Orpheus

For the most part Virgil's representation of Orpheus accords with traditional accounts. He was a minstrel; with his lyre he played and sang; the son and servant of the Muses, he was the father of song, an ancestor of Homer and Hesiod. He did not believe in killing, and he taught other men to abstain from bloodshed. Thus the legend portrays a gentle man who, through music and magic, could accomplish feats impossible for others. Diodorus' account of Orpheus (4.25) is particularly valuable to us because he is contemporary with Virgil. From him we learn that Orpheus was Thracian, son of Oeagrus, distinguished for learning, song, and poetry; he could charm beasts and trees, was associated with theology and ritual, and participated in the Argonautic expedition. Finally, of greatest importance for us, he was permitted by Persephone to retrieve his wife from the lower world. Diodorus makes no mention of a second disappearance of Eurydice or of a passionate flaw in Orpheus.^[68]

It is crucial to a correct understanding of this myth in the Georgics to realize that the traditional version before Virgil included Orpheus' success in bringing Eurydice back to life. That Orpheus, traditionally a gentle, civilizing musician (poet), should lose his wife through dementia and furor is antithetical to the tradition as we know it, both in Orpheus' failure and in the emotions that the poet attributes to him. Every reader of the Orpheus story experiences its haunting and melancholy beauty. Its sadness overshadows the fourth book, dominating the read-

[68] Heurgon, 27, comments that Diodorus had collected almost all the fables that Alexandrian mythographers had transcribed. Diodorus' work informs us, therefore, about the state of the Orpheus-Eurydice legend in all Hellenistic circles.

er's memory and his response to the poem as a whole. The tale as told in the Georgics is tragic; in the context of the reader's expectations, it is emphatically so. Either by inventing this version or by choosing an obscure variant on a traditionally happy story, the poet emphasizes the tragedy of Orpheus' loss, invests tragedy with a certain pleasure and beauty, and gives expression to his own inclination to sing sad songs.

Orpheus' failure to retrieve Eurydice is the major example of the failure of art in the poem. Orpheus is exceptionally gifted, his song of such unimaginable beauty and power that we do not hear it directly but only hear of its effects. Spirits long dead and otherwise insensitive to pity or human feeling are moved (commotae 4.471):

quin ipsae stupuere domus atque intima Leti
Tartara caeruleosque implexae crinibus anguis
Eumenides, tenuitque inhians tria Cerberus ora,
atque Ixionii vento rota constitit orbis.
(4.481–84)

Why, Death's very home and holy of holies was shaken
To hear that song, and the Furies with steel-blue snakes entwined
In their tresses; the watch-dog Cerberus gaped open his triple
mouth;
Ixion's wheel stopped dead from whirling in the wind.

et caligantem nigra formidine lucum
ingressus, Manisque adiit regemque tremendum
nesciaque humanis precibus mansuescere corda.
at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis
umbrae ibant tenues simulcraque luce carentum.
(4.469–72)

The gorge of Taenarus even, deep gate of the underworld,
He entered, and that grove where fear hangs like a black fog:
Approached the ghostly people, approached the King of Terrors
And the hearts that know not how to be touched by human
prayer.
But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost realms,
There came the bodiless shades, the phantoms lost to light.

The power of his music moves the dead and enables him to gain from Persephone permission for Eurydice to return from the dead. This would constitute a true resurrection, that is, the restoration of a deceased individual to life, and would thus be

significantly different from and superior to the bougonia of Aristaeus, which is an exchange of death for life and which involves permanent loss of the creatures that die. This miraculous possibility is achieved entirely through song and without sacrifice and loss. The power of song then, its ability to move the spirit, is greater than the power of legions or plows or religious rituals, for example. Thus song is powerfully beautiful; and yet it is ultimately useless, since Orpheus fails to achieve his goal. The suggestion, both (as here) literal and also metaphorical, is that Orpheus fails of his goal because he is backward-looking (490–93).^[69] Eurydice terms his backward glance at her furor (495). We can define it perhaps more precisely as part of the characteristic pattern of his absorption with and idealization of the past, as when he obsessively mourns Eurydice's loss, both after her first death (464–66) and after the second (507–20), calling her even beyond the moment of his own death (523–29). It is in the past that he finds perfection and beauty. He seems to cultivate and nurture in himself sensations of pathos and loss, and therefore he makes beautiful songs out of tragic visions. He likes to sing songs of his loss and the pathetic groupings that he sees in Hades (475–77) reflect his own vision, which tends to focus on sorrow. Hades contains all the dead, yet Orpheus sees in particular youths and girls unwedded, those having missed therefore the crown and purpose of their lives (476; cf. implumis 513). There is further pathos in the detail of children buried before their parents. (The too-early loss of the young is a powerful motif also in the Aeneid. ) Both Orpheus and the Georgic poet, who makes poetry of Orpheus' experience, find in tragedy a thing of beauty. At Eurydice's death Orpheus cannot accept this necessary and inevitable loss in order to proceed with life; rather he looks back incessantly, sees his ideal in the past, and seeks to restore it/her through song. In this way he parallels the Georgic poet, who also places his ideal—the Golden Age—in the past. This metaphorical looking back becomes literal when Orpheus turns to glance at

