Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(52)

Then he explains that he tried to suffer the loss, but Love overpowered him. He appeals to Persephone’s backstory: weren’t you abducted by the king of the Underworld because he loved you? Abduction as a sign of affection is obviously a more acceptable phenomenon in Ovid’s time than it is today. But then he makes a more powerful argument: we all come to you in the end, he says.8 Let my wife have her time and she’ll return to you. And then he makes one final plea: if she can’t come back with me, I will stay. Rejoice in the death of both of us.

And as he speaks, he plays, and the bloodless spirits of Hades weep. It is an astonishing image. No wonder so many musicians and composers have been tempted to take on this story. Even the thought of it makes me shiver: music so beautiful that the dead cry when they hear it. Now we have a slightly longer version of the glimpsed scene from the Georgics as all the torments that are visited upon the inhabitants of Tartarus come to a temporary halt: even Sisyphus pauses to sit on his rock. The king and queen cannot refuse him, so they summon Eurydice. She walks with a slow step, because of her injury.9 The viper’s bite continues to hurt, we might suppose, even after death. Orpheus receives Eurydice on the strict condition (legem, as in Virgil) that he cannot look back until they have left the valley of Avernus (the entrance to the Underworld). Otherwise his gift will be worthless – inrita dona.10 These are also the same words used by Virgil in his description. Even as Ovid makes the story his own, he tips his hat to the readers who are paying close attention.

Orpheus and Eurydice make their terrifying ascent. The vocabulary of a single line tells us how difficult it is: arduus, obscurus, caligine densus opaca – ‘steep, dark, enveloped in thick fog’.11 Now we see an element of the story with which we’re very familiar: fearing he has lost her, Orpheus turns back. Eurydice disappears immediately into the darkness. She reaches out her hands to him, but he can only grab at the breezes. She is gone. The pathos is almost overwhelming, and surely this is why the story resonates so strongly for us today, as it has for hundreds of years of operas, songs and paintings. It is the very fact that Orpheus loves her so much that causes their downfall: her second death, his second loss. If he loved her less, or at least less anxiously, they would make it outside and be free to live and love once again, to enjoy the marriage which was cut short on their wedding day. But, if he had loved her less, he would never have embarked on his terrible journey to the Underworld to reclaim her. The failure of his mission is assured from the moment he undertakes it. There is something cripplingly true about this, isn’t there? That we are so often the authors of our own misfortunes because of the same qualities which make us brave, or hopeful, or loving in the first place. This Orpheus hasn’t been gripped by madness, he has been afflicted by fear. And because the fear eventually overwhelms him, the thing he feared comes true.

Eurydice doesn’t blame her husband, Ovid tells us. Because what could she reproach him for except loving her?12 She has only time to say farewell, and even that is scarcely audible. This is an interesting inversion of the Virgilian emphasis. Virgil gave Eurydice a short but poignant speech, while Orpheus was silent except belatedly to speak her name. But Ovid has switched the focus to Orpheus, and Eurydice has moved into the margins of the story even before she is taken into the shadows of the Underworld.

And Ovid keeps the focus on Orpheus, just as Virgil did at this same point. We could follow Eurydice back down to Hades, but we don’t. Instead we watch as Orpheus tries to persuade the ferryman to take him back across the Styx, but is refused. He doesn’t eat for a week, he feeds off grief and tears.13 Orpheus has now lost interest in women, and turns to (very) young men for love. The rest of the book is a series of songs performed by Orpheus on various mythological subjects. We have to wait for the beginning of Book Eleven for a longer version of the death scene we are familiar with from Virgil: Orpheus is dismembered by maenads, who are prone to religious frenzy, and angered by his rejection of them.

His disembodied head floats all the way to the shore of Lesbos, and a snake makes to attack it. But Apollo intervenes for Orpheus in a way no one did for Eurydice. He turns the snake to stone. At this point, Orpheus goes down into the Underworld for a second time, but now there is no chance of him coming back. He recognizes all the places he’d seen before. And then he finds Eurydice and embraces her with love. They walk together, side by side, Ovid says.14 Sometimes he follows her as she goes ahead. And sometimes Orpheus goes ahead, safe in the knowledge that he can look back at his Eurydice. It’s such a lovely romantic end to this tragic story that we almost don’t notice that, while we are concerning ourselves with Orpheus getting over his fear of losing Eurydice again, we have totally failed to ask if she might prefer it if she didn’t have to walk behind him. Dazzled by the enormity of his loss, we have forgotten hers.

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These two Roman poets, Virgil and Ovid, shaped the Orpheus and Eurydice narrative, but they didn’t invent it. The earliest surviving certain mention of it is in Euripides’ play from 438 BCE, Alcestis.15 This unusual play is a tragedy with a happy ending, and tells the story of Alcestis, whose husband Admetus has won a favour from the god Apollo. When it comes to be time for Admetus to die, he can continue to live if, and only if, he can find another person to die in his stead. This is obviously a somewhat double-edged gift: who is likely to offer to die on your behalf? Someone who loves you more than life itself. Chances are, you might well feel the same way about them. In the months or years before the day on which the play is set (the action – as is usual with Greek tragedy – takes place on a single day), Admetus has failed to find any volunteer, except one: his wife, Alcestis.