Orpheus is supposed to be the most beautiful,
important and well-known singer of the the Greek Ancient times. It is
said that he was the son of Apollo and the patroness of the epic poetry
Calliope. He played and sang so beautiful, that when he started the
bushes, the trees and also the mountains turned in his direction. His
instrument was a lira that he got as a present from Apollo, who
got it himself as a present from his half brother Hermes.
Orpheus
was also one of the Argonauts who sailed around the world in the ship
Argo, and thanks to his magic singing he could rescue some of his
friends in different occasions. As he returned from his trip and his
adventures, he met Eurydice and immediately fell in love with her. They
were a really happy couple. But one day, while Orpheus was in the city,
Eurydice went for a walk in the fields and got a lethal bitten from a
snake.
When Orpheus
came back and found her, he fall in an unimaginable depression. He did
not eat, he did not sleep, and he sang just the most beautiful and
saddest songs. One day he left to the end of the world and arrived to
the south of the Peloponnesus, where stands the door to the Underworld.
Given that he was there, he decided to get in. He sang and played so
beautifully that they all laid at his feet: Charon, the ferryman that drives the souls over the
Stynx, the river of the
Underworld, with his boat and that is not supposed to drive anybody who
is alive, could not resist his request. Also the dangerous
hound of hell Zerberus, whose job was to be a second guard of the
Underworld, could not resist his divine tones and let him in.
This
way he penetrated into the Underworld and found Hades and Persephone,
the royal couple. Also they were so bewitched by those melodies as
beautiful as they had never heard in their land, that they decided that
Orpheus deserved to take his beloved Eurydice with him... with the only
condition that he should not turn around to look after him until he was
outside.
So Orpheus
went on the front and Eurydice followed him. However, as they saw the
light Orpheus turned around without any reason and Eurydice vanished and
got lost in the Underworld for ever. Since then Orpheus walked around
the world avoiding women, afraid to fall in love again and again loose
his lover. He
funded then an order of men with whom he meet to tell stories and sing.
People talked about great parties and many women surely desired him
because of his beauty.
Apparently,
the situation finally got to hard for the women. One day, they met
together in the evening and attacked the men to end up cutting Orpheus
into pieces. Then they threw the head to the river, which continued
singing for a long while until Apollo quieted him. The head got picked
up in the island of Lesvos, where they built a temple in his honor, and
Zeus took his lira and made it immortal by turning it into a
constellation.
Gods / Heroes / The Danaids / Europa / The Atriden / Trojan War / The Oracle