[69] See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), 11ff., on the regressive goal of the poet. Conte, 130–40 (esp. 134–37), conceives the significance of Orpheus more narrowly than is argued here. For him Orpheus is exclusively a poet of tragic love rather than of suffering and loss more generally.

Eurydice. The backward glance is, then, a physical expression of his characteristic tragic and regressive inclination. The wintery, isolated landscape (508–10) that forms the background for his subsequent laments suggests the sterility of his backward quest. Yet again his song has power beyond human imagination. Where previously he had charmed the dead, here he soothes tigers and moves oak trees (510). Thus the constraints of both fate and nature are subject to his song, so skilled is he at the manipulation of pity (for he moves Hades to grant his prayer) and beauty (for he moves the dead, the wild, and the inanimate). Yet all this power is of no avail because Orpheus' own determination and vision of his goal, the regaining of Eurydice, are inadequately sustained. Perhaps his dementia ("madness" 488) is that he takes more pleasure in sorrow than in success. The continuing and cold beauty of his song has nature as its witness (527), not Eurydice or any other human being. Virgil has taken the figure of Orpheus, the paradigmatic poet, and made it a portrait of the failure of the artist, despite all the emotional power and beauty of his art, to affect or effect action in the real world. (We may compare Aeneas' emotion before the pictura . . . inani, "vain picture," in Aen. 1.464.) Orpheus' endeavor, as we have seen, fails through his uncompromising—in some sense, sterile—nostalgia for Eurydice, that is, his longing for an irretrievable ideal. The triumph of love or of song over death is, therefore, surely not the message here.^[70] Rather the poet is defeated by regressive passion, isolation, and death. As an inhabitant of the Iron Age world, Orpheus, just like Aristaeus, has flaws that menace his achievements.

The parallels between Orpheus and the Georgic poet are suggestive of the poet's view of the value of poets and of poetry in this poem. For example, while Orpheus is ultimately the loser in the struggle for survival, he appears nevertheless to have greater courage than Aristaeus. Orpheus, whose initial cause for lament is surely as great as Aristaeus', takes the more courageous approach to his loss in relying on his own songs to charm the dead. He dares to descend alone to Hades to face the "king of

[70] Contrast Büchner, RE 8 A2.(1958): 1313–14.

terrors" (4.467–70). These verses suggest the fearfulness of the hell to which Orpheus descends alone, with a courage or audacity that recalls the Georgic poet's (1.40, 2.175, 4.565). While Aristaeus whines to his mother, Orpheus acts, sings (466, 471), has the courage to face death. Neither Orpheus nor Aristaeus, however, has the courage to face life with any compromise.

Orpheus' vision seeks out sorrow, and he sees in Hades particularly pathetic groupings that reflect his own inclinations. His vision of hell parallels his own emotional experience and esthetic sensibility:

at cantu commotae Erebi de sedibus imis
umbrae ibant tenues simulacraque luce carentum,
quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt,
vesper ubi aut hibernus agit de montibus imber,
matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum.
(4.471–77)

But, by his song aroused from Hell's nethermost realms
There came the flimsy shades, the phantoms lost to light,
In number like to the millions of birds that hide in the leaves
When evening or winter rain from the hills has driven
them—Mothers and men, the dead
Bodies of great-hearted heroes, boys and unmarried maidens,
Young men laid on the pyre before their parents' eyes.

