Krewe of Orpheus guarded the gates of Hell. He passed through crowds of ghosts, and presented himself before Hades and Persephone. Orpheus strummed his lyre as he implored them to return Eurydice to the realm of the living. As he sang, the ghosts wept and the cheeks of the Furies became wet with tears. The yearning notes from Orpheus' lyre had kindled their memories of the sweet secrets of life's pleasures. At last, Eurydice was called forth. Orpheus was permitted to take her away, on condition that he should not turn to look at her until they both reached the surface. They traveled
Greek mythology and she burst forth from his head—fully-grown and dressed for war. The earliest Greek thought about poetry considered the theogonies to be the prototypical poetic genre—the prototypical "mythos"—and imputed almost magical powers to it. Orpheus, the archetypal poet, also was the archetypal singer of theogonies, which he uses to calm seas and storms in Apollonius' "Argonautica", and to move the stony hearts of the underworld gods in his descent to Hades. When Hermes invents the lyre in the "Homeric Hymn to Hermes", the first thing he does is sing about the birth of the gods. Hesiod's "Theogony" is not only