The earlier chapters of this book have contained countless myths telling of war, violence, monster slayings, revenge, and suchlike, so let us end in unashamedly romantic fashion with some inspirational stories of love – and of what so often accompanies love in such myths: death. Though in our final story, it is (appropriately) Death who is defeated, his dominion broken, while love lives on.
HERO AND LEANDER
Hero and Leander were lovers who lived on opposite sides of the narrow Hellespont (Dardanelles). Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos, and each night she would light a lamp in the window of the tower in which she lived, to guide Leander as he swam across to her from Abydos. He stayed with her until daybreak and then swam home again. In this way they met and made love through many summer nights.
Winter came, with its stormy weather, and still Hero lit the lamp, and still Leander braved the treacherous seas. Then one night, during a violent storm, Hero failed to notice that the lamp had been blown out by the wind. Without his signal light, Leander lost his way among the dark and heaving waves and was drowned. The next morning Hero looked down and saw his body washed up on the shore. In her grief she flung herself from the tower, falling to her death beside her lover.
The story of this tragic love affair probably originated in an Alexandrian poem, but in extant literature we come across it first in Virgil (Georgics 3.258–63) and Ovid (Heroides 18 and 19). Its fullest treatment is in the poem Hero and Leander by Musaeus, probably of the late fifth or early sixth century AD. It has inspired many other poets since. Shakespeare gives the story a humorous twist in his As You Like It, where Rosalind uses it to demonstrate that no one ever dies for love (IV.i. 88–95):
"Leander, he would have liv’d many a fair year though Hero had turn’d nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for (good youth) he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp, was drown’d; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was ‘Hero of Sestos’. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love".
Lord Byron was moved to try and repeat Leander’s achievement, and in May 1810 (not, we note, at the most testing time of year) he himself swam from Sestos to Abydos and reported the result (Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos):
"If, in the month of dark December,
Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
If, when the wintry tempest roar’d,
He sped to Hero, nothing loth,
And thus of old thy current pour’d
Fair Venus! how I pity both!
For me, degenerate modern wretch,
Though in the genial month of May,
My dripping limbs I faintly stretch,
And think I’ve done a feat today".
...
"Twere hard to say who fared the best:
Sad mortals! thus the Gods still plague you!
He lost his labour, I my jest;
For he was drowned, and I’ve the ague".
We turn to A.E. Housman to restore us to romantic mood. He characteristically saw Hero and Leander’s love as symbolizing the transient nature of happiness (‘Tarry, delight, so seldom met’, from More Poems):
"By Sestos town, in Hero’s tower,
On Hero’s heart Leander lies;
The signal torch has burned its hour
And sputters as it dies.
Beneath him, in the nighted firth,
Between two continents complain
The seas he swam from earth to earth
And he must swim again".
PYRAMUS AND THISBE
Pyramus and Thisbe lived next door to one another in Babylon. They became friends, and when they grew up they fell in love. Their parents refused to let them marry or even to meet, but luckily they found a chink in the wall between the two adjoining houses, and through this they would spend hours whispering their love. When they had to say goodnight, they each kissed the wall between them since they could not kiss each other.
Longing to be truly together, they arranged to steal away at dead of night and meet in the countryside at a local landmark, the tomb of Ninus, in the shade of a mulberry tree hung thick with snowy fruits. When the time came, Thisbe, with her face veiled, arrived first and sat down beneath the appointed tree, but she was startled away by a lioness who approached, fresh from her kill, to drink at a nearby spring. The frightened girl ran away into a cave that was close by, but as she ran she dropped her veil. When the lioness was returning to the woods, she found the garment and tore it to pieces in her bloodied jaws.
A little later, Pyramus arrived. He saw the footprints of the lioness and, worse still, the torn veil all stained with fresh blood. Recognizing the garment, and full of remorse for causing, as he thought, Thisbe’s death, he killed himself with his sword in the shade of the tree where they had planned to meet. Now Thisbe returned and despairingly found her beloved’s body. She joined him in death, stabbing herself with the same sword still warm from his own mortal wound. When their parents found their corpses, they were moved too late by the young couple’s love for one another and buried their ashes in a single urn. The snowy fruit of the mulberry tree was coloured by all the spilt blood, and has ever since been a dark red.
