Orpheus and Eurydice

“True he was present, but no hallowed words

He brought nor happy smiles nor lucky sign.”

Ovid is referring to the god Hymen, whom Orpheus has summoned to attend his wedding. Ovid takes this opportunity to narrate a series of bad omens to foreshadow the imminent catastrophe of Eurydice’s death. Three such omens follow in quick succession in this quotation.

“He risked even the gorge of Taenarus, the towering portals of the underworld,

And the abode of spirits where darkness reigns like a dismal fog.”

Virgil succinctly evokes the dangers that Orpheus is prepared to face as he descends to the underworld. The cavern known as Taenarus, in southern Greece, was considered to be one of the main entrances to the underworld. The simile in the second line here conveys the forbidding nature of the place Orpheus is about to enter.

“But love has won, a god whose fame is fair

In the world above, but here, I doubt, though here

Too I surmise; and if that ancient tale

Of ravishment is true, you too were joined

In love.”

Orpheus speaks to Hades and Persephone. He adopts a reasonable tone, suggesting that love may not be honored in Hades as it is in the upper world, although he admits that he does not know for sure. Ovid presents Orpheus as anxious not to make assumptions and to present himself as a reasonable individual—one that the lords of the underworld can deal with. Through Orpheus, Ovid also shows a willingness to cast doubt on the traditional story of Hades’s ravishment of Persephone; it might just be all a lie, Orpheus says. The work from which Ovid’s version of the Orpheus story is drawn, Metamorphoses, often brings traditional myths into question. Here, he does so in a way that fits the situation of his speaker, who wants to make his point while also not wanting to upset his hosts by bringing up something they might not want to be reminded of.

“[T]hose hearts that don’t know how to be swayed by human pleas for prayers.”

This line brings out the vast dichotomy between Hades and the human world. The occupants of Hades do not know how to deal with such things as prayer or the concept of mercy. They are in a different moral realm, with its own laws and practices. Thus, the line conveys the enormous and apparently impossible task that Orpheus is taking on.

“Reweave, I implore, the fate unwound too fast

Of my Eurydice.”

Fate is presented metaphorically as the weaving and unweaving (or cutting) of human life. Traditionally there were three Fates, Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis, who were portrayed as literally measuring and cutting threads representing lives. Ovid does not name them directly.

“[M]others and men, the build of once big-hearted heroes,

now dead and done with; boys, too, and unwed girls,

and youths borne on their funeral pyres before their parents’ eyes.”

This is one occasion on which Virgil, although his version of the story is shorter than Ovid’s, gives considerably more detail. These lines about the shades in Hades work by contrast. Now mere phantoms, they once lived vibrant human lives on earth as mothers, men, boys, and girls.

“[I]f the fates

Will not reprieve her, my resolve is clear

Not to return: may two deaths give you cheer.”

Having presented his case, Orpheus issues a challenge, as if to pile up pressure on Hades and Persephone. If they won’t reprieve Eurydice from her too-early death, then he will remain in Hades as well. Then there will be two deaths rather than one. Orpheus hopes that by saying this he may prick their conscience (if, of course, they have such a thing). “May two deaths give you cheer” is like sarcastically saying, “I hope that’ll make you happy!”

“[W]hen a stroke of madness caught him, who loved her, off his guard—

a pardonable offence, you’d think, if the Dead knew how to pardon.”

Virgil’s narrator calls Orpheus out for his moment of folly in making the backward glance, but softens his censure in the second line—it was surely not such a heinous offense and could likely be forgiven. Then he makes it clear that the rulers of Hades are unable to pardon any offense, big or small.

“And she, dying again, made no complaint

(For what complaint had she save she was loved?)”

Eurydice accepts what is happening to her after the backward glance. Ovid here modifies the more distressed reaction Virgil gives to Eurydice. Typically, Ovid’s narrator inserts in parenthesis a comment intending to guide the reader about how to react to the previous information.

“Eurydice was his again and on the brink of light, and who knows what possessed him

but he turned back to look. Like that, his efforts were undone.”

These poignant lines express the feeling of being so near yet so far. Orpheus was on the point of success, but in an instant everything changes. The image of light symbolizes the world of the living, a stark contrast to the place “where darkness reigns” (Line 16), and the “night’s immense embrace” (Line 45) carries Eurydice off.

“The double death of his Eurydice

Stole Orpheus’ wits away; (like him who saw

In dread the three-necked hound of Hell with chains

Fast round his middle neck, and never lost

His terror till he lost his nature too

And turned to stone”

This refers to the fate of an unnamed shade who like Orpheus went through a terrifying experience that transformed him entirely. Ovid’s purpose is to show through a simile not only the mortal danger that Orpheus is in but also to provide a contrast. The man Ovid refers to turned to stone, and yet Orpheus—although ultimately, he will meet an unfortunate end—lives to sing and play for several more years, albeit in a somber frame of mind. In the five lines that follow, to further emphasize the danger and the contrast, Ovid mentions two other characters, Olenos and Lethaea, who were also turned to stone.

“Three peals of thunder clapped across that paludal hell.”

The three thunderclaps occur immediately after Orpheus’s backward glance. They symbolize the inviolable judgment of the underworld gods.

“It was his lead that taught the folk of Thrace

The love for tender boys, to pluck the buds,

The brief springtime, with manhood still to come.”

No longer forming attachments to women, Orpheus turns elsewhere for sexual connection and love. Ovid drew on a Greek tradition for this passage. The metaphorical image of human life in terms of the passage of the seasons is a fairly conventional one.

“What was left for him to do? Where could he turn, his wife now taken

twice from him? Would any wailing move the shades—or please the gods?”

After Eurydice vanishes, the narrator captures his plight with these three rhetorical questions, designed solely to make a point about the hopeless situation Orpheus is in, which he cannot change. The three questions correspond to the three peals of thunder he has just heard.

“‘Look!’ shouted one of them, tossing her hair

That floated in the breeze, ‘Look there he is,

The man who scorns us!’”

Ovid reveals his storytelling skill in this description of one of the women who are about to attack Orpheus. The direct speech catches the reader’s attention, thus dramatizing the beginning of an episode that receives only short narrative treatment by Virgil. Ovid even adds a detail about the appearance of this woman.

“[E]xpounding under frozen stars his broken-hearted threnody

to the delight of tigers, and even drew the oak to him with his style of singing.”

Orpheus sings his lament for the dead (called a threnody), expressing his deep sorrow at the loss of Eurydice. The frozen stars are a reflection of his broken heart. Yet, paradoxically perhaps, his singing has lost none of its old power; as always nature responds to him in startling fashion, charming tigers and causing trees to uproot themselves and approach him. The heart may break, but music goes on unrestrained.

“Through those lips

(Great Lord of Heaven!) that held the rock entranced,

That wild beasts understood, he breathed his last.”

These lines describe the moment that Orpheus dies. The narrator’s parenthetical exclamation gives expression to the momentous nature of the occasion, thus guiding the reader on how to react.

“No thought of love, or marriage, could distract him.

Disconsolate, through icefields of the north, the snow-kissed river Tanais,

and the Riphaen range whose peaks are never free from frost.”

This describes Orpheus’s state of mind after he loses Eurydice for a second time. Virgil covers the topic succinctly, in just one tactful line, not mentioning at this point the anger Orpheus arouses in women who feel they have been scorned, which Ovid will elaborate on. The description of the cold environment mirrors the frozen state of Orpheus’s heart.