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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter IX: The Underworld & the Afterlife

Orpheus and Eurydice: The Myth of the Descent to Hades

Orpheus and Eurydice explained: the snakebite, the descent to Hades, the fatal backward look, Orpheus' death, the ancient sources, variants and later legacy.

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Orpheus and Eurydice is the Greek myth of a singer who went down alive into the underworld to bring back his dead wife. Eurydice died of a snakebite soon after their wedding; Orpheus charmed the rulers of the dead with his lyre and won her release on one condition, that he not look back at her until they reached the light, and at the last moment he turned and lost her for ever. The tragic version is best known from Virgil and Ovid, but older Greek sources suggest that the story once ended differently.

Orpheus the Singer Before Eurydice§

Orpheus was a figure of song before he was a figure of grief. The lyric poet Ibycus, in the sixth century BCE, already calls him "famous-named Orpheus", and a sculpted metope from the Sicyonian treasury at Delphi (c. 560 BCE) shows him with his lyre beside the ship Argo. His father was usually the Thracian king or river-god Oeagrus, sometimes Apollo; his mother was a Muse, most often Calliope. His music moved animals, trees and stones, and on the voyage of the Argonauts, as Apollonius of Rhodes tells it in the third century BCE, he drowned out the song of the Sirens so that the crew sailed safely past.

Greek writers also made him a founder of rites and the author of religious poems, later called "Orphic". Here the subject is the myth: the marriage, the descent and the death that made Orpheus the archetype of the mourning lover.

The Death of Eurydice and the Descent to the Underworld§

Eurydice ("wide justice") was a nymph, in most accounts a dryad. In Virgil's version she was running along a riverbank to escape the unwanted attentions of Aristaeus, a rustic demigod and keeper of bees, and did not see a snake in the long grass. Ovid tells it more simply: she was walking in a meadow with a company of naiads soon after the wedding when a snake bit her ankle. He adds an omen. Hymen, god of marriage, attended the wedding but brought no blessing, and his torch only sputtered and smoked.

Orpheus mourned her above ground and then resolved to follow her below. Virgil sends him through the "jaws of Taenarus", the cave at the southern tip of the Peloponnese believed to lead to the realm described in Hades and the Greek underworld. Both Roman poets make the moment of his song the heart of the story. The shades gathered like birds; Cerberus held his three mouths open and forgot to bark; the wheel of Ixion stopped turning. In Ovid's longer scene the torments of the underworld pause together: Tantalus stops reaching for the receding water, the vultures leave the liver of Tityos, the daughters of Danaus rest from filling their leaking jars and Sisyphus sits on his stone. For the first time, it was said, the Furies wept. Ovid also gives Orpheus an argument: all mortals come to the dead in the end, so Eurydice's life is asked only as a loan, not a gift.

The Backward Look: Why Orpheus Turned§

Persephone and Hades granted the request with a single condition: Orpheus must lead the way and not look back at Eurydice until they had both left the underworld. They climbed in silence up a steep, dark path. Near the threshold of the upper world he turned.

The sources give different reasons. In Virgil a "sudden madness" seized the careless lover, a fault the poet calls forgivable if the shades knew how to forgive. Eurydice cries out against the madness that has destroyed them both and vanishes like smoke into the air, while Charon will not ferry Orpheus across again. In Ovid he looks back out of love and anxiety, afraid that she was faltering and longing to see her; she stretches out her arms, grasps only air, and speaks a last farewell that hardly reaches him. Ovid insists that she did not reproach him, for what could she complain of except that she was loved? Apollodorus' Library, a Greek handbook of the first or second century CE, gives the bare plot: Orpheus was to bring her home without turning round until he reached his own house, but he disobeyed.

Folklorists class the episode under a widespread motif, the prohibition against looking back, found also in the biblical story of Lot's wife and in the Japanese myth of Izanagi, who loses his dead wife Izanami when he looks at her in the land of the dead.

Earlier Greek Versions and Variants of the Myth§

How old is the tragic ending? The question has been debated for over a century, because the Greek evidence before Virgil is fragmentary and partly points the other way.