The myth of these star-crossed lovers was immortalized by Ovid (Metamorphoses 4.55–166) and was inevitably inspirational to later poets, such as Chaucer, who tells the story in The Legende of Goode Women, and – perhaps most famously – Shakespeare. He turns it into the ‘most Lamentable Comedy and most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ played by Bottom the weaver and his friends in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (where the lovers meet at ‘Ninny’s tomb’). Here is Thisbe discovering the dead Pyramus (V.i. 332):
"Asleep, my love?
What, dead, my dove?
O Pyramus, arise!
Speak, speak! Quite dumb?
Dead, dead! A tomb
Must cover thy sweet eyes.
These lily lips,
This cherry nose,
These yellow cowslip cheeks,
Are gone, are gone;
Lovers, make moan!
His eyes were green as leeks.
O Sisters Three,
Come, come to me,
With hands as pale as milk;
Lay them in gore,
Since you have shore
With shears his thread of silk.
Tongue, not a word.
Come, trusty sword;
Come, blade, my breast imbrue:
[Stabs herself.
And farewell, friends;
Thus Thisby ends:
Adieu, adieu, adieu.
[Dies."
PROKRIS AND KEPHALOS
Pyramus. Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.
Thisbe. As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.
This is how Bottom and Flute garble the names of Kephalos and Prokris in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Once again it is Ovid who gives us the most familiar version of the couple’s ultimately tragic love (Metamorphoses 7.672–862).
Kephalos was the grandson of the Thessalian king Aiolos and was happily married to Prokris, a daughter of Erechtheus, the king of Athens. It was in the second month of his marriage that Eos, goddess of Dawn, fell in love with Kephalos. She was always of an amorous disposition, ready to seize any particularly handsome young man she noticed, and now she carried Kephalos off for her own delight, though much against his will. She soon tired of him, for she grew so annoyed by all his talk of his young bride, and the ties of matrimony, and his marriage vows, that she wanted only to be rid of him, so she sent him home again. Unfortunately she was vengeful enough to inspire Kephalos with the idea of disguising himself and testing Prokris’s fidelity, and she even helped him by altering his appearance.
Kephalos arrived back in Athens so thoroughly disguised that no one could recognize him. He made his way to his own home, and there he made advances to Prokris, offering countless gifts to win her over to him. For a long time she stayed resolutely faithful, firmly rejecting all his lures, but when he finally promised her a vast fortune in return for a night in her bed, she hesitated. At this Kephalos revealed his true identity and accused her of infidelity.
Overwhelmed by shame, and hating all men because of her husband’s deceitful trick, Prokris ran away and lived in the mountains. There she devoted herself to hunting as a follower of the virgin goddess Artemis. Yet now that he had lost her, Kephalos loved her more than ever, so he found her and begged her to forgive him, confessing (quite rightly) that he had been totally in the wrong. Eventually she accepted his apology. Reunited once more, they returned home and spent some years together in great happiness.
Prokris, however, had not come empty-handed from the mountains: she brought home two gifts given her by Artemis, a hound called Lailaps that could not fail to catch its prey, and a javelin that could not miss its mark. She gave both gifts to Kephalos. He used the hound to get rid of the Teumessian Vixen, a fierce fox, fated never to be caught, that was preying cruelly on the people of Thebes (p. 186). So the infallible hound served a good purpose. But the unerring javelin eventually brought only tragedy in its wake.
Every morning Kephalos went hunting, always quite alone, since his javelin was all that he needed to kill as many animals as he chose. When he had hunted enough and was hot and tired, he would lie in the shade and call on a cool breeze, Aura, to come and soothe him. One day some passer-by overheard him and misunderstood, thinking that Aura must be a nymph with whom he was in love. At once this busybody hurried to Prokris to report his infidelity.
In her unhappiness, and hoping still that it was all a mistake, she followed her husband the next morning when he went off to hunt. He made his kill, then as usual lay down and called on Aura to come and soothe him. Prokris, overhearing, moaned in sorrow, and Kephalos, thinking that some wild creature was hiding in the bushes, threw his javelin towards the sound. Prokris cried out in pain as it found its mark, and he recognized the voice of his dear wife, and ran to her. She died in his arms.
