Eurydice

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A snake in the grass, and the story turns. 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 serpent’s bite to the foot; 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.

A wife without a fixed name

She is not a historical person, and the older Greek record gives her little life of her own — not even a stable name. The figure of Orpheus the supreme singer is attested from the sixth century BCE, in lyric poets such as Ibycus; his wife, in the earliest references, goes unnamed. The first poet known to have named her does not call her Eurydice at all. Hermesianax of Colophon, writing elegiac verse around 330 BCE in the collection addressed to his beloved Leontion, calls her Agriope — and makes the descent a triumph, not a failure. In his telling Orpheus braves the ferryman and the river of wailing, charms the lords of the dead with his playing, and brings his wife back up to the light: the rescue stands as the supreme proof of what love can dare. The name Eurydice surfaces only later, in the Hellenistic Lament for Bion of the first century BCE.

This instability is itself a clue. A wife who can be called Agriope by one poet and Eurydice by another, and left simply the wife by the rest, was not, in the oldest stratum, a character with a fate of her own. She was the occasion of an act — the thing reached for in the dark, the reason the singer descends, the name the rest of the tradition would later borrow when it needed one. The two names do not even point the same way. Eurydike reads as wide-ruling, or wide in justice — a queenly word fit for an underworld bride, faintly echoing the titles of the dread goddess below — while Agriope carries something wilder, savage-faced or of the wild country, closer to the edge of the cultivated world where the death by snakebite befalls her. A figure whose very name oscillates between the regal and the feral is a figure not yet settled into a person. And early Greek references to that descent do not agree on how it ended. One strand, Hermesianax among it, let Orpheus bring his wife back whole. A darker variant runs the other way: Plato, in the speech given to Phaedrus in the Symposium, has the powers below send Orpheus away with only a phantom of his wife, an apparition and not the woman, faulting him as a soft thing, a lyre-player who contrived to enter the house of death alive instead of dying for love as Alcestis had done. Failure, in Plato, comes not by a backward glance but by the gods’ refusal to give the real woman to a man unwilling to pay death’s price; the contrast with Alcestis, who chose to die in her husband’s place and was for that brought back, is the whole point of the speech. Between Hermesianax’s triumph and Plato’s phantom lies a tradition that had not yet decided whether the descent worked, and in neither version does the loss turn on a look. The single image the name now carries — the turn at the threshold, the second and final loss — is nowhere yet.

The two Roman poems that fixed the glance

The version that became canonical is fixed above all in two Latin poems of the first century BCE and the years around it. Each tells the story differently, and between them they set the shape that later readers would take for the myth itself.

Virgil, in the fourth book of the Georgics, places the whole tale inside another. In that poem on husbandry, the herdsman Aristaeus has lost his bees and seizes the shape-shifting sea-prophet Proteus to learn why. Proteus answers that the loss is a punishment: Aristaeus is the cause of Eurydice’s death. Pursuing her along a riverbank, he drove her headlong into flight, and fleeing him through the deep grass she failed to see the monstrous water-snake at her feet. The bite killed her. Here the snakebite is no accident of the wilderness but the end of a chase — the rustic god’s desire driving the bride onto the serpent. From that wrong the descent follows: Orpheus’s song softens the shades and the dread queen below, the return is granted on the law that he not look back until he has left the valleys of Avernus, and at the very edge of the upper air — redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras, Eurydice given back and already nearing the light — he stops, turns, undone. A triple crash sounds across the infernal pools; the compact breaks. She cries out against the madness that has destroyed them both, calls him a last farewell, and is drawn back into the dark, her hands reaching for hands that close on nothing. The poem follows Orpheus past her loss into his own: mourning by frozen rivers, the spurned Thracian women who tear him apart, and the severed head that floats down the river Hebrus still calling Eurydice with a cold tongue while the banks send the name back as an echo.

Ovid tells it again, at greater length, in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses, and gives Orpheus the long lament that follows. Ovid’s Eurydice dies on or near her wedding day, struck in the ankle by a serpent while walking with the water-nymphs. Orpheus descends through the gate at Taenarus and sings his plea directly to Persephone and the lord of the dead — the power the Latin poets call by Roman names, Proserpina and the king of the silent realm, the Greek Pluto — that all things come to them in the end, that he asks not to keep his wife but only to borrow her until her proper time, and that if the fates refuse the favor he is resolved not to return either: let them have two deaths instead of one. The song stills the whole machinery of punishment: Tantalus stops reaching for the water, Ixion’s wheel halts, the vultures leave Tityos, the daughters of Danaus rest from their broken jars, Sisyphus sits upon his stone, and — for the first time, the poem says — the cheeks of the Furies are wet with tears. Eurydice is given back, on the one condition. The turn comes from love itself: eager, afraid she might be flagging behind him, he looks. And she, slipping back, finds nothing in his fault to reproach — for what was it but that she was loved — and her last vale, farewell, reaches him so faintly that it scarcely arrives before she has rolled back into the same place. In the eleventh book the Maenads finish what Virgil’s women began; head and lyre go down the Hebrus together.

