Listed 11 sub titles with search on: Mythology for destination: "VISTONIA Ancient area GREECE".
Orpheus. A mythical personage, regarded by the
Greeks as the most celebrated of the early poets, who lived before the time of
Homer. His name does not occur in the Homeric or Hesiodic poems; but it had already
attained to great celebrity in the lyric period. There were numerous legends about
Orpheus, but the common story ran as follows: Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus and
Calliope, lived in Thrace at the period of the Argonauts, whom he accompanied
in their expedition. Presented with the lyre by Apollo and instructed by the Muses
in its use, he enchanted with its music not only the wild beasts, but the trees
and rocks upon Olympus, so that they moved from their places to follow the sound
of his golden harp. The power of his music caused the Argonauts to seek his aid,
which contributed materially to the success of their expedition; at the sound
of his lyre the Argo glided down into the sea; the Argonauts tore themselves away
from the pleasures of Lemnos; the Symplegades, or moving rocks, which threatened
to crush the ship between them, were fixed in their places; and the Colchian dragon,
which guarded the Golden Fleece, was lulled to sleep; other legends of the same
kind may be read in the Argonautica, which bears the name of Orpheus. After his
return from the Argonautic expedition he took up his abode in a cave in Thrace,
and employed himself in the civilization of its wild inhabitants. There is also
a legend of his having visited Egypt. The legends respecting the loss and recovery
of his wife, and his own death, are very various. His wife was a nymph named Agriope
or Eurydice. In the older accounts the cause of her death is not referred to.
The legend followed in the well-known passages of Vergil and Ovid, which ascribes
the death of Eurydice to the bite of a serpent, is no doubt of high antiquity;
but the introduction of Aristaeus into the legend cannot be traced to any writer
older than Vergil himself. He followed his lost wife into the abodes of Hades,
where the charms of his lyre suspended the torments of the damned, and won back
his wife from the most inexorable of all deities; but his prayer was only granted
upon this condition: that he should not look back upon his restored wife till
they arrived in the upper world; at the very moment when they were about to pass
the fatal bounds, the anxiety of love overcame the poet; he looked round to see
that Eurydice was following him; and he beheld her caught back into the infernal
regions. His grief for the loss of Eurydice led him to treat with contempt the
Thracian women, who, in revenge, tore him to pieces under the excitement of their
Bacchanalian orgies. After his death the Muses collected the fragments of his
body, and buried them at Libethra at the foot of Olympus, where the nightingale
sang sweetly over his grave. His head was thrown into the Hebrus, down which it
rolled to the sea, and was borne across to Lesbos, where the grave in which it
was interred was shown at Antissa. His lyre was also said to have been carried
to Lesbos; and both traditions are simply poetical expressions of the historical
fact that Lesbos was the first great seat of the music of the lyre; indeed, Antissa
itself was the birthplace of Terpander, the earliest historical musician. The
astronomers taught that the lyre of Orpheus was placed by Zeus among the stars
at the intercession of Apollo and the Muses.
Orpheus is spoken of as the first diviner, the first to employ
the rites of expiation, the inventor of letters and of the heroic metre--in fact,
as the first civilizer of early Thracia and Greece. In these legends there are
some points which are sufficiently clear. The invention of music, in connection
with the services of Apollo and the Muses, its first great application to the
worship of the gods, which Orpheus is therefore said to have introduced, its power
over the passions, and the importance which the Greeks attached to the knowledge
of it, as intimately allied with the very existence of all social order, are probably
the chief elementary ideas of the whole legend. But here comes in one of the dark
features of the Greek religion, in which the gods envy the advancement of man
in knowledge and civilization, and severely punish any one who transgresses the
bounds assigned to humanity. In a later age the conflict was no longer viewed
as between the gods and man, but between the worshippers of different divinities;
and especially between Apollo, the symbol of pure intellect, and Dionysus, the
deity of the senses; hence Orpheus, the servant of Apollo, falls a victim to the
jealousy of Dionysus and the fury of his worshippers. The story of Orpheus and
Eurydice is found in a reversed form in the ancient Keltic tale of the three daughters
of King O'Hara. may be mentioned the following poems: Wordsworth, The Power of
Music; Browning, Orpheus and Eurydice; W. Morris, Orpheus and the Sirens; R. Lowell,
Eurydice; Dowden, Eurydice; Gosse, The Waking of Eurydice; and R. Buchanan, Orpheus
the Musician.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Nov 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Orpheus was the son of the river-god Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope.
