Orpheus: A Phantom, Not a Wife
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Phaedrus — τῷ ἔργῳ· οὕτω καὶ θεοὶ τὴν περὶ τὸν ἔρωτα σπουδήν τε καὶ ἀρετὴν μάλιστα τιμῶσιν. Ὀρφέα δὲ τὸν Οἰάγρου ἀτελῆ ἀπέπεμψαν ἐξ Ἅιδου, φάσμα δείξαντες τῆς γυναικὸς ἐφʼ ἣν ἧκεν, αὐτὴν δὲ οὐ δόντες, ὅτι μαλθακίζεσθαι ἐδόκει, ἅτε ὢν κιθαρῳδός, καὶ οὐ τολμᾶν ἕνεκα τοῦ ἔρωτος ἀποθνῄσκειν ὥσπερ Ἄλκηστις, ἀλλὰ διαμηχανᾶσθαι ζῶν εἰσιέναι εἰς Ἅιδου. τοιγάρτοι διὰ ταῦτα δίκην αὐτῷ ἐπέθεσαν, καὶ ἐποίησαν τὸν θάνατον αὐτοῦ ὑπὸ γυναικῶν
For that deed, so highly do even the gods honor the zeal and virtue that concerns love. But Orpheus, son of Oeagrus, they sent away from Hades unfulfilled, showing him only a phantom of the wife he had come for, and not giving him the woman herself, because he seemed to be playing it soft since he was merely a lyre-singer, and did not dare to die for love's sake the way Alcestis did, but schemed to go down into Hades alive instead. And so, because of this, they imposed a penalty on him, and made it that his death came at the hands of women.
Continuing straight from 179c — where the gods rewarded Alcestis by releasing her soul from Hades, a favor granted to almost no one — Phaedrus turns to Orpheus, who came to the underworld for his wife but tried to charm his way to her rather than die for her, so the gods showed him only her phantom and eventually arranged for women to kill him. The sentence runs on, unbroken, straight into 179e's contrasting case of Achilles.
The insult buried in this passage is not that Orpheus loved too little but that he tried to collect love's reward without paying love's price. Phaedrus's real target is the word kitharoidos: Orpheus is disqualified less for a moral failing than a professional one — he is a performer, someone whose whole art is making things beautiful and moving from a safe distance, and Phaedrus treats that as proof he could never actually pay with his body what Alcestis paid with hers. The punishment fits with a cruelty that borders on comic: a singer famous for charming stones and rivers is denied the one audience that mattered, and dies not in mythic combat but hypo gynaikon, at the hands of women — about the least heroic death a Greek storyteller could invent, and a mirror of the unheroic bargain he tried to strike. Read against the Phaedo, where Socrates calls philosophy a rehearsal for dying and welcomes his own death as proof of a life well spent, Orpheus's scheme to slip into Hades alive looks like exactly the wrong kind of cleverness: technique substituted for the courage that alone would have made the trip worth anything.
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