We do not know how he came to meet Eurydice, or any of the details of their courtship, though he is bound to have wooed her with song. She was a “nymph,” one of the young maidens who lived in the forests and caves, free spirits in wildest nature, children of the earth. The nymphs hunted with Diana, feasted with Dionysus, and spent time with mortals, whom they sometimes wed. But Orpheus and Eurydice had little chance to enjoy their marriage. Soon after the wedding, Eurydice was walking across a meadow when she encountered the lecherous Aristaios (one of Apollo’s sons), who pounced on her. She managed to pull free and run away, but she was so addled by his attack that she didn’t see a snake sleeping in the sun in her path. Before she could stop herself, she stepped on the snake’s tail, and it spun around and bit her on the ankle, killing her. Hours later, Orpheus found her lying dead in the field. Bludgeoned by grief, he resolved to go down into the subterranean realm of death to find his bride and bring her back. He’d heard a rumor that a cave at Tainaron led down to the Underworld, and so he went there, carrying his lyre. This was a fearsome journey he planned, but he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his beloved, and he knew his music was a pacifying weapon of great power, which nothing on earth could resist. He reasoned
With my song
I will charm Demeter’s daughter,
I will charm the Lord of the Dead,
Moving their hearts with my melody.
I will bear her away from Hades.
As he journeyed deeper and deeper into the cave, he played the sweetest, saddest song, music forged on the anvil of his heart. The cave spirits took pity on him and left him unharmed. A tearful Charon ferried him readily across the River Styx. Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed dog with hair of snakes that guarded the gates of the Underworld, lay down and let him pass. With his song of grief, Orpheus charmed his way into the kingdom of Hades. There he sang until earth was saturated with his voice, sang so beautifully that the dead rejoiced, and those vexed by punishments were granted a day of freedom so they could listen to his serenade. The king and queen of the Underworld, stirred by his pitiful lament, grew infatuated by the music. His song reasoned with them in a new, unexpected way that bypassed thought and turned their hard hearts to quicksand. So the king granted Orpheus a favor never before allowed a mortal—he could take his bride back to the world of light. But there was a stipulation.
“One thing,” King Hades warned. “You must not look behind you. She may follow you into the upper air. If, however, you but once look back to see her ere you both have stepped fully into the light, she will be lost to you forever.” Orpheus agreed, Eurydice was summoned, and he led her back along the way he had come, singing songs of hope and deliverance as he once more gained safe passage past Cerberus, across the River Styx, and into the cave. There he began a steep ascent, clambering over the skiddy rocks, worrying that Eurydice might slip, trying to find the easiest path for her. As he climbed toward the entrance of the cave, just above, his song became wilder and more ecstatic. At last he reached the top and leapt into the blaze of daylight. Joyously turning to Eurydice, he saw to his horror that he had turned too soon; she was at the mouth of the cave, getting ready to step out. He lurched after her, but that fast she fell backward, into darkness, into death, crying “Farewell” as she disappeared down the throat of the cave. Wild with despair, Orpheus dived after her, found Charon again and begged to be taken once more across River Styx. There would be no need for a return passage, he explained; he would join his bride in death. But the boatman would not ferry him. Nothing would persuade Charon. For a week, Orpheus sat sobbing on the shore, starving away to nothing, covered in mud and slime. Finally, he brokenheartedly returned to Thrace, where he spent the next three years wandering alone, trying to erase even the thought of women. In time, he became a priest, performing simple duties in a small temple in the country. Celibate, solitary, he played his lyre for the plants and animals. As ever, his songs enchanted the woodlands and moved nature itself. That is, all but the maenads, wild-eyed, scruffy-haired, frenzied followers of Dionysus who hated him for every reason and no reason, but especially because he resisted their orgies and the favors of all womankind. They were punks with quick tempers and savage tastes, and easily annoyed. His music hit them like rock salt. It soured their mood, and it gave them the willies. So one morning this pack of bare-breasted assassins lay in wait for him outside the temple, and when they saw him they went murderous wild, attacking him with spears and rocks, then clawing him apart with their bare hands. They ripped off his arms and hurled them into the grass, yanked his legs loose, and when the ground was drenched with his blood, they ripped his head off and threw it into the river along with his lyre. That should have been the end of him. But, drifting downriver, his lyre began playing music all by itself. It played a low, mournful dirge, and then, miraculously, the tongue began to move in Orpheus’ severed head. Singing his own funeral song, he floated out to sea and sank beneath the waves, above which the sad song lingered.
