1. Story

Orpheus came from Thrace, the wild region to the north of classical Greece. His mother was Calliope, one of the nine Muses; his father was either Oeagrus, an otherwise obscure Thracian king, or the god Apollo. Orpheus sang and played on the lyre with such beauty and skill that he enchanted not only humans but even wild nature: animals and birds flocked to hear him, rivers paused in their courses, even trees and stones uprooted themselves and lumbered to follow his voice.

He sailed with the Argonauts on the quest for the Golden Fleece, where he caused fish to leap out of the water to hear his music, and outsang the seductive songs of the Sirens.

He married the nymph Eurydice, but lost her on the very day of their wedding when she was bitten by a snake and died. The grieving Orpheus descended to the underworld and played before Hades and Persephone, begging to be allowed to take his wife back to life. They agreed, on one condition: that he should go, on ahead, and not look back to see if she was following. Orpheus had reached the very verge of the upper world when, overcome by love or fear, he looked back, and Eurydice was lost again, this time irretrievably.

Inconsolable, Orpheus retreated into the wilderness to sing his songs to animals and trees, abandoning human company and rejecting the love of women (according to Ovid, he turned to homosexuality). Enraged at his misogyny, or his scorn of their love, or his allegiance to Apollo, or simply the insufferable harmony of his music, the Thracian Bacchantes (wild women followers of Dionysus) turned on him and tore him to pieces.

His head and his lyre were thrown into the River Hebrus, floated out to sea, and landed on the island of Lesbos, which became a centre of poetry; some say that his severed head continued to give oracles until Apollo silenced it.

2. Significance

Orpheus is the archetypal poet and the archetypal musician; beyond that, he can be seen as the embodiment of 'art' in its widest sense, of all kinds of creative activity, all human attempts to find or create harmony and order in the world, through literature, music, art, philosophy, science, politics, or religion. In his unsuccessful attempt to reclaim his wife Eurydice from death, and his own death at the hands of an angry mob, he embodies the limitations of art in the face of mortality and human irrationality.

3. Greek's original idea of Orpheus

The Greeks believed Orpheus was a real person, an ancient poet (perhaps the inventor of poetry) and religious teacher. They attributed to him an unorthodox version of the creation of the world and the nature and destiny of the human soul. At the heart of this theology was a myth which strangely parallels the story of the death of Orpheus himself:  how the young god Dionysus was torn to pieces and devoured by the Titans, who were then killed by a thunderbolt, and how human beings arose from their ashes, thus partaking both of the divine nature of the god and the evil of the Titans. Orpheus (it is said) taught that men could purify themselves of this taint of original sin by proper ritual practices and an ascetic lifestyle, including vegetarianism, celibacy, and avoidance of women (there  seems to have been a misogynistic strain in his teaching which may be reflected in the myth of his death at women's hands).

4. Later developments in Greek literature

In any case, the Greek figure of Orpheus as shaman/poet/ teacher gives rise to two important conceptions of Orpheus in later tradition. One is that of the Orphic poet: the divinely inspired bard with profound insight into life and death and the nature of things. The other is that of Orpheus the civiliser, teacher of arts and morals, whose melodious wisdom draws people together into an ordered and humane society. Both these conceptions can be metaphorically expressed in the image of Orpheus's power over nature - whether that power is conceived in terms of taming and subduing the wildness of nature, or of sympathetic oneness with the natural order.

All these Orpheuses - the shaman, the religious guru, the inspired poet, the civiliser - have one thing in common: they are essentially public figures, whose efforts are directed towards the welfare of their community or their disciples.

The idea of the Orpheus legend as essentially a love story, and Orpheus as a hero driven by personal love and grief, is a later development. Eurydice is barely referred to by Greek writers, and it is hard to say at what point she entered the tradition. Her name ('wide-ruling' or 'wide-judging') has suggested to some scholars that she was originally an underworld goddess, an aspect of Persephone play interestingly with this notion). Even when she was accepted as Orpheus's wife, there is some evidence that the story may once have had a happy ending; ambiguous references in Euripides, Plato, and Moschus seem to imply that in the accepted Greek version of the story Orpheus succeeded in bringing back Eurydice from the underworld. It may have been some unknown Hellenistic poet, or possibly even Virgil, who invented the now canonical tragic ending of the story.

5. Virgil

The Georgics, ostensibly a practical guide to the farmer, are in fact a poetic evocation of the beauty of the Italian countryside and the moral values of country life. The story of Orpheus comes at the end of the last book, which deals with bees, and is enclosed within the story of the demigod Aristaeus, inventor of beekeeping (and, as son of Apollo, Orpheus's half-brother). Aristaeus's bees have died of a mysterious plague; questioning the prophetic sea god Proteus, he learns that he is being punished for the deaths of Eurydice, who was snake-bitten while fleeing his advances, and of Orpheus; having heard the story, he is able to do penance and magically create a new hive of bees.

The relevance of this story to the Georgics as a whole, and the relationship between the stories of Aristaeus and Orpheus, have been endlessly debated. Clearly Aristaeus's successful quest to recover his bees parallels Orpheus's failed quest to recover his wife. Aristaeus, the briskly unsentimental farmer, seems to be offered as a role model to the practical Roman, as his bees are a miniature model of the efficient Roman state. By contrast, Orpheus, the poet not as public teacher but as private singer of his own love and grief, seems to be offered as a moral warning against the dangers of excessive emotion.

6. Ovid

Ovid, writing some forty years after Virgil, is very conscious of the need to do the story differently. In the Metamorphoses it becomes merely one of hundreds of mythological stories, and the intensity, starkness, and jagged abruptness of Virgil are replaced by smoothly flowing narrative, romance, quiet pathos, and subtly subversive humour. At the same time, with characteristic delight in the complex interweaving of his stories, Ovid makes Orpheus the narrator of a whole series of other stories. Ovid's Orpheus, in fact, is as much the master storyteller as the lover; at the point where Virgil's broken hero is wandering off into the snowy wastes to die, Ovid's is just getting into his stride as narrator of a series of cautionary tales of unhappy love and wicked women. Revelling like his Orpheus in the sheer pleasure of storytelling, Ovid imposes no obvious moral; perhaps for that very reason, his text invites, and has received, the widest range of interpretations.