What Is the Story of Orpheus and Eurydice? A Song, a Descent and a Backward Glance
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Of all the Greek myths, the one about the musician who went to fetch his wife back from the dead has been retold most often, because it is the one whose ending everybody wants to change. Orpheus does everything right, moves the unmovable gods of the underworld with a song, and loses Eurydice in the last few steps by looking round to see if she is following. The story is about two thousand seven hundred years old, and the first operas, the first films and a good deal of modern poetry are attempts to go back and not turn round.
The musician
Orpheus was a Thracian singer, the son of a Muse, usually Calliope, and either the god Apollo or a Thracian king. Apollo gave him a lyre and he played it so well that wild animals lay down to listen, rivers changed course and trees pulled up their roots to follow him. He sailed with Jason on the Argo, where his music drowned out the Sirens and saved the crew, and on his return he married Eurydice, a nymph or a mortal woman depending on the teller.
On the wedding day, or soon after, Eurydice was bitten by a snake and died. In Virgil's version she was running from a beekeeper named Aristaeus who tried to seize her; in Ovid's she was simply walking in the grass with her bridesmaids. Either way, Orpheus's grief was such that he decided to do what no living person did and go down after her.
The descent
He entered the underworld through a cave and sang his way through it. Charon ferried him across the Styx without payment; the three-headed dog Cerberus lay down; the eternal punishments stopped, Sisyphus sitting on his rock and Tantalus forgetting his thirst; and the Furies wept for the first time. Before Hades and Persephone he sang that all of them would come to this place in the end, and asked only that Eurydice's arrival be postponed to her proper time. Persephone, who had her own history with being taken below, was moved, and Hades agreed.
The condition was that Orpheus must walk ahead of Eurydice up to the light and not look back until both were out. He nearly managed it. At the threshold, unable to hear her footsteps and afraid she had not been given back, he turned, and she was drawn back down, reaching out to him and saying, in Ovid, only farewell, which he could barely hear. He was refused a second crossing.
The death of Orpheus
The story does not end with the glance. Orpheus went back to Thrace and sang only grief; in Ovid he turned from women altogether, and the women of Thrace, maddened by Dionysus and enraged at being scorned, tore him to pieces. His head and lyre floated down the river Hebrus and across the sea to Lesbos, the head still singing, and was buried there, where it gave oracles. The lyre became a constellation. In the underworld, Ovid says, he found Eurydice at last and walks with her now, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, and can look back at her as often as he likes.
The versions
The myth had several endings before it settled. Early Greek references, from the sixth and fifth centuries BC, seem to have let Orpheus succeed, and Plato in the Symposium mentions a version in which the gods showed him only a phantom of his wife because he had lacked the courage to die for her. The version everyone knows, with the backward glance, comes from two Roman poets writing thirty years apart:
- •Virgil, Georgics, about 29 BC: the earliest surviving telling with the glance, brief and devastating, ending with Orpheus's severed head still calling Eurydice's name
- •Ovid, Metamorphoses, about 8 AD: the fullest version, with the speech to Hades, the farewell, the death and the reunion below
- •Monteverdi's Orfeo, 1607, and Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, 1762: the first great operas took the myth of the singer as their natural subject, and Gluck gave it a happy ending
- •Cocteau's film Orphee, 1950, and Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, 1959: the story moved to post-war Paris and to carnival in Rio
- •Rilke's poem Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, 1904: told from Eurydice's side, in which she no longer knows who he is and does not mind
Why he looked
The glance is what makes the myth, and every teller has to decide what it means. Virgil calls it a sudden madness, forgivable if the dead knew how to forgive. Ovid says he looked for love, afraid she would fail. Later readers have made it doubt, impatience, the failure to trust what cannot be seen, or the artist's need to look at the thing he is losing so that he can sing about it, since it is the loss, not the rescue, that produced the songs. The Orphic religious cults of ancient Greece, which took the singer as their founder, drew a different lesson: that Orpheus had been to the underworld and returned with knowledge of it, and that with the right rites, so could they.
The takeaway
Orpheus, the singer whose music moved animals and rivers, went into the underworld to reclaim his wife Eurydice after a snake killed her, won her back from Hades with a song, and lost her at the threshold by looking behind him against the one condition set. The glance appears first in Virgil and Ovid, earlier versions may have let him succeed, and the story has been retold in opera, film and poetry ever since by people trying to decide why he turned.