Orpheus

Orpheus played well enough to bend the world. Son of the Muse Calliope, given a lyre by Apollo, he made rivers change course to hear him, and trees pull up their roots and follow. On the voyage of the Argo he out-sang the Sirens, which is the only recorded instance of anyone beating them at their own craft.

His wife Eurydice died of a snakebite on their wedding day. Orpheus went down after her — living, uninvited — and played his way past every obstacle. Charon ferried him. Cerberus lay down. In Ovid's account the damned stopped mid-torment to listen: Tantalus forgot his thirst, Sisyphus sat down on his rock, and the Furies wept for the first time.

Hades and Persephone granted what no one else had been granted. Eurydice could follow him back to the light, on one condition: he must not look behind him until both were out. He climbed the whole way, and at the threshold, with sunlight on his own face and no way to know whether she was still there, he turned. She was, and that was enough to lose her.

He never played for anyone again in the same way. Torn apart later by Maenads, his head is said to have floated down the river Hebrus still singing her name.

The cult that grew up around him outlasted the story. Orphism taught that the soul is divine, trapped in the body, and returns through a cycle of rebirths — ideas that reached Pythagoras and Plato and, through them, a great deal of later philosophy. A myth about a man who could not stop himself looking back became a doctrine about what survives looking.