Orpheus and Eurydice

Book 4 of the Georgics opens with a narrative that provides context for the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. This is the story of Aristaeus, a shepherd and beekeeper, whose bees have all died of hunger or disease. In despair, Aristaeus consults his mother, the goddess Cyrene, who tells him to go to Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea, who knows everything. Proteus, speaking directly to Aristaeus, explains to Aristaeus the reason for the death of his bees. It is Aristaeus’s own fault. He committed a crime and must therefore be punished. His crime was to pursue Eurydice with malevolent sexual intent, thus indirectly causing her death; his punishment is no more than he deserves. In other words, Virgil creates a moral framework for the story of Orpheus that follows: The universe operates according to laws that work themselves out inexorably. Virgil also presents Aristaeus’s current plight as the result of Orpheus’s posthumous anger at him for his illicit pursuit of Eurydice.

In Virgil’s version, the death of Eurydice takes place sometime after she has married Orpheus, not on the actual wedding day, as Ovid has it. Virgil’s opening lines create a strong emotional effect. He shows sympathy for the unfortunate girl who never sees the sudden danger she is in from the snake. She is an innocent, helpless victim, and Virgil underscores that she is properly mourned (more so than Ovid). She is mourned by the dryads (nymphs associated with trees), whose cries reach the hilltops, and by nature itself, in an example of the pathetic fallacy, or the poetic device of imbuing landscape with human emotions: The mountains of Rhodope and Pangaea wail, as does the land of Rhesus—a region in Thrace—and the river Hebrus. The Gatae (a Thracian people) and the princess Orithyia, who is connected with Thrace, also mourn her. Virgil follows this with four lines that leave no doubt about the depth of Orpheus’s grief as he sings of Eurydice on the shore, before the dawn and at evening time. Virgil uses the Latin word “te,” meaning “you,” four times in the space of two lines (Lines 13-14), which emphatically shows that Orpheus’s lost wife is constantly in his thoughts.

Virgil’s description of Orpheus’s voyage down into the underworld juxtaposes the dismal nature of the place with Orpheus’s beautiful singing, which draws out the shades who inhabit that realm and holds them “spellbound” (Line 29). In a passage that Ovid condenses to just one line, Virgil describes the shades as what they formerly were: “mothers 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.” (Lines 23-25). This brings home the reality and the universality of death; no one in the upper world escapes Hades, their final destination. Virgil’s account of Hades is based on the description in Homer’s Odyssey (Book 11, Lines 36-41), when Odysseus descends into the underworld. The shades of former humans are imprisoned in Hades between two rivers: the Cocytus and the Styx, the principal river that flows nine times around the borders of Hades (“the Styx’ nine coils” [Line 28]).

Virgil also mentions the frightening creatures that inhabit the nether regions and how they are miraculously stilled by Orpheus’s singing; however, unlike Ovid, Virgil does not provide the minstrel’s song itself. The creatures that respond to Orpheus’s music include the Furies, with their hair full of “writhing snakes” (Line 30), the three-headed dog Cerberus, and the perpetually suffering Ixion. Ixion was a Thessalian king who tried to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus. Zeus punished him by tying him to a fiery wheel that revolves forever in the underworld. In the presence of Orpheus’s song, however, the wheel of Ixion stands still.

Ovid will later expand this collection of horrors. He will also present Orpheus’s direct interactions with Hades and Persephone, which Virgil skips over. Instead, Virgil moves on to Orpheus on his way home with his reclaimed bride, making it clear without actually saying it that the gods of the underworld granted his plea. Man and wife almost make it safely to the upper world, but Orpheus, in a moment of unthinking “madness” (Line 36), looks back, which seals their fate. Having broken the pact he made with Hades and Proserpina (the Roman name for the goddess Persephone), Orpheus must pay the price, because the decrees of the gods cannot be countermanded. Virgil emphasizes this latter point no less than three times. The gods of the underworld “don’t know how to be swayed by human pleas for prayers” (Line 18); Orpheus’s backward glance might have been a pardonable act “if the Dead knew how to pardon” (Line 37), and his offense is marked by “Three peals of thunder [that] clapped across that paludal hell” (Line 41).

Thus, Orpheus too, like Aristaeus, commits a crime that bears consequences. Virgil, through his narrator Proteus, is not unsympathetic to Orpheus (“a pardonable offence, you’d think” [Line 7]), but nonetheless concedes that Orpheus has some moral culpability in forgetting himself, failing to exercise self-control, and allowing emotion to overcome reason and the necessity of obeying divine authority. The moral framework of the story—crime followed by punishment—that includes Aristaeus now includes Orpheus too. Virgil presents Eurydice in a more favorable light than her husband. In five lines of direct speech, Eurydice explains that she is unhappy, disappointed, aware of her fate, and might even be seen as chiding Orpheus for his failure. (Ovid will present her reaction very differently.) She bids him farewell, reaching out her hand to him in vain, while Orpheus is left to clutch at her fading shadow, unable to speak to her, although there is much he wishes to say.

Despite acknowledging Orpheus’s fault at the crucial moment of the narrative, Virgil treats him kindly in the remainder of the story. Alone by the river, Orpheus mourns Eurydice for seven months. His powers as a musician are not diminished, however. His singing charms tigers, and oak trees uproot themselves and come toward him. He wanders through icy and mountainous regions, still mourning Eurydice. He does not seek new love or remarriage. Then he is set upon by some Ciconian women, who are angry at his rejection of their sexual advances. In a frenzied ritual, they tear him limb from limb and scatter his body. His head floats down the river Hebrus, where twice it calls out plaintively for Eurydice. Thus does Virgil show Orpheus’s undying devotion to his wife and their irrevocable separation.