Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Orpheus, Thracian son of the Muse Calliope (and of Oeagrus, or of Apollo in some stems), was the supreme singer and lyre-player; his music moved stones, trees, and beasts, and had already steadied the Argonauts (catalogue 062). He married Eurydice (Agriope in some early notices). She died of a serpent’s bite—Apollodorus states the death and Orpheus’s descent without elaborating the wedding-day accident that Vergil later made famous. Orpheus went down to Hades alive, enchanted Persephone and Hades with song, and won leave to lead Eurydice back to the upper world. Apollodorus says simply that he persuaded Persephone to send her up. Plato’s *Symposium*, by contrast, denies him full success: the gods showed Orpheus only a phantom of his wife because he was soft enough to enter Hades living rather than die for her—as Alcestis did—thus a philosophical correction of the romantic descent. The look-back condition—that he must not turn to look at Eurydice until both clear the upper air—is not spelled out in Apollodorus; it is the backbone of Vergil’s *Georgics* 4 and Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* 10 (Roman transmission). In those accounts he glances back too soon; she slips away forever; he returns mourning. Greek notices establish the singer’s katabasis and partial or contested recovery; the detailed taboo-and-loss drama that modern readers know is chiefly Roman poetic form built on that Greek core.