Or how Thracian Orpheus, the son of Oeagrus, loved Calaïs, the son of Boreas, with all his heart and often he would sit in the shady groves singing his heart’s desire; nor was his spirit at peace, but always his soul was consumed with sleepless cares as he gazed on fresh Calaïs. But the Bistonian women of evil devices killed Orpheus, having poured about him, their keen-edged swords sharpened, because he was the first to reveal male loves among the Thracians and did not recommend love of women. The women cut off his head with their bronze and straightaway they threw it in the sea with his Thracian lyre of tortoiseshell, fastening them together with a nail, so that both would be borne on the sea, drenched by the grey waves. The hoary sea brought them to land on holy Lesbos [...] and thus the lyre’s clear ring held sway over the sea and the islands and the sea-soaked shores, where the men gave the clear-sounding head of Orpheus its funeral rites, and in the tomb they put the clear lyre, which used to persuade even dumb rocks and the hateful water of Phorcys. From that day on, songs and lovely lyre-playing have held sway over the island and it is the most songful of all islands. As for the warlike Thracian men, when they had learned the women’s savage deeds and dire grief had sunk into them all, they began the custom of tattooing their wives, so that having on their flesh signs of dark blue, they would not forget their hateful murder. And even now, the women pay reparations to the dead Orpheus because of that sin.

--- Phanocles, 'Fragment 1', Living Poets ( Powell, 2014 ), https://livingpoets.dur.ac.uk/w/index.php/Phanocles,_fragment_1_Powell

This story has some complicated ideas about love and marriage in it - Depending on who you are or how you understand the story of Orpheus and his role in the mythology, you may come away with very different morals. It’s a good example of the complexity of interpreting traditional stories and why we may find some different traditions among different groups of people who all pull from the ancient wisdom to understand the world they live in.

The story of Orpheus’ love in this telling is the basis upon his musical talents - Talents that are also, in many traditions, the basis for the religion as a whole. It is said by others that he took his music and travelled singing the praises of the gods he met there, but here we see another side of him - A man who sings instead not of divine powers or holy miracles, but who sings instead of the heavy weight of love on his heart. For refusing the love of women, he was apparently torn apart by those of Thrace and the different pieces of his body were thrown into the river. In the Orphic tradition, this same event is interpreted in different ways, with some such as Ovid claiming that Orpheus was a beloved devotee of Dionysus and that the women were in the wrong to tear him apart for not wanting them. Meanwhile, others insist that it was him turning away from the gods that brought him this punishment and that it was Dionysus’ own Maenads who were overcome with the madness of the god and tore him to pieces in a symbol of divine wrath. And still others insist that this was all a metaphorical act of divine intervention to show that Orpheus himself would be born again as a god, his dismemberment symbolic of the same act as done to Dionysus himself by the titans. Each of these retellings are interesting, for rarely do they mention the specifics of a lover and yet? Here we have but a fragment of a story that might give us his name. Often those who speak of Orpheus at all will readily recall the story of Eurydice - A beautiful tale of his devotion to be sure - but rarely is that same attention repeated for the lover that he himself would later die for.

Additionally, we see the detail of his floating down the river to the island of Lesbos, a land well known today for another queer figure - Sappho. It is said that Orpheus’ head arrived there and that they built for him a shrine where his oracles continued on even after his death. The blessed and spiritual power of queerness in other cultures and superstitions is not lost on a studied practitioner and it would not be completely out of the ordinary for the ancient hellenic world to have similar concepts of the divine working through those who cross the traditional boundaries of gender and those of the spiritual and material world alike.

But the celebration of such diverse experiences are not the only one that we might read into this story. For also we see a concept of inherent sin emerging from this tale as well - Particularly those of the women of Thrace, who are destined to wear the physical manifestation of their judgement marked in ink. Their husbands carried this tradition as a weight upon their wives long after the supposed life and death of Orpheus, using his name as a way to control and, frankly speaking, brand the women they wed. It speaks to the limitations of the past, to the agency that women had in the ancient world. It is not without it’s irony that an island like Lesbos, which would become the very representation of freedom from men and patriarchy would, likewise, be the resting place of the same voice whose loss was the justification for such things.

This speaks a lot to the power of a myth - To both hurt and to help others. Like many of the ancients who came before us, often we are left with only stories from the past; Stories that have changed and evolved throughout the ages or been adopted by many people all with different agendas. Their significance is felt by many, but we have little way to fully understand their context or how they might have been meant in their earliest interpretations. Much of this relies on understanding of culture, but even people far more studied than we are all across time can’t always agree even on this.

So instead, we must often decide for ourselves how we want to interpret these stories. We must find ourselves in them, to find one another, and to figure out the lessons that the stories might be trying to tell us… And then decide for ourselves if those stories and lessons are worth carrying with us into the future.

I bring you the following questions to think about for today's discussion.
These are just things to get the discussion started and you can feel free to explore other ideas or thoughts if you have them:

• One possible interpretation of the story of Orpheus’ love for Calais might be about respecting differences. In the GrecoRoman world, we had a strong emphasis placed on concepts of hospitality and respecting those who might have lived lives very different to ours. If this is the discussion we are going to take from this, what might we infer to be the will of the gods in regards to how we treat each other? What other lessons, practices or myths from the ancient world support this reading of the text?
• The context of Phanocles original work featured love between two men in many different forms and specifically emphasised this in its title. What do stories like this tell us about how the gods may see people who fit outside the traditional gender spectrum or whose sexuality might be more complicated than can be defined by traditional lines? How do we think that stories like this one might have shaped the way that ancients saw the world or understood it to work? How might our understanding of these things also be shaped by religion or cultural stories of our own time?
• In the end of the section from Stobaeus, we see this concept of original or natal sin attributed to the Thracian women, for which they continued to be punished through tradition for a long time. What does this say about how the Thracian men of the ancient world felt about women? What does it say about the nature of punishment and the ways that we can apply the law - Both those given to us by men and those given to us by the gods. Do you think that this tradition of tattooing the Thracian women like this would have been what Orpheus would have wanted as reimbursement for the ways he suffered? How does this talk about the ways that tradition can be used to hurt others or be taken to such an extreme that it becomes a new problem? Does the fact that the mythology is tied to these traditions make it worth throwing out entirely? Does it require us to write completely new myths to reflect modern sensibilities, as is suggested by Plato? Do we try to reimagine new interpretations of the stories that may not reflect as closely the culture of the ancient world?

Find a myth that you either see yourself in or that you can relate to. Go through that myth and try to think about some of the ways elements of it could be interpreted to hurt others or be used as a justification for some of the things that you believe are problems with the world. When you’ve done that, try and think of some other myths or traditions that might help combat those interpretations or help clarify how the myth should be applied to our modern day understandings of the world. Is the mythology and tradition alone enough to “fix” the problems that we might find in one story? Why or why not?