Orphism a religious movement in ancient Greece that may have influenced Plato and some of the pre-Socratics. Neither the nature of the movement nor the scope of its influence is adequately understood: ancient sources and modern scholars tend to confuse Orphism with Pythagoreanism and with ancient mystery cults, especially the Bacchic or Dionysiac mysteries. ‘Orphic poems,’ i.e., poems attributed to Orpheus (a mythic figure), circulated as early as the mid-sixth century B.C. We have only indirect evidence of the early Orphic poems; but we do have a sizable body of fragments from poems composed in later antiquity. Central to both early and later versions is a theogonic-cosmogonic narrative that posits Night as the primal entity – ostensibly a revision of the account offered by Hesiod – and gives major emphasis to the birth, death through dismemberment, and rebirth of the god Dionysus. Plato gives us clear evidence of the existence in his time of itinerant religious teachers who, drawing on the ‘books of Orpheus,’ performed and taught rituals of initiation and purification intended to procure divine favor either in this life or in an afterlife. The extreme skepticism of such scholars as Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and I. M. Linforth concerning the importance of early Orphism for Greek religion and Greek philosophy has been undermined by archaeological findings in recent decades: the Derveni papyrus, which is a fragment of a philosophical commentary on an Orphic theogony; and inscriptions with Orphic instructions for the dead, from funerary sites in southern Italy, mainland Greece, and the Crimea. A.P.D.M.