John Henry Freese and Anonymous

“ As closely connected with religious life, he was an augur and seer; practised magical arts, especially astrology; founded or rendered accessible many important cults, such as those of Apollo and Dionysus; instituted mystic rites, both public and private; prescribed initiatory and purificatory ritual. He was said to have visited Egypt, and to have become acquainted there with the writings of Moses and with the doctrine of a future life.
According to the best-known tradition, Orpheus was the son of Oeagrus, king of Thrace, and the muse Calliope. ”

“ This school is first observable under the rule of Peisistratus at Athens in the 6th century B.C. Its doctrines are founded on two elements: the Thraco-Phrygian religion of Dionysus with its enthusiastic orgies, its mysteries and its purifications, and the tendency to philosophic speculation on the nature and mutual relations of the numerous gods, developed at this time by intercourse with Egypt and the East, and by the quickened intercourse between different tribes and different religions in Greece itself. These causes produced similar results in different parts of Greece. ”

“ A large number of writings in the tone of the Orphic religion were ascribed to Orpheus. They dealt with such subjects as the origin of the gods, the creation of the world, the ritual of purification and initiation, and oracular responses. These poems were recited at rhapsodic contests together with those of Homer and Hesiod, and Orphic hymns were used in the Eleusinian mysteries. ”

“ A. W. Bather (Journ. Hell. Studies, xiv. p. 254) sees in the myth an allusion to a ritual, the object of which is the expulsion of death or winter. It is possible that the floating of the head of Orpheus to Lesbos has reference to the fact that the island was the first home of lyric poetry, and may be symbolical of the route taken by the Aeolian emigrants from Thessaly on their way to their new home in Asia Minor.
The name of Orpheus is equally important in the religious history of Greece. ”

“ The Orphic poems also played an important part in the controversies between Christian and pagan writers in the 3rd and 4th centuries after Christ; pagan writers quoted them to show the real meaning of the multitude of gods, while Christians retorted by reference to the obscene and disgraceful fictions by which the former degraded their gods.
Bibliography.—C. A. Lobeck's Aglaophamus (1829) is still indispensable. Of more modern writings on Orpheus and Orphism the following may be consulted. ”

“ They promised an easy expiation for crimes to both living and dead on payment of a fee, undertook to punish the enemies of their clients, and held out to them the prospect of perpetual banqueting and drinking-bouts in Paradise. ”

“ T. Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, i. (Eng. trans., 1901) , pp. 84–90, 123–147; E. Gerhard, Über Orpheus und die Orphiker (1861) ; A. Dieterich, Nekyia (1893) , pp. 72–108, 136–162, 225–232; O. Kern, De Orphei, Epimenidis, Pherecydis theogoniis (1888) ; O. Gruppe, Die rhapsodische Theogonie (1890) ; A. Dieterich, De hymnes Orphicis (1891) ; G. F. Schömann, Griechische Alterthümer, ii. (ed. J. H. Lipsius, 1902) , p. 378; P. Stengel, Die griechischen Kultusaltertümer (1898) ,
There is an edition of the Orphic Fragments and of the poems by E. Abel (1885) . ”