Everyone knows the ending. Orpheus leads Eurydice out of the underworld, doesn't believe she's behind him, looks back and loses her. It's one of the most famous scenes in Western literature. But if you go back to the older sources, you find that the looking back is not always there. The oldest Orpheus is a different figure, and I think he is more interesting: not a heartbroken lover, but a man who knew the road to the dead and made it into a religion.
The earliest version
Plato mentions the story in the Symposium, written in the fourth century BC. He says that the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed, because he was a mere harp player who wasn't brave enough to die for love. They showed him only a phantom of his wife. There is no condition, no glance, no loss at the last second. He simply fails, because he didn't have the nerve.
Other early writers treat his song as a known power. In Euripides's Alcestis, the grieving Admetus says that if he had the voice of Orpheus, he would go down and win his wife back from the dead. The famous cautionary version, with the ban on looking back, comes most fully from Virgil and Ovid, writing in Latin centuries after Plato.
I find that thrilling. The detail we all think is the heart of the myth may be a Roman invention, added to explain why a story about the power of song ends in loss. For the Greeks, the question was not about patience. It was about whether any art, however moving, can undo death.
The singer
Whatever the ending, Orpheus is first of all a musician. He is the son of the Muse Calliope, and his father is either the Thracian king Oeagrus or, in some tellings, Apollo. He plays a lyre, and his music affects everything. Animals gather to listen. Trees uproot themselves to follow him. Rivers stop flowing. Even stones shift.
On the Argo, he was the crew's secret weapon. He set the rowing rhythm with his song, and when the ship passed the island of the Sirens, he played louder than they could sing, and the crew was saved. Here's a hero whose weapon is rhythm, and whose most useful trait is the ability to put a group in time with itself.
The descent
When Eurydice dies, bitten by a snake in some versions while fleeing from a would-be rapist, Orpheus takes his lyre down to the underworld. He goes through the gate at Taenarum, charms Cerberus, calms the Furies, stops the torments of Sisyphus and Tantalus, and approaches Hades and Persephone. His song, as Ovid tells it, makes even the shades weep.
The thing I notice is how thoroughly he knows the route. He doesn't wander. He walks in as if he had a map. That detail is the key to something that most retellings skip, which is that there was an actual religion built around this idea.
The gold tablets
Archaeologists have found, in graves across the Greek world, thin sheets of gold, folded small, inscribed with instructions for the dead. They date from about the fourth century BC onward, and they were buried with people who followed what we call Orphic or Bacchic rites. A typical tablet tells the soul what to expect. On the left of the house of Hades, it says, you'll find a spring with a white cypress beside it. Do not go near this one. Find the lake of Memory, and say to the guards that you are a child of Earth and starry Sky, that you are parched with thirst, and that you want to drink from the cold water that flows from the lake.
These are directions. They are a kind of travel guide for the afterlife, and they are credited to the tradition of Orpheus, who knew the way down because he'd been. When I read them, I see the real power of the myth. The man who walked in and walked out again, even once, was the best possible authority on the route.
That explains why the Orphic movement made him a founder, with poems attributed to him on the origin of the gods and the fate of the soul. His journey was not just a love story. It was an expedition, and the report was valuable.
The end
Orpheus's own death is as dramatic as his life. After losing Eurydice, he refuses the company of women. In the common version, a group of Thracian women, the Maenads, tear him to pieces in a Dionysiac frenzy, in some tellings for ignoring Dionysus, in others for spurning their advances. His head, still singing, floats down the river Hebrus to the island of Lesbos, where it keeps prophesying, and his lyre is set among the stars.
I like how the story finishes. The man whose voice could stop rivers is silenced by a mob, and the voice survives anyway, in a severed head that keeps singing. It's gruesome, but it makes the point that what he made can't be killed.
What I take from it
So here is my reading. The Orpheus myth is two stories wearing one coat. One is the Latin tragedy about a man who looks back, and it's about the weakness of love. The other, older, one is about a mortal who found the road to the underworld and came back with information. For the first, the lesson is that some things can't be undone. For the second, it is that death has a map, and you can learn something from the person who has seen it. Both stories are about the limits of song, but one says song fails, and the other says song can at least carry directions.