Apollodorus (3.15.1) interestingly draws a quite different picture of Prokris in which she is an utterly faithless wife, and this probably reflects a tradition much earlier than Ovid’s adaptation. He says that she went to bed with a certain Pteleon when he bribed her with a golden crown. Kephalos discovered her infidelity, so she ran away to King Minos of Crete, who tried to seduce her. His wife Pasiphae, however, was angry because of his general promiscuity, and had drugged him in such a way that whenever he had intercourse with a woman, he ejaculated snakes and scorpions, and she died.
Prokris wanted to possess the inescapable hound and the unerring javelin that Minos had promised her in return for her favours (in this version, they had once been given to Europa by Zeus and then passed down to Minos), so she in her turn drugged him to prevent any harm coming to her, then went to bed with him. She took her payment, the hound and javelin, and went home, where she and Kephalos were reconciled. The couple went hunting together and Prokris was killed, though her death here was the result of a simple hunting accident. It is hardly surprising that it was Ovid’s romantic story, rather than this, which captured the imagination of later artists and became the standard version of the myth.
APHRODITE AND ADONIS
We have seen how Myrrha made love with her own father, Kinyras, and gave birth to the baby Adonis (p. 528), but that is far from being the end of the story. Once again Apollodorus’ version is rather different from that of Ovid. According to Apollodorus (3.14.4) the baby was so beautiful that Aphrodite wanted him for herself, so she secretly hid him in a chest and entrusted him to Persephone, queen of the Underworld, to keep for her. But Persephone too loved him and she refused to give him back. The two goddesses took their dispute to Zeus, who decreed that Adonis should spend a third of the year with each of them and have the remaining third for himself. He always chose to live his own third of the year with Aphrodite, and the months that he spent in her arms became the living, burgeoning time of spring and summer. His disappearance from the earth marked the harvesting of the crops, and his time in the arms of Persephone was the dead, winter period when seed lay dormant below the earth.
In Ovid’s version of the story (Metamorphoses 10.519–739), Aphrodite fell in love with Adonis only when he grew to be a beautiful young man. She became his constant companion, and because like most young men he was a passionate huntsman, she too learnt to enjoy hunting, roaming woods and mountains with her skirts kilted up to her knees, just like Artemis, and shouting encouragement to the hounds. She was careful to pursue only creatures safe to hunt, like hares or deer, and she warned Adonis against the dangerous beasts – wild boars and wolves and lions and bears – who were always ready to turn and attack their hunters.
Unfortunately his natural courage made him pay too little heed to her advice. One day he roused a wild boar from its lair and wounded it in the side with his spear. (It was sometimes said that the boar was Aphrodite’s husband Hephaistos or her lover Ares in disguise, jealous because of her affair with Adonis.) The boar easily dislodged the weapon, then rushed after Adonis as he was making for safety and slashed him deep in the groin with its tusk. Aphrodite heard from afar the groans of the dying boy and hurried to him, but too late. She did what little she could: she decreed that his death would in the future be lamented every year, and she made the dark red anemone spring from his blood as an everlasting token of her grief. It was elsewhere said that Adonis’s death was also the origin of the red rose, for as Aphrodite rushed to her dying love she pricked her foot on a white rose. Stained with her blood, it was ever afterwards red, and thus it naturally became a symbol of passionate love.
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, probably his first published work (1593), is based on Ovid’s account of Adonis’s death, with once again the anemone springing up from his blood. Venus plucks the flower and addresses it as she puts it in her bosom:
"Here was thy father’s bed, here in my breast;
Thou art the next of blood, and ’tis thy right.
Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest;
My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night;
There shall not be one minute in an hour
Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love’s flow’r."
PARIS AND OINONE
The tale of Paris’s love affair with the beautiful Helen, she of ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ and brought all Troy to destruction, is told and retold throughout ancient literature. Yet Paris had another, earlier love: the nymph Oinone, daughter of the river-god Kebren, and this story is seldom mentioned. Apollodorus, as so often, is helpful in sketching out the bare details (3.12.6).
Paris married Oinone while he was still a herdsman on Mount Ida and lived with her happily. Then one fateful day he was called by Zeus to judge the beauty contest between the three goddesses, Hera, Athene and Aphrodite. When he chose Aphrodite as the loveliest and awarded her the prize of the golden apple, he won for himself the promised love of the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Sparta (p. 309). Oinone, however, was skilled in the art of prophecy, and she knew just what disasters would follow if Paris sailed to Greece to fetch Helen. She warned her husband as eloquently as she knew how, but he ignored all her good advice and made ready to leave. Finding that she could not influence him, and knowing what lay in store, she told him to come to her if he were ever wounded, because she alone could heal him.
