VIRG. Æn. vi. ver. 119.
That is, in quality of lawgiver; the harp being the known symbol of his laws, by which he humanized a rude and barbarous people.—Had an old poem, under the name of Orpheus, intitled A descent into Hell, been now extant, it would perhaps have shown us, that no more was meant than Orpheus's initiation." See MYSTERIES.
Many ancient writers, in speaking of his death, relate, that the Thracian women, as hinted at above, enraged at being abandoned by their husbands, who were disciples of Orpheus, concealed themselves in the woods, in order to satiate their vengeance; and, notwithstanding they postponed the perpetration of their design some time through fear, at length, by drinking to a degree of intoxication, they so far fortified their courage as to put him to death. And Plutarch assures us, that the Thracians stigmatized their women, even in his time, for the barbarity of this action.
Our venerable bard is defended by the author * of Waverley, the Divine Legation, from some insinuations to his disaffection in Diogenes Laertius. "It is true (says he), if uncertain report was to be believed, the mysteries were corrupted very early; for Orpheus himself is said to have abused them. But this was an art the debauched mystic of later times employed to vanish their enormities;
Orpheus. Orpheus mities; as the detected poets of after ages scandalized the blameless Socrates. Besides, the story is so ill laid, that it is detected by the surest records of antiquity; for in consequence of what they fabled of Orpheus in the mysteries, they pretended he was torn in pieces by the women; whereas it appeared from the inscription on his monument at Diium, in Macedonia, that he was struck dead with lightning, the envied death of the reputed favourites of the gods."
This monument at Diium, consisting of a marble urn on a pillar, was still to be seen in the time of Pausanias. It is said, however, that his sepulchre was removed from Libethra, upon Mount Olympus, where Orpheus was born, and from whence it was transferred to Diium by the Macedonians, after the ruin of Libethra by a sudden inundation which a dreadful storm had occasioned. This event is very minutely related by Pausanias.
Virgil bestows the first place in his Elysium upon the legislators, and those who brought mankind from a state of nature into society:
Magnanimi heroes, nati melioribus annis.
At the head of these is Orpheus, the most renowned of the European lawgivers, but better known under the character of a poet: for the first laws being written in measure, to allure men to learn them, and, when learnt, to retain them, the fable would have it, that by the force of harmony Orpheus softened the savage inhabitants of Thrace:
Threicinus longa cum veste sacerdos
Obloquitur numeris septem discrimina vocum:
Jamque eadem digitis, jam pectine pulsat eburno.
ÆN. lib. vi. ver. 645.
The seven strings given by the poet in this passage to the lyre of Orpheus, is a circumstance somewhat historical. The first Mercurean lyre had, at most, but four strings. Others were afterwards added to it by the second Mercury, or Amphion: but, according to several traditions preserved by Greek historians, it was Orpheus who completed the second tetrachord, which extended the scale to a heptachord, or seven sounds implied by the septem discrimina vocum. For the assertion of many writers, that Orpheus added two new strings to the lyre, which before had seven, clashes with the claims of Pythagoras to the invention of the octachord, or addition of the found prostantbanomenos to the heptachord, of which almost all antiquity allows him to have been the inventor. And it is not easy to suppose, that the lyre should have been represented in ancient sculpture with four or five strings only, if it had had nine so early as the time of Orpheus, who flourished long before sculpture was known in Greece. See the article LYRE.
With respect to the writings of Orpheus, he is mentioned by Pindar as author of the Argonautics, and Herodotus speaks of his Orphics. His hymns, says Pausanias, were very short, and but few in number: the Lycomides, an Athenian family, knew them by heart, and had an exclusive privilege of singing them, and those of their old poets, Musæus, Onomacritus, Pamphus, and Olen, at the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries; that is, the priesthood was hereditary in this family.
VOL. XV. Part II.
Jamblicus tells us, that the poems under the name of Orpheus were written in the Doric dialect, but have since been transliterated, or modernized. It was the common opinion in antiquity that they were genuine; but even those who doubted of it, gave them to the earliest Pythagoreans, and some of them to Pythagoras himself, who has frequently been called the follower of Orpheus, and has been supposed to have adopted many of his opinions.
Of the poems that are still subsisting under the name of Orpheus, which were collected and published at Nuremberg 1702, by Andr. Christ. Eschenbach, and which have been reprinted at Leipzig 1764, under the title of ΟΡΦΕΩΣ ΑΘΑΝΤΑ, several have been attributed to Onomacritus, an Athenian, who flourished under the Pythagorides, about 500 years before Christ. Their titles are, 1. The Argonautics, an epic poem. 2. Eighty-six hymns; which are so full of incantations and magical evocation, that Daniel Heinus has called them veram Satane liturgiam, "the true liturgy of the devil." Pausanias, who made no doubt that the hymns subsisting in his time were composed by Orpheus, tells us, that though less elegant, they had been preferred for religious purposes to those of Homer. 3. De lapidibus, a poem on precious stones. 4. Fragments, collected by Henry Stevens. Orpheus has been called the inventor, or at least the propagator, of many arts and doctrines among the Greeks. 1. The combination of letters, or the art of writing. 2. Music, the lyre, or cithara, of seven strings, adding three to that of Mercury. 3. Hexameter verse. 4. Mysteries and theology. 5. Medicine. 6. Magic and divination. 7. Astrology. Servius upon the sixth Æneid, p. 450. says, Orpheus first instituted the harmony of the spheres. 8. He is said likewise to have been the first who imagined a plurality of worlds, or that the moon and planets were inhabited.