The melancholy character of these apparitions—unwedded girls and parents burying their children—reflects Orpheus' own sensibility to loss and his own capacity for suffering. He sees a reflection of what he is, and the sadness of his vision fixes on premature loss. The pathetic focus of this grouping suits Orpheus' capacity for sentiment, which quality, lacking in Aristaeus, he has in the extreme. Time of darkness and season of death are powerfully suggested by the simile of 473–74, an image of dashed hopes and lost glory.

Like the Georgic poet, Orpheus is passionate, dissatisfied, and nostalgic. Dementia (Proteus' term 488) and furor (Eurydice's term 495) precipitate his loss of Eurydice, but, significantly, the Georgic poet presents his actions with sympathy (489):

iamque pedem referens casus evaserat omnis,
redditaque Eurydice superas veniebat ad auras
pone sequens (namque hanc dederat Proserpina legem),
cum subita incautum dementia cepit amantem,
ignoscenda quidem, scirent si ignoscere Manes:
restitit, Eurydicenque suam iam luce sub ipsa
immemor heu! victusque animi respexit. ibi omnis
effusus labor atque immitis rupta tyranni
foedera.
(4.485–93)

And now he's avoided every pitfall of the homeward path,
And Eurydice, regained, is nearing the upper air
Close behind him (for this condition has Proserpine made),
When a sudden madness catches her lover off his
guard—Pardonable indeed, if Death knew how to pardon.
He halts. Eurydice, his own, is now on the lip of
Daylight. Forgetful alas! Broken in purpose, he looked back.
His labor was lost, the pact he had made with the merciless king
Annulled.

In his longing for Eurydice, Orpheus is, like the Georgic poet, nostalgic for the past, thus making of Eurydice the final embodiment in the poem of the meaning of the Golden Age.

Exclusively absorbed in his passion for Eurydice, refusing compromise or substitution, Orpheus sings only of loss. In this way he resembles the nightingale (4.511–15), who never ceases to sing her mourning song. Orpheus and the nightingale are parallel in the beauty of their song and in their impotence to achieve what they long for.

Orpheus' grief, austere and uncompromising, renders him an isolated and in some sense sterile figure:

septem illum totos perhibent ex ordine mensis
rupe sub aëria deserti ad Strymonis undam
flesse sibi, et gelidis haec evolvisse sub astris^[71
] mulcentem tigris et agentem carmine quercus
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymenaei:
solus Hyperboreas glacies Tanaimque nivalem

[71] Reading astris for Mynors's antris .

arvaque Riphaeis numquam viduata pruinis
lustrabat, raptam Eurydicen atque inrita Ditis
dona querens.
(4.507–10, 517–20)

Month after month, they say, for seven months alone
He wept beneath a crag high up by the lonely waters
Of Strymon, and under the ice-cold stars poured out his dirge
That charmed the tigers and made the oak trees follow him
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No love, no marriage could turn his mind away from grief:
Alone through Arctic ice, through the snows of Tanais, over
Frost-bound Riphaean plateaux
He ranged, bewailing his lost Eurydice and the wasted
Bounty of death.

Deserti (508) recalls sed me Parnasi deserta per ardua dulcis/ raptat amor (3.291–92, cited on p. 60) and tends to corroborate the earlier suggestion that the poet feels himself to be, to some degree, isolated from others and embodying separate values. Very interesting in this regard is Raymond Williams's observation, in his discussion of Wordsworth, that the poet who feels alienated can either retreat "into a deep subjectivity" (as Orpheus does here) or attempt "to discover, in some form, community," as has been argued above of the Georgic poet.^[72]

Through his song Orpheus' grief is continually renewed, not solaced. In his refusal to accept another mate, he reveals his inability to compromise with reality, and consequently he perishes:

spretae Ciconum quo munere matres
inter sacra deum nocturnique orgia Bacchi
discerptum latos iuvenem sparsere per agros.
(4.520–11)

In the end the Ciconian women, scorned
By this devotion, amidst sacred rites and nocturnal orgies of
Bacchus,
Tore him limb from limb and scattered him over the land.

[72] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York, 1973), 295.

