ORPHEUS

A mythological personage; according to the common story, a son of the Thracian river iEagrus and the muse Calliope. His power of moving inanimate things by music, the share he bore in the Argonautic expedition, his descent into the Shades to recover his wife Eurydice, and his death by the violence of the Thracian women, are well-known circumstances in ancient romantic fable. Moderns have imagined that his name is a general mythic designation for the earliest bards, who came with their art from Thrace to Greece. Whether any fragments of poetry, either of the real Orpheus or of this supposed school, existed in Grecian cla ical ages, has been doubted. What pa ed as the poetry of Orpheus in the time of Aristotle seems to have been decidedly supposititious, as much so as the poems which we po e under the same name, some of which are thought to be as recent as the 4th century after Christ. According to modern theories, the Orphic poetry of ancient times contained the whole body of Grecian esoterical religion and import of the Mysteries. (See Lobeck's Aglaophamtis; Jiode's Orpheus; Tiedemann, Initia PhtJasophite Greece; the History of the Literature of Greece, Lib. U.K. p. 231.; Mem. de VAcad. des Sciences, vol. xii.) [s. 872]