipers and died of a bite on the heel. Orpheus mourned so movingly that nymphs and gods wept, and he went down to the underworld. His music softened Hades and Persephone, who let her follow him out provided he never looked back until both had reached daylight. He stepped into the upper world, turned in his eagerness while she was still behind, and she vanished for good.
That tragic shape seems to date from Virgil, who added Aristaeus as the pursuer. Earlier writers were less kind. The oldest known depiction of the descent, a painting by Polygnotus, does not mention a wife at all, and her name first appears in literature only in the 1st century BC. In Plato's Symposium the gods show Orpheus a mere phantom because he lacked the courage to die for love, and punish his cowardice by having him killed by women. Aristotle, according to Cicero, doubted Orpheus had existed.
The earliest written mention is a two-word fragment by the 6th-century BC poet Ibycus, praising Orpheus famous of name. Greeks treated him as the founder of the Orphic mysteries and credited him with hymns and theogonies. In the common telling he died at the hands of the maenads of Dionysus, weary of his endless grieving for Eurydice.
Source: Orpheus
