Love among the ruins

Eurydice, Orpheus, and romance in the ancient world

When I was eight or nine years old, I had a friend whose family dog was named Riddisee, or so I thought. Later on, I found out about a mythical character named Eurydice, which I pronounced like “you’re a dice.” Still later I realized that the dog’s name and the mythical character’s were the same.

I never asked my friend why they called their dog Eurydice, though the simple answer would be that the family liked Greek Mythology. Eurydice is the lamented wife of the heroic singer Orpheus. The Roman poet Ovid made her myth unforgettable by describing how, for love, Orpheus braved the Underworld to bring Eurydice back to life after she died from a snake bite.

The lamented part? Orpheus was instructed not to look back at Eurydice until they had safely exited the shadows of the land of the dead.

They took the upward path, through the still silence, steep and dark, shadowy with dense fog, drawing near to the threshold of the upper world. Afraid she was no longer there, and eager to see her, the lover turned his eyes. In an instant she dropped back, and he, unhappy man, stretching out his arms to hold her and be held, clutched at nothing but the receding air. Dying a second time, now, there was no complaint to her husband (what, then, could she complain of, except that she had been loved?). She spoke a last ‘farewell’ that, now, scarcely reached his ears, and turned again towards that same place.

(translation, with hearty thanks, by A.S. Kline)

This story has been told most recently in the musical Hadestown, of which I had not been aware till this very good friend and colleague informed me.

The incredible creativity surrounding this production spurs me to continue working on THE INVENTION OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY and its thesis that the Greek myths’ diverse origins are responsible for its evergreen ability to sprout new versions and adapt itself to new cultures and world-views.

But that is not my main concern today. Today, I want to talk about love: specifically, romantic love in the ancient world, how attitudes to it changed, and how that is reflected in the changing versions of the Orpheus story.

Let’s start with Ovid. His tale is a re-invention, written about 500 years after Orpheus first emerged as a character in Greek myths. His emphasis on Orpheus’s longing to see Eurydice is not an original characteristic of the story—at least as far as we know.

In fact, there is no surviving story in early Greek myths that says anything about Orpheus descending to the Underworld for love of his wife.

Orpheus is, in origin, a master musician. He first appears as a member of the expedition led by Jason to find the Golden Fleece. He is able to save Jason, his ship the Argo, and the rest of the heroes with him (the Argonauts), by playing his famous lyre to drown out the song of the Sirens, whom we know from the Odyssey are dangerous bird-headed monsters luring sailors to their deaths on rocky shoals.

In other tales he is known as someone who can make fish leap from the sea in time to his music and trees and rocks follow him.

But we do not hear of his wife Eurydice, neither in texts nor art. The romance is not the focus of these early versions.

So Eurydice is invisible. Does that mean she’s not there? By no means. So much has been lost from 2,500 years ago. It’s possible—probable even—that the romance of Orpheus and Eurydice is a tale as old as time.

The point is that if that detail had been popular—blockbuster, Marvel Comics popular—we would see it.

And there’s a reason, I think, that it wouldn’t have been popular.

In early Greece, the idea of romance and falling in love was frowned upon. I have written elsewhere about the Greek way of weddings (in reference to Hades and Persephone), and how there was no such thing as dating way back when. Fathers determined who married whom.

That doesn’t mean there weren’t tales of husbands and wives loving each other, Odysseus and Penelope being a prime example.

But the idea that a man, for love, would venture into the Underworld and brave all its dangers to bring back his wife was not something that would’ve gotten much airtime in the earliest Greek imagination.

Romantic love, for the Greeks, was considered dangerous. Think about the prince who chose a beautiful wife over status as a battle leader or king. That started the most disastrous war in all of Greek Mythology.

But attitudes change.

The Greeks had already received a huge amount of influence on their stories from western Asia and Egypt, and when Alexander the Great conquered these areas in the 4th century BCE, cultural contacts were enhanced even more, as Greece, Asia, and Egypt came under more or less one governmental umbrella.

At this time, west Asian (Semitic, Near Eastern) romance stories were circulating far and wide. You can see the influence of them in the Biblical texts known as the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon. In this we have very specific love poetry where the lover praises the beloved in intimate terms.

The earliest romance novels were written at this time as well. The formula went like this: two young people fall in love, are separated by circumstance (pirates often figure into the story here), and are finally reunited after many adventures.

Basically, The Princess Bride.

Yet Eurydice takes some time to come into the picture. In fact, it is the story of Orpheus’s love of a youth, Calais, that is the focus of a poem by Phanocles, who wrote around the era of Alexander the Great.

The tradition of Orpheus winning Eurydice back from the Underworld emerges with the Greek mythographer Conon, who wrote around the same time as the famous version of Ovid. By now, the romantic tradition in tales has been well established.

Yet we note that, as is true of a lot of Greek myths (and not of romance novels), there is no happy ending. So some things don’t change.

Orpheus, in fact, was always more famous in the ancient world for the mystery religion that took his name. But that is a tale for another time.

Ah, romance. Here is Robert Browning:

In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,

And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky

Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
Gold, of course.

O heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns

For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,

With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.