Eurydice

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Eurydice is the wife of Orpheus in Greek myth, remembered almost entirely for the manner of her loss. She dies young, the sources say, of a snakebite; her husband, the singer whose music could move stones and beasts, goes down living into the land of the dead to win her back. He is granted what no mortal is granted — her return — on one condition, that he not turn to look at her until both have come up into the light. At the threshold he looks back, and she slips away a second time, now beyond recovery. The name has carried that single image ever since: the figure almost saved, lost by a glance.

She is not a historical person, and the older Greek record gives her little life of her own. Early references to Orpheus’s descent do not even agree that he failed; one strand of the tradition seems to have let him bring his wife back whole. The version that became canonical — the backward glance, the second and final loss — is fixed above all in two Roman poems of the first century BCE and the years around it. Virgil, in the fourth book of the Georgics, frames the descent inside the story of the herdsman-god Aristaeus, whose pursuit of Eurydice drives her onto the fatal snake. Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, tells it again at greater length and gives Orpheus the long lament that follows. What earlier Greek poets and painters made of her is harder to recover; the heartbreaking ending may itself be a relatively late shaping of older, looser material.

In the religious literature ascribed to Orpheus — the theogonies and poems concerned with the soul’s fate after death — Eurydice plays no doctrinal part. The descent is a story about Orpheus, and she is its occasion rather than its subject. This is the ordinary asymmetry of the myth: the singer acts, suffers, and is interpreted; the wife is the thing reached for and not held.

Later readers found more in her than the ancient sources spell out. Allegorists took the descent as the soul’s effort to lead something — wisdom, the lower self, desire — up out of the dark, and the backward glance as the failure of that effort, attention betraying its own object. Such readings belong to those who made them and should be marked as theirs, not read back into the poems. What the poems themselves hold is plainer and stranger: a permission granted against every rule of death, and undone by the one act the granter knew the griever could not resist.

→ Related: Orpheus · Aristaeus · Proserpina · Lethe