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In the centuries after Homer a number of individuals with supernatural powers emerged who cannot be labeled or classified precisely. They belong partly to the history of Greek philosophy and science, partly to the realm of Greek religion, but they are also magoi, or miracle-workers.

Perhaps the three most famous Greek magoi, between Homer and the Hellenistic period, when magic became an applied science, were Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles. All three are strikingly similar, but each clearly has an identity of his own. Pythagoras and Empedocles lived in fifth century BCE Orpheus was a more mythical figure, but Orphism, the religious movement named after him was very real and influential.

Orpheus and Pythagoras are associated with important philosophical and religious groups or schools in the history of Greek culture, while Empedocles remains more of a solitary phenomenon, though he did have disciple. All three individuals are known to have expressed their ideas in poetry and prose, and at some point many of these compositions were probably written down by their followers, but few of these writings are extant. What we have are fragments or substitutions by later authors. The similarities among these three figures suggest that in Greek civilization existed a type of miracle-worker who was also an original thinker and a great teacher, someone who offered a philosophical theory to explain the universe and the human soul-macrocosm and microcosm-and who may also have been a poet.

Orpheus is first mentioned in the sixth century by the poet Ibycus of Phegium, who speaks of "Orpheus of famous name." For Pindar, he is "the player on phorminx, father of melodious songs." [3] Aeschylus described him as he who "haled all things by the rapture of his voice." [4] In a vase painting he is depicted on board a boat, lyre in hand; and he is expressly named on a sixth-century metope of the Treasury of the Sicyonians at Delphi. Beginning in the sixth century the iconography of Orpheus becomes continually richer: vase paintings show him playing the lyre and surrounded by birds or wild animals or else by Thracian disciples. He is torn to pieces by maenads, or he is in Hades with other divinities. From the fifth century, too, are the first references to his descent to the underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice.[5] He fails in this because he looks back too soon or because the infernal powers opposed his undertaking.[6] Legend makes him live in Thrace "a generation before Homer," but on fifth-century ceramics he is always represented in Greek costume. It is in Thrace that he dies. His head, thrown into the Hebron, floated to Lesbos, singing. Piously recovered, it served as an oracle. [7]