Few myths have been retold and reimagined as often as this one. Why did Orpheus look back? I’ve often wondered. Because he didn’t trust the gods? As an all-too-human reflex when he didn’t hear Eurydice’s movements—that is, because not even his magical gifts could protect him from his human traits? Out of a self-destructive, Freudian desire to fail in his life? In arrogance, because he thought his music made him more powerful than the gods? Was it a natural oversight linked to his gift (he was a transcendental musician, someone for whom time was fluid)? Because the author of the myth had a strong sense of drama, or—as it’s so tempting to say while reading a whodunit—otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story? Because the gods, who understand human nature better than human beings do, knew all along that Orpheus would look back, so they weren’t risking anything in letting Eurydice go with him? In this scenario, it is Orpheus’ destiny to turn back, and their sadistic pleasure to let him go as far as possible, to the ultimate edge, to let him think he had won, so that their Schadenfreude would be the sweeter. Because no gift can be enjoyed without paying the price? Perhaps its lesson is about knowing one’s place, in essence: This is what happens if you try to best the gods. Or is it a social lesson having to do with gender definition—as a musician, Orpheus was a person with a sensitive, intuitive nature, and that wasn’t considered manly. In Greece, a woman was a man’s property, so he would naturally assume that when he stepped into the light his possessions went with him. Perhaps his tragedy was that he didn’t think of Eurydice as having a separate destiny.
In Balanchine’s ballet, set to music by Stravinsky, it’s all Eurydice’s fault. During the entire trip back, she clings to him, tugging, yanking, desperate that he turn to look; and she finally wins, turning him around and pulling the mask from his eyes. This sounds a lot like blaming Eve for the world’s sins. However interpreted, the story captured the hearts and minds of the Greeks, and every generation after them, as an example of loving devotion, self-sacrifice, and the power of love to survive everything, even dismemberment and death. In this myth, although the lovers are dead, the melody of their love continues to play without them. It has a fate of its own. It reminds us that love is the most resurrecting emotion in the world, which can carry one into the depths of hell and out again, provided one believes. Perhaps the simple moral is that, in love, there’s no turning back.
*See Plato, “The Perfect Union,” for a discussion of Plato’s theory of love.
*From the Greek verb “to rub.”
ROME
THE NIGHTMARE OF GIRLS
Cornelia, the little girl next door, does not yet know she shares her name with Cornelia Gracchus, mother to a family of Roman statesmen in the first century A.D. As I write this, I’m watching her play on a fallen tree trunk which bridges our two yards. Neighbors always know where their property begins and ends. The line is the same for both, but we call the nearest edge “the beginning,” as we do birth; and the farthest edge “the ending,” as we do death. I suppose this is because
we have a processive notion of time and life—the first of which our kind invented long ago,* the second of which each person invents anew. But so much of one’s personality and actions are inherited. There must be a shyness gene. My friend’s son, Isaac, was a flirt from the day he was born. Last year, as a seven-year-old, he met me at the door to their Long Island house, flung his arms around me, squeezed tight, climbed all over me, then said: “Who are you?” Affection pours from him, spontaneous as a mountain stream.
