ORPHEUS, a celebrated poet and musician of antiquity. His reputation was established as early as the time of the Argonautic expedition, in which he was himself an adventurer; and is said by Apollonius Rhodius not only to have incited the Argonauts to row by the sound of his lyre, but to have vanquished and put to silence the sirens by the superiority of his strains. Yet, notwithstanding the great celebrity he had so long enjoyed, there is a passage in Cicero, which says, that Aristotle, in the third book of his Poetics, which is now lost, doubted if such a person as Orpheus ever existed. But as the work of Cicero, in which this passage occurs, is in dialogue, it is not easy to discover what was his own opinion upon the subject, the words cited being put into the mouth of Cais Cotta. And Cicero, in other parts of his writings, mentions Orpheus as a person of whose exist-