Paris travelled to Greece and carried Helen off to Troy, and the Greeks sailed out in force to fetch her back: the Trojan War had begun, and Paris thought no more of Oinone. But in the tenth year of the war, soon after he had killed the mighty Achilles, he himself was mortally wounded by an arrow from Philoktetes’ great bow. Then he remembered Oinone’s words and asked to be carried to Mount Ida. She was still angry at his desertion of her and refused to help him, so he was carried back to Troy. Too late she changed her mind, remorsefully hurrying to Troy with her healing drugs, but she found Paris dead. She hanged herself from grief.
Oinone’s rejection of the wounded Paris is narrated in great detail by Quintus of Smyrna in his late epic Sequel to Homer (10.262–489). ‘I wish I had in me a lion’s heart and strength, to devour your flesh and then to lap your blood, for all the pain your folly has brought on me,’ Oinone cries (315–27). ‘Where is Aphrodite now? ... Just leave my house and go to your Helen, for her to heal you of your grievous pain.’
Paris dies on Mount Ida, and all the shepherds mourn, and all the nymphs too, remembering him as a little boy growing up on the mountain, and even the glens of Ida mourn. So, of course, does Oinone when she learns of Paris’s death. She rushes down the slopes of Ida, ‘just as a mountain heifer, stung in her heart with passion, speeds with flying feet to meet her mate’ (441–3), and she flings herself on to Paris’s funeral pyre, joining him in death.
Many later poets took up the story, the best remembered work probably being Tennyson’s Oenone (the Latinized version of Oinone’s name). Here is Oinone waiting for Paris, not yet knowing that he has been chosen to award the golden apple to the loveliest of the three goddesses. He brings the apple to show Oinone just before the fatal contest, on the day that will change everything for her for ever:
"‘O mother Ida, many fountain’d Ida,
Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
I waited underneath the dawning hills,
Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark,
And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine:
Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,
Leading a jet-black goat white-horn’d, white-hooved,
Came up from reedy Simois all alone".
"O mother Ida, harken ere I die.
Far-off the torrent call’d me from the cleft:
Far up the solitary morning smote
The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes
I sat alone: white-breasted like a star
Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard skin
Droop’d from his shoulder, but his sunny hair
Cluster’d about his temples like a God’s:
And his cheek brighten’d as the foam-bow brightens
When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart
Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came.
‘Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.
He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm
Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold,
That smelt ambrosially ..."
PSYCHE AND CUPID
Psyche (‘Soul’) was the mortal lover of Cupid (Eros), god of love. Her story was first and most famously told by Apuleius in the second century AD in The Golden Ass (4.28–6.26) and has all the characteristics of a fairy-tale. In later times it came to be seen as an allegory of the soul’s difficult journey through life towards a mystic union with the divine after death.
Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who had three daughters, all of them very beautiful, but the youngest girl, Psyche, was quite breathtakingly lovely. The fame of her beauty spread until people came from far and wide just to gaze on her, and all were so overwhelmed by her loveliness that they paid her the divine honours which they should have been offering to Venus (Aphrodite). The goddess naturally grew very angry and wanted to avenge this insult. She told her son Cupid to visit Psyche and inflame her with a dishonourable passion for some completely worthless man, but Cupid disobeyed his mother, for when he saw the girl’s great beauty he fell in love with her himself.
Psyche’s two elder sisters had been married to foreign kings from distant cities, but she herself remained unmarried – nor indeed had she any suitors, for she was so amazingly beautiful that all men adored her from afar and never dared to approach her. At last her father went to Apollo’s oracle at Miletos and asked where he could find a husband for this youngest daughter of his. The reply, influenced by Cupid, said that Psyche must prepare to marry an evil spirit, feared even by the gods, who would come to fetch her as she stood on a lonely mountain-top.
