Orpheus and the Length of a Look

In a marble relief known from Roman copies in Naples, Paris and Rome, three figures stand close together in a stillness that feels like the end of a conversation. A young man in a Thracian cap holds a lyre and turns his head. A veiled woman rests her fingers on his shoulder. Behind her, Hermes, the guide of souls, has already taken her wrist. The sculptor of the lost Athenian original, working in the fifth century BCE, chose the moment just after the mistake. In this room we walk back through the story to see how that moment was reached, and why the ancient poets disagreed about what it meant.

The singer and the snake

Orpheus came from Thrace. His mother was the Muse Calliope; his father was the Thracian king Oeagrus in most accounts, though some named Apollo. His song could move animals, trees and stones, and on the voyage of the Argo it was his lyre that drowned out the Sirens. Early Greek poets knew his name and his music, but the descent to the dead for his wife, Eurydice, is told in full for us only by two Roman poets: Virgil in the fourth book of the Georgics and Ovid in the tenth of the Metamorphoses. They set it up differently.

In Virgil the story is embedded in a larger tale about the beekeeper Aristaeus. Eurydice, fleeing his advances along a riverbank, fails to see a huge water snake in the long grass. In Ovid there is no pursuer. The marriage god Hymen comes to the wedding, but his torch only sputters and smokes and will not catch, and soon afterwards the bride, walking through the grass with her attendant nymphs, is bitten on the ankle. Either way, the death is sudden and ordinary, and Orpheus refuses to accept it. He goes down by the gate at Taenarus, the cave near the southern tip of the Peloponnese that the Greeks counted among the entrances to the Underworld.

The bargain

Virgil shows the dead drawn out by the music, thin shadows as numerous as birds sheltering among leaves at nightfall, while Cerberus holds his three mouths open and Ixion’s wheel stops turning. Ovid gives Orpheus an actual speech before the throne of Persephone and Hades, and it is a lawyer’s speech as much as a song. He has not come to spy, he says, or to chain the three-headed dog. Love brought him. Everything mortal belongs to the rulers of the dead sooner or later; Eurydice too will be theirs when she has lived out her years. He asks for her on loan, not as a gift. If they refuse, he will not go back alone, and they may enjoy two deaths instead of one.

The Underworld stops to listen. In Ovid’s tableau the bloodless spirits weep, Tantalus stops reaching for the water that always slips away, the vultures leave Tityus’s liver alone, the daughters of Danaus rest beside their leaking urns, and Sisyphus sits down on his stone. For the first time, people said, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears. The king and queen of the dead cannot refuse. Eurydice is called from among the newly dead, still limping from her wound.

Then comes the condition. Orpheus may lead her up, but he must not turn his eyes back until he has left the valleys of Avernus, or the gift is void. Virgil says it was Proserpina who laid down that law. Apollodorus, summarising in Greek, says Pluto promised to restore her if Orpheus did not turn round before he reached his own house.

The backward glance

The path climbs through silence, steep and dark and thick with fog. They are almost at the surface, and here the two Roman poets give different reasons for what happens next.

Virgil calls it madness: a sudden dementia seized the unwary lover, “forgivable indeed, if the dead knew how to forgive”. On the very edge of the light he halted and, forgetting himself, looked back. Three times a crash was heard from the pools of Avernus, and Eurydice spoke: what madness has destroyed us both? Fate calls me back; farewell; I am carried off into the vast night, stretching out to you hands that are no longer yours.

Ovid makes it love. Afraid she might falter, and longing to see her, Orpheus turned. She slipped back at once, reaching out for him and catching nothing but air.

And dying now a second time, she made no complaint against her husband; for what could she complain of, except that she was loved?

Ovid, Metamorphoses (our rendering)

A third reading is far less kind. In Plato’s Symposium, the speaker Phaedrus says the gods showed Orpheus only a phantom of his wife, because he was a soft lyre-player who schemed to enter Hades alive instead of daring to die for love, as Alcestis did for her husband. As punishment, the gods arranged that he would die at the hands of women. In Euripides’ Alcestis, staged in 438 BCE, the grieving husband wishes he had Orpheus’s voice to charm the queen below and fetch his wife back, and some readers take this as a hint that older versions let the singer succeed. The evidence is thin, and scholars remain divided.

Why forbid a look at all? Greek ritual for the powers below often required averted eyes. In the Odyssey, Circe tells Odysseus to turn his face away towards the river while he makes his offering to the dead. What belongs to the dark is not meant to be watched as it moves. Orpheus breaks one of the oldest rules there is, not a passing whim of the gods.

After the look

Virgil’s Orpheus mourns for seven months beneath a cliff by the river Strymon, singing to tigers and oak trees like a nightingale that has lost its young. He turns from every woman, and the women of Thrace, during the night rites of Bacchus, tear him apart. His head, carried down the river Hebrus, still calls “Eurydice” with its last breath, and the banks echo the name. Ovid adds that the head and lyre drifted out to sea and came ashore on Lesbos, the island that would later give Greece its lyric poets.

Then Ovid does something no one forced him to do. He sends Orpheus’s shade below again, where he finds Eurydice in the fields of the blessed and takes her in his arms. Now they walk together, sometimes side by side, sometimes she ahead and he following; sometimes he goes in front and looks back at his Eurydice, safely. The forbidden glance becomes, at last, a free one.

The queen who set the condition has her own story of an act below the earth that could not be undone, told in our room on Persephone. Hermes, who leads Eurydice back in the marble relief, waits in our Pantheon. And for another tale of a single moment of not holding back, a father and son high above the sea, walk on to Icarus.