ABSTRACT
One might be tempted to start by defining it as a religious movement associated, above all, with asceticism and with unusual doctrines about the relation of this life and the next. But even a formula that seems so inoffensively general assumes that there was a thing Orphism and that it was a movement; and doubts on just these scores lead the cautious not to use the word except within inverted commas (which, after that warning, I shall abandon). Instead we must begin, it is nowadays generally agreed, not with Orphism but with something more concrete, Orphic books: that is to say, a number of poems in hexameters that were falsely attributed to the mythical singer Orpheus, and may in fact have presented themselves as being his work.3
