Orpheus and Eurydice

1. Summary

1) Orpheus came from Thrace a son of a Thracian king Oeagrus(or the god Apollo) and Calliope, the Muse in charge of Epic.

2) Orpheus is a great singer enchanting not only humans but even wild nature.

3) Orpheus married the nymph Eurydice who was bitten by a snake and died on the very wedding day.

4) Orpheus descended to the underworld and begged Hades and Persephone to allow him to take his wife back to life.

5) They agreed, on one condition: that he should go on ahead, and not look back to see if she was following.

6) Orpheus, however, did look back on the very verge of the upper world, which made Eurydice disappear for good.

7) Orpheus, frustrated and depressed, retreated into the wilderness without accepting the love of women(possibly homosexuality).

8) Enraged Bacchantes tore him to pieces and threw his head and lyre into the river Hebrus, which reached the island of Lesbos, the place that became a center of poetry.

2. Symbolism

1) The archetypal poet or musician.

2) The embodiment of 'art' or of all kinds of creative activity.

3) The embodiment of the limitations of art in the face of mortality and human irrationality.

3. The Evolution of Orpheus

1) The Greeks believed Orpheus was a real person, and ancient poet and religious teacher: the Orphic poet with profound insight into life and death and the civiliser, teacher of arts and morals that expressed himself in the image of Orpheus's power over nature. The shaman, the religious guru, the inspired poet, the civiliser, essentially public figures working for the welfare of their community. Love story is a later addition with a happy ending.

2) Virgil's Orpheus in the Georgics: the poet not as public teacher but as private singer of his own love and grief.

3) Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses: the master storyteller as well as the lover without any obvious moral.

4) The Medieval Orpheus: allegory and romance

-a 'type ' or symbol of Christ.

-the human soul looking for enlightenment or salvation.

-an allegory of music.

-Orpheus and Eurydice as ideal courtly lovers.

5) The Renaissance Orpheus: the musician and poet whose art reflects the harmony of the cosmos, but sometimes with limitations.

6) Orpheus in the eighteenth century lost much of its power. 

-comic and ironic treatments of the myth: a gipsy fiddler in the quest of his nagging wife 'dice'.

7) Romantics and Victorians

-the Romantics were drawn to the image of the 'Orphic poet,' associated with the figure of the ancient poet-teacher. Wordsworth(a poet writing an immortal verse) and Shelley(a tormented individual, singing his pain isolated from society).

-the Victorian Orpheus: the civiliser and moral teacher, sometimes with Christian tenor. Eurydice appeared for the first time as a subject in her own right in the later Victorian period.

8) The twentieth century: Eurydice sings her own song and Orpheus remembers himself.

-the 20th century Orpheus is subject to harsh criticism, seen in terms of his failure and death rather than his power.

-the feminist versions attempting to see the story from Eurydice's point of view.

-the pessimistic expression of artists's power.

-a new kind of tragic heroism: the poet who risks his own sanity to explore the darkness of the human psyche on our behalf bravely confronting suffering and death.

-Orpheus with his masculine desire for power and control cannot accept the nirvana-like peace of Eurydice's underworld, insists on pursuing worldly fame, and so loses Eurydice.