The two poems differ in everything but the glance. Virgil makes Eurydice’s death a consequence of Aristaeus’s pursuit and nests her loss inside a parable about the keeping of bees and the cost of transgression; Ovid makes it a wedding cut short and turns the descent into a stage for the singer’s eloquence and grief. What earlier Greek poets and painters made of her is harder to recover, and the heartbreaking ending may itself be a relatively late shaping of older, looser material. But after these two poems the looseness is gone. The backward glance becomes the story, and the woman becomes the glance’s object.

Absent from the Orphic books

In the religious literature ascribed to Orpheus — the theogonies that begin with Night or the cosmic egg, the gold leaves buried with initiates instructing the soul which spring to drink from, the doctrines concerning the soul’s fate after death — Eurydice plays no doctrinal part. This is striking, because the descent into the underworld is the one episode of Orpheus’s myth that touches directly on what those texts care about: the journey of the dead, the geography of the world below, the springs of Memory and of Lethe. Yet the literature that built an eschatology around Orpheus’s authority as a knower of the underworld does not build it around his wife. The katabasis it cares about is the soul’s, schooled by formulae and passwords; the rescue of a particular woman is a separate story, a poets’ story, and the Orphic books leave it to the poets. The descent, in them, is 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.

That asymmetry is legible in the oldest surviving image of the three of them. A relief known from a Roman copy of a Greek original of about 420 BCE — its best version in the National Archaeological Museum at Naples, with replicas in Rome and Paris — shows the moment of the second parting: Hermes, the conductor of souls, laying his hand on Eurydice’s wrist to lead her back down, while she rests a hand on Orpheus’s shoulder and he, turned at last toward her, lifts the edge of his cloak. The names are cut in Greek above the figures. The composition holds all three at the instant the bond breaks — the guide, the singer, and between them the woman already half-belonging to the other side.

What the allegorists made of her

Later readers found more in her than the ancient sources spell out. The descent invited reading as a figure of something else, and the something else was usually the soul. Allegorists took the journey downward as the soul’s effort to lead something — wisdom, the lower self, desire, the buried good — up out of the dark, and the backward glance as the failure of that effort, the moment attention betrays its own object by turning to look at what it should have trusted itself to be carrying. On such a reading Eurydice is whatever the climbing soul most wants and least dares to verify; the glance is the verifying, and the verifying is the loss. The line of this reading runs through late-antique and Renaissance commentary and into the long modern habit of treating the myth as a parable of art, or of contemplation, or of the impossibility of possessing what one loves by looking straight at it.

Such readings belong to those who made them and should be marked as theirs, not read back into the poems. The allegory is a use of the story, not its meaning; it tells more about its readers — their Neoplatonism, their psychology, their theories of attention — than about anything in Virgil or Ovid. 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.

Sources and scholarship

The two Latin poems are the load-bearing texts and both are freely readable. Virgil’s Georgics Book 4, with the Aristaeus frame and the turning-point line at 4.453ff., is hosted in the public-domain edition of J. B. Greenough (Ginn & Co., Boston, 1900) at the Perseus Digital Library; Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book X, the longer telling, is hosted in an early English verse rendering at the Internet Classics Archive. For the figure of Orpheus and the descent in their wider setting, see the Encyclopædia Britannica treatment.

The standard modern reconstructions of the Orphic poetic tradition stand behind any account of Eurydice’s place in it. Martin L. West’s The Orphic Poems (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) reconstructs the theogonies philologically; Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (English translation, Harvard, 1985) sets the descent within the practice of the mysteries and the model of itinerant ritual specialists rather than a church. On the gap between the contested category of “Orphism” and the myth as the poets shaped it — and on why the rescue story sits beside, not inside, the Orphic eschatological literature — Radcliffe G. Edmonds III’s Redefining Ancient Orphism (Cambridge, 2013) is the fullest recent skeptical treatment, in the line of Ivan M. Linforth’s The Arts of Orpheus (Berkeley, 1941). The instability of the wife’s name across the early evidence — unnamed, then Agriope in Hermesianax, then Eurydice in the Lament for Bion — and the early variants in which the descent succeeds or fails by phantom rather than by glance are drawn from those poets and from Plato’s Symposium, and are best followed through West and the philological literature he gathers.

The Naples three-figure relief and its Roman replicas remain the central piece of ancient iconography for the parting, and the later painted tradition — from Poussin and Rubens through Corot, George Frederic Watts, and Edward Poynter — keeps returning to the same instant: the singer leading, the woman following, the turn not yet made or just made.

→ Related: Orpheus · Aristaeus · Proserpina · Persephone · Lethe · Soul · Pluto · Eleusis