  • A successful rescue? In Euripides' Alcestis (438 BCE), Admetus wishes he had the voice and song of Orpheus so that he could go down and bring his dead wife back, a wish that makes most sense if Orpheus was known to have succeeded. The orator Isocrates in the fourth century likewise says Orpheus led the dead back up from Hades.
  • A phantom wife. In Plato's Symposium (c. 380 BCE), Phaedrus says the gods sent Orpheus away without his wife and showed him only an apparition of her, because as a mere lyre-player he lacked the courage to die for love; for that reason, he adds, they later had him killed by women.
  • The name. Early sources rarely name the wife; the Hellenistic poet Hermesianax calls her Agriope.
  • The parting in art. A marble relief known from Roman copies, the best of them in Naples, shows Hermes, Eurydice and Orpheus in a quiet, tender scene that is usually read as the moment of final parting. The original is generally dated to the late fifth century BCE, which suggests to many scholars that a tragic version was already known in Athens, though others interpret the scene differently.
  • The oracle of the dead. Pausanias (second century CE) records a story that Orpheus went not to Taenarum but to Aornum in Thesprotia, a site of an oracle of the dead, believed that Eurydice's soul was following him, lost it when he turned, and killed himself in grief. This version links the myth with the consultation of the dead discussed in Greek burial, the dead and hero cults.

The safest conclusion is that several versions coexisted and that Virgil, followed by Ovid, made the tragic one canonical.

The Death of Orpheus and the Singing Head§

Orpheus' own death was told in as many ways as his descent. In Virgil he wanders alone for seven months beside the river Strymon, rejecting every woman, until the women of the Ciconians, in the frenzy of a Bacchic rite, tear him apart. In Ovid the maenads of Thrace, enraged that he scorns them, attack him with stones and farm tools while his song still holds the animals spellbound. A lost tragedy of Aeschylus, the Bassarids, known from later summaries, offered a different cause: Orpheus honoured the Sun (identified with Apollo) above Dionysus, climbing Mount Pangaion to greet the dawn, and the offended god sent his maenads against him. The conflict between the two gods is part of the background explored in Dionysus and the Bacchae.

The head and lyre floated down the river Hebrus into the sea, the head still calling Eurydice's name, and came ashore on Lesbos, the island later famous for its lyric poets. There the head was said to have given oracles, a scene painted on several Athenian vases of the fifth century BCE. Ovid adds a consolation: Orpheus' shade went down to the underworld, found Eurydice in the fields of the blessed, and now walks with her, sometimes beside her, sometimes ahead, looking back at her as he pleases without fear.

Orpheus and Eurydice in Later Art, Music and Literature§

Late antiquity read the myth as a moral allegory. Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524), draws the lesson that whoever seeks the higher light but turns his eyes back to the darkness loses what he has gained. Medieval writers turned it into romance: in the Middle English Sir Orfeo (c. 1300) a king wins back his queen from the king of the fairies with his harp, and the story ends happily.

The myth then shaped the birth of opera, since a story about the power of song suited a new art of sung drama. Jacopo Peri's Euridice (1600) and Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) are among the earliest surviving operas; Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) restores Eurydice through the intervention of Love; and Offenbach parodied the tradition in Orphée aux enfers (1858). Painters from Poussin and Rubens to Corot chose the descent or the parting, and in the twentieth century Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" (1904), inspired by the Naples relief, Jean Cocteau's film Orphée (1950) and Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus (1959) carried the story into modern art.

Frequently asked questions§

Why did Orpheus look back at Eurydice?§

The ancient poets differ. Virgil blames a sudden madness born of love, while Ovid says Orpheus feared she was faltering and longed to see her. Either way, the condition set by the rulers of the dead was broken just before they reached the upper world.

Who killed Orpheus?§

Most sources say he was torn apart by Thracian women, maenads or followers of Dionysus. Their motive varies: grief-stricken rejection of women in Virgil and Ovid, or the anger of Dionysus at Orpheus' devotion to the Sun in Aeschylus' lost Bassarids.

Did Orpheus ever succeed in bringing Eurydice back?§

Some early Greek allusions, in Euripides and Isocrates, seem to assume that he did, and medieval and operatic versions such as Sir Orfeo and Gluck's opera give the story a happy ending. The tragic ending is the one made classic by Virgil and Ovid.

Is the myth of Orpheus the same as Orphism?§

No. The myth is a story told by poets; Orphism was a set of religious poems, rites and beliefs attributed to Orpheus as their legendary founder. The two are connected because his return from the underworld made him a natural authority on the afterlife.

Sources and further reading§