Aristaeus is able to accept a substitute for his lost bees, in some sense to compromise, since he is not concerned with individual human value (except in himself). Orpheus is not viable in the world precisely because of his inability to compromise, to live without the ideal, and to look forward. His final loss of Eurydice and his death at the hands of the Ciconian women are the consequences of his own character. What remains of him is intangible—the pathos of loss, the vulnerability of love and artistic strivings, and the beauty of the poetry that sings of these things:

tum quoque marmorea caput a cervice revulsum
gurgite cum medio portans Oeagrius Hebrus
volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa et frigida lingua
a miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat.
Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripae.
(4.523–27)

But even then that head, plucked from the marble-pale
Neck, and rolling down mid-stream on the Oeagrian Hebrus,
The voice alone and the death-cold tongue cried out "Eurydice!"
Cried "Poor Eurydice!" as the soul of the singer fled,
And the banks of the river echoed, re-echoed "Eurydice!"

By his self-assertion, Aristaeus achieves his desired divinity, moving from unacknowledged and unregretted crime to atonement without sentiment and, finally, to success and satisfaction in a substitution for his lost past. One could reasonably argue on Aristaeus' behalf, as have Putnam and Miles,^[73] that he is somehow morally or cognitively improved by his descent to the source of waters, where he sees a world different from himself—feminine, nurturant, peaceful. Additionally to his credit one could argue that Aristaeus succeeds because he is bonded to someone, his mother, who wishes to help him, and that thus he is not alone

[73] Putnam, Poem of the Earth, 316ff.; Miles, 288ff. Contrast Spofford, 57ff., who wonders if the sequence of events related here is due more to luck than to justice.

like Orpheus. On the other hand, his mother, a goddess, counsels him to success through violence and guile. So the apotheosis that Aristaeus achieves appears ultimately to be the reward neither of virtue nor of sentiment, but simply an index of success and power in the world. Perhaps one could argue that his character and experience best ready him to deal with the ambiguity, cost, and exchange represented by the bougonia . Although Aristaeus expresses no sentiment, sense of guilt, or pity, he does become a god—a provocative comment on the nature of Iron Age divinity.

A vision of Iron Age reality is suggested in the triumph of Aristaeus. Through his vital ruthlessness of purpose he achieves his desired divinity (cf. 1.14, where he is invoked as a god), while Orpheus is the eventual victim of Aristaeus' passion and of his own. Bound to Eurydice by sentiment, he is incapable of compromise for survival. Rejecting any substitution, he preserves through song the memory of the ideal that he has lost. He remains unconsoled, his grief never solaced or relinquished. This myth of Aristaeus' success and of Orpheus' loss mirrors reality as the poet envisions it. In the Iron Age, beauty and sentiment, as embodied in Orpheus and other victims, are in tension with success and progress, represented here by divinity. Despite Orpheus' flaws of regressiveness, egocentrism, and sterility, the poet's clear intent is to engage the reader's sympathy with him. It is Orpheus' sorrow and not Aristaeus' triumph that moves the reader and resonates in memory.

With the closing vignette of the farmer who plunders the nightingale's nest, the Georgic poet further expands the reader's sensibility through pity and through apprehension of ambiguity. We saw in Book 1 that the reader was often identified (through first-person verb forms or direct address, such as at 50, 100, 155–59) with the farmer (durus agrestis 1.160), who struggled continually against deprivation and hardship, against enemies large and small that undermined his labor . At the concluding moment that same farmer (now the "harsh ploughman," durus arator 4.512) appears no longer as the sympathetic figure, but rather as predator and ravager of the nightingale's helpless young, the agent of destruction, loss, and sorrow. Thus we are made to feel, through the sorrows of Orpheus and the nightin-

gale, the character and cost of Iron Age civilization, and hence to expand our moral and critical perspectives on our experience. This dual vision is the quintessence of the poem, for the poet shows man both as victim of the gods and nature (as in Book 1) and also as aggressor against nature and humanity. The poet makes the reader see with complexity and with pity that which otherwise might be seen, without reflection, as the unambiguous triumph of technology and mastery.

The Georgics illuminates aspects of reality as the poet sees them and thus deepens the reader's sensitivity to those humane and artistic values that do not lead to quantifiable progress. The function of song in this poem, then—Orpheus', the nightingale's, and the Georgic poet's—is preservation of the memory of the ideal, variously of harmony and pity, and of its loss, since the ideal is continually seen in retrospect. As a whole, in the songs of its several poet voices, the Georgics preserves and values the memory of a retrospective ideal. This memory is preserved not only, if climactically, in the moving tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also in the repeated representations of and allusions to the Golden Age, which constitute reflections on an ideal beyond reach. It is the nature of these reflections on the Golden Age that I term "the poet's vision" and that forms the subject of the following chapter.