A severed head washes ashore on Lesbos, still singing, with a golden lyre playing beside it. This episode treats Orpheus as a biographical subject: his birth in Thrace to the muse Calliope and a Thracian king (or, in some texts, Apollo), the lyre he perfected until trees uprooted themselves to dance, and the Pythagorean idea that his music tapped the mathematical source code of the universe. It follows him aboard the Argo, where he out-played the Sirens, and into his love for the Argonaut Calais.

Then comes Eurydice, the viper bite, the descent to Hades and Persephone, and the fatal backward glance, which Plato’s Symposium reinterprets as cowardice rather than love. The hosts trace his turn to sun worship and rejection of Dionysus, his dismemberment by the Maenads when their noise drowned out his music, and the Orphic Mysteries that grew from his story, with their bans on meat, eggs, and beans and their goal of escaping the cycle of reincarnation.

• The etymology of Orpheus and its possible links to orphan, servant, or darkness
• Chiron’s warning that the Argonauts would not survive the Sirens without him
• Plato’s claim that the gods showed Orpheus only a phantom of Eurydice
• Apollonian order versus Dionysian chaos in the mechanics of his death
• The Derveni Papyrus, Europe’s oldest readable manuscript, and the rules of the Orphic way of life