He was born in Thracia, not
far from Mount Olympus where
the Muses too were born.
He was the most gifted of musicians, and was said to be the inventor
of the 9-string cithara (a number derived from that of the Muses). His songs were
so sweet that they would tame wild beasts and rugged men and bend branches from
trees. Orpheus took part in the expedition of the Argonauts. Being too soft to
row, he would keep the rowers in rythm with his songs and, because they were even
sweeter than those of the Sirens, he saved his companions from them. He also managed,
during an early stop in that island, to have them all initiated to the mysteries
of Samothrace, of which he
was already himself an initiate.
Orpheus' wife was Eurydice, a Dryad. One day she was wandering along
a creek in Thracia, she was
bitten by a snake hiding in the grass and died. So aggrieved was Orpheus that
he descended into Hades to try and recover his beloved wife. With his music, he
managed to subdue the monsters at the gates and the gods within. Hades and Persephone
agreed to let Eurydice go provided she walked behind Orpheus and he didn't try
to look at her till he had returned to the world above. Unfortunately, just before
reaching the light of day, Orpheus, tortured by doudt, looked behind, and instantly,
Eurydice died for the second time, this time forever and there was nothing Orpheus
could do to help it.
Back on earth, Orpheus was so sad that he didn't want to have anything
to do with women again. This is why Thracian women, angered at being so despised,
decided one day to kill him, teared his body apart and threw the pieces into a
river that brought them to the sea. And, so the story goes, his head and lyre
eventually landed into the island of Lesbos,
where the residents buried them with great honor. And it was said that, from the
tomb, the song of a lyre could sometime be heard. This explains why the island
of Lesbos was the center of
lyric poetry (Mytilene, the
main city on that island, was the birthplace of the poets Alceus and Sappho, among
others).
After Orpheus' death, his lyre became the constellation by that name
in heaven, and his soul was transported to the Elysium where he keeps singing
for the Blessed. The legend of Orpheus gave birth, in the VIth century B. C.,
to mystery cults supposed to transmit the revelations that Orpheus himself was
supposed to have brought back from his descent into Hades. Orphism later became
mingled with the Eleusinian Mysteries and with Pythagoreanism.
Bernard Suzanne (page last updated 1998), ed.
This extract is cited July 2003 from the Plato and his dialogues URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks.
Eurydice. The beautiful nymph-wife of Orfeus, who was bitten by a snake while
running away from Aristaeus, a son of Apollo. The desperate husband then descended
to Hades, and begged the god of Death to release her. Hades was so touched by
Orpheus' music, that he agreed on the condition that Orpheus would not look back
at her during the ascent. Almost back in the world of the living, Orpheus could
no longer hear Eurydices footsteps behind him, and could not resist turning around,
only to see his wife screaming being pulled back into the underworld.
Orpheus, mortified by grief wandered aimlessly around the forests
where a crowd of maenads attacked him and tore him to pieces. His head fell into
a river, still singing laments after his lost wife. It finally floated to Lesbos,
where the Muses buried it.
This text is cited Sept 2003 from the In2Greece URL below.
Dryas (Druas), a son of Ares, and brother of Tereus, was one of the Calydonian hunters. He was murdered by his own brother, who had received an oracle, that his son Itys should fall by the hand of a relative. (Apollod. i. 8.2; Hygin Fab. 45). There are five other mythical personages of this name. (Apollod. ii. 1.5; Horn. Il. vi. 130; Apollod. iii. 5.1; Hom Il. i. 263; Hesiod. Scut. Herc. 179.)
Diomedes, a king of the Bistones, in Thrace, son of Ares and Cyrene. His mares fed on human flesh. Heracles sailed to this quarter, having been ordered, as his eighth labour, to bring these mares to Mycenae. The hero overcame the grooms of Diomedes and led the mares to the sea. The Bistones pursued with arms. Heracles, leaving the mares in charge of Abderus, one of his companions, went to engage the foe. Meantime the mares tore their keeper to pieces; and the hero, having defeated the Bistones and slain Diomedes, built a city by the tomb of Abderus, which he called Abdera after him. Heracles brought the mares to Eurystheus, who turned them loose, and they strayed to Mount Olympus, where they were destroyed by the wild beasts. Another account makes Heracles to have given Diomedes to be devoured by his own mares, and Eurystheus to have consecrated them to Here.
This text is from: Harry Thurston Peck, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Cited Dec 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Diomedes was a son of Ares and Cyrene, and he was king of the Bistones, a very warlike Thracian people, slain by Herakles.
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