At five years old, Cornelia is sociable and forthcoming, but not buggy. I’ve known her all her life, and she’s always had a bold, self-sustaining curiosity. She loves snakes and worms and caterpillars and slugs. This is not the perverse fascination with things gross or scary that one often finds among little boys who have discovered how to appall grown-ups and spellbind girls by wielding the monstrous. No, Cornelia just finds nature interesting. She has dolls and games and educational toys, a little brother burbling toward speech, and a nanny during the day while both parents are at work. But she spends many happy hours alone in the yard, rediscovering insects, dogwood blossoms, acorns, and fungi. She likes to name the bugs—“Catty” being a favorite for caterpillars. My naming the garter snake that lives in the backyard “World Without End” clearly puzzled her, but she understood my need to name it, and also that it fell to her as a friend to praise my choice, however faintly. She hasn’t the knack yet of how to feign emotions, as society requires, but she’s learning. She doesn’t know that she’s restaging Adam’s task, the naming of the beasts; she just feels the powerful urge to make nature personal. She does not know that the kindergarten intrigues of the last week are versions of love she’ll grapple with more fully later. Because she’s one of the two oldest kids in her class, the other children woo her. It’s not just that there’s status in being part of her clique—one finds this same pattern of envying the in-crowd among chimpanzees and other primates—some of the boys have crushes on her. Last week, Nathan, a deeply smitten five-year-old, kicked her in the ankle a few times as a gesture of affection, and Cornelia got mad and told him he couldn’t be her friend anymore. Stricken to the core, Nathan went home sobbing because his Adored One had banished him and, by evening, his mother called Cornelia’s mother and together they worked out a rapprochement which involved suggesting to Cornelia that she might have been a little hard on Nathan, and taking her over to Nathan’s house to play—just the two of them—which both children enjoyed. In this small drama of power, worship, exile, and reunion, Cornelia’s mother, Persis, recognized the seeds of romance and sighed bitter-sweetly as she related the story during one of our early morning runs.
“Nathan’s so sensitive and vulnerable,” she said. “You can already see how some girl is going to break his heart later on.” Just then we reached the hill leading up past the purple and gray Indian Students Center, the roughly mown baseball field, and the brick village of the freshmen dorms. We slow to a walk up the steep incline, and that gives us more chance to talk.
“What do you suppose Cornelia will be like in love?” I asked.
Looking into the middle distance, Persis smiled, her cheeks arching high, the way she does sometimes when playing with her children, and she shook her head excitedly. “I don’t know,” she said. A race of memories seemed to cross in front of her. “I can’t wait to see.”
Although she expressed it passively, as a spectacle she would stand back and behold, we both knew how emotional it would be for Persis, balancing her role as adviser and bystander. Helping a child heal the first contusions of love must be difficult. The image that comes to mind is of a harbor boat guiding ships through lanes of hidden rock and hull-snagging coral to the vast seas beyond.
Persis expects her daughter to marry a man she loves. But in the days of Cornelia Gracchus such a thought was scandal. Female children were lucky to be alive at all, since “exposing” newborns, especially daughters, by abandoning them in the wild was a father’s prerogative. Horrible as this practice sounds, I can only imagine it felt elementally right to the Romans: born of the earth, a child was returned to the earth. A father could decide a child’s fate at birth, depending on whether a girl or boy was born. So what must the mother have felt for nine months, holding her natural love in abeyance? Mother was the ocean carrying the child to port, but the child could only stay if the father secured it with the ligature of his name. Our word “possessive” in its most maniacal sense, suggesting bouts of jealous rage, begins to capture how Romans felt about their property. Everything a man owned increased his stature, made him seem broader and taller. As he acquired land, slaves, livestock, wealth, and wife, a man cast a longer and longer shadow on the earth. It was as if he could extend his own body through his acquisitions, and thus digest a larger piece of the planet. Perhaps a mother comforted herself that, in death, her baby girl would find, as Lucretius had written, “a sound slumber, and a long good-night.” Perhaps, instead of calamity, she felt a sense of fatalistic regeneration. People who grow crops and animals are acutely aware of the cyclical processes of nature, and tend to accept that
All things, like thee, have time to rise and rot;
And from each other’s ruin are begot.
Nonetheless, women frequently plotted to have their exposed children rescued and raised secretly by others.
It’s not that the Romans felt no tenderness—one need only read their literature to discover the streams of passion that irrigated every field of action. Rome itself—the world’s first large-scale city with a population of about three quarters of a million—was said to be built in the wake of a tempestuous love affair, whose stirring details every Roman knew. The poet Virgil offers an absorbing, breathless account in his epic poem The Aeneid.* Although the story is supposedly set in the distant past, Virgil’s audience belonged to Rome in the first century B.C., and it had to seem realistic to his readers, so it is probably a good reflection of the relationships they would recognize. The story goes like this:
DIDO AND AENEAS
After the fall of Troy, the Trojan hero Aeneas sets sail to search for another home. A storm separates him from most of his men and he lands on the African coast, near Carthage, a city being founded by Dido, who is its queen. Made invisible by magic, Aeneas and his friend Achates steal into the city and find it ambitiously under way, raising theaters, harbor, temples, and workshops, in a hive of activity. It dazzles him, and he wishes it were his home, when the radiant Queen Dido appears with her entourage. Soon Aeneas’ men also find their way to the city, and approach the queen, explaining that their leader Aeneas is apparently lost at sea, and requesting shelter while they fix their “storm-shattered” vessels. Their tale of woe moves her, and she welcomes them wholeheartedly, regretting only that Aeneas is not safely there as well. Hearing this, Aeneas and Achates decide to make themselves known:
These words were hardly spoken, when in a flash the cloud-cloak
They wore was shredded and purged away into pure air.
Aeneas was standing there in an aura of brilliant light,
Godlike of face and figure: for Venus herself had breathed
His manhood and a gallant light into his eyes …
The queen is understandably smitten, and it’s as if he’s voicing her destiny when he says: “I am here, before you, the one you look for….”
Actually, she wasn’t looking, but he’s come at the right time. A grieving widow, Dido is a fiercely passionate woman with a strong sense of self-dramatization who has pledged that
He who first wedded me took with him, when he died,
My right to love: let him keep it, there, in the tomb, for ever.
But “for ever” is a very long time, and Aeneas seems “heaven-born” to rekindle “the old flame” that she’s nearly forgotten.
Old flame. It’s amazing how many metaphors for love and arousal we share with the ancients. “I’m on fire,” Bruce Springsteen wails lustily in a recent rock song. In another song (also written by Springsteen), the Pointer
Sisters sing “I say I don’t love love you / but you know I’m a liar / because when we kiss—F-i-r-e!” Dido tells of that same delicious conflagration. Notice it’s not the physical pain of burning skin that’s being referred to, but stoking the invisible, primordial “fire” in each cell, which then blazes brighter. Love feeds a million watch fires in the encampment of the body. Not only does Dido find Aeneas physically appealing, and his war and sea stories enchanting, she has a lot in common with him, despite their different cultures. Both are royalty. Most of all, she identifies with his suffering:
I too have gone through much; like you, have been roughly handled
By fortune; but now at last it has willed me to settle here.
Being acquainted with grief, I am learning to help the unlucky.
She translates this charitableness into hundreds of bulls, sheep, swine, and other goods for his men; a private banquet for him; and the invitation to stay as long as he wishes. Without meaning to, she falls deeply in love, and soon is “a woman wild with passion … wandering at large through the town in a rage of desire, like a doe pierced by an arrow.” One day Dido takes Aeneas hunting; a storm hits and they find shelter in a cave, where they make love and exchange vows. To Dido and the Roman understanding of such things, it’s a marriage. After a luxuriant period of marital bliss, the fickle gods decree that Aeneas’ fate is to found his new city in Italy, his lost homeland, and they order him to return at once. Torn between love and duty, Aeneas plans to steal away by nightfall without telling Dido. Although this seems cowardly, the reader forgives him, because many a hero has lost his nerve in clashes of the heart. When rumor of his plan reaches Dido, she becomes unbalanced by grief. The powerful, productive, omnicompetent queen suddenly feels destitute and ragged. Her path into the future disappears behind a veil of dust, and she loses her inner compass. Without love, life is a desert night filled with wolves. After her first husband died, her heart had gone into hibernation. She joined the suspended animation of the aggrieved. If she was numb, at least she was safe from pain. Just as in the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, a princely hero arrives to wake her from that dreamless sleep. With Aeneas she risks all in a powerful openheartedness that makes her vulnerable. When he betrays her, she goes to pieces. Dido’s lament is the timeless anthem of the jilted woman, who alternately chastises herself and begs her lover to stay. Slightly delirious, she pleads with him, using quick turns of logic and every wile she can think of. What litigant is as avid, what lawyer as skillful, as a woman in love? Here is a small sample of her anguish:
A Natural History of Love Page 5