With great sorrow the king and queen obeyed the oracle’s instructions. Psyche’s bridal day arrived, and she was accompanied to a craggy hill-top and left there, alone and afraid. Yet her fears were needless, for Zephyros, the gentle West Wind, lifted her up and wafted her softly down into a flowery valley, and there she found in the middle of a nearby wood a fairy-tale palace, full of unbelievable treasures. Here she was waited upon by unseen hands, until night came and it was time for bed. In the darkness Cupid came to her and made her his wife, and she lay in delight with this unseen, unknown husband. He left her just before dawn. And so the days and nights passed for her: lonely days with only invisible servants for company, and love-filled nights with Cupid coming after dark and always vanishing before the morning light.
Psyche found that she was missing her family, so at last she persuaded Cupid to allow her sisters to visit her. He warned her urgently that they were likely to bring her great unhappiness, and that she must pay no attention if they tried to make her find out what he looked like. If she ever saw his face, he would leave her for ever. She promised that she would do just as he wanted, and on the sisters’ first visit, after they had been carried down from the high crag by Zephyros, she kept her word. At the end of their visit, Zephyros carried them back up the mountain and they returned home.
Unfortunately both sisters had been struck with a violent jealousy because of Psyche’s good fortune and they agreed to do all they could to ruin her. They visited her again, and then again, with the West Wind delivering them and carrying them away as before, and they wormed their way so far into Psyche’s confidence that at last she confessed she had no idea what her husband looked like. They terrified her by saying that she must be married to a fearful monster, who would end up by devouring both her and the baby that she was now carrying. She had best kill him before she herself was killed.
So that night poor, credulous Psyche waited until Cupid was asleep after their love-making, then she lit a lamp and approached him, armed with a sharp carving knife. At once she recognized with awe the beautiful Love-god. She saw his bow and arrows lying at the foot of the bed, and in curiosity she drew one of the arrows out of its quiver. The sharp tip pricked her thumb enough to draw blood, and now she was even more in love with her husband than before, quite overcome with wonder and desire. Just then a drop of scalding oil, spurting from the lamp, fell on to Cupid’s shoulder and he was startled awake. He leapt up in pain, and when he saw that his wife had broken her promise, he spread his wings and flew away from her, just as he had said he would.
Psyche, in despair, searched everywhere for him, but in vain. On her travels she came at different times to the cities where her sisters lived and sadly told them exactly what had happened. Each sister in turn, burning with desire to have for herself Cupid’s love – and Cupid’s palace – hurried to the crag from which Zephyros had always wafted them down. They each leapt confidently into the air, but this time no West Wind came for them, and each in turn was dashed to pieces on the rocks below. The birds and beasts feasted on their remains.
Psyche carried on wandering through country after country, searching for her lost Cupid. She prayed for help at the temples of Ceres (Demeter) and Juno (Hera), but neither goddess was willing to help her for fear of offending Venus, who by now had heard that her son had been Psyche’s lover. At last Psyche plucked up the courage to come to the palace of Venus herself. The goddess, furious that her son had not only failed to punish Psyche but had even made her pregnant, treated her cruelly and gave her formidable tasks to perform.
The first task was to sort out a vast heap of mixed grains into their separate kinds by nightfall. Psyche had no idea where to begin, but a passing ant saw her plight and sympathetically scurried to round up every other ant in the district to help. They worked furiously and the job was soon done.
The next morning, Venus told Psyche to fetch a hank of golden wool from a flock of murderous sheep. Once again the poor girl felt quite hopeless, but this time a kindly green reed whispered advice to her as the breeze blew over it. It told her to wait until the sheep were asleep in the heat of the afternoon, then to gather up the loose wisps of wool clinging to the nearby briar bushes. Psyche did so and carried a whole lapful of the golden wool to Venus, but still the goddess was not satisfied.
The third task was harder still: Psyche had to fetch a jar full of ice-cold water from the river Styx, where it cascaded out from halfway up a steep precipice, near the summit of a high mountain. When she arrived there, she found the outlet guarded by fierce, ever-watchful dragons, and she knew she could never complete her task and escape them alive. At that moment Jupiter’s eagle flew by. He owed a debt of gratitude to Cupid, so he snatched Psyche’s jar and filled it for her, and she delightedly carried it back to Venus.
The furious goddess set her one final, fatal task: she must go down to the land of the dead and fetch a day’s supply of Proserpina’s store of beauty. Realizing that she was being sent to her death, Psyche climbed to the top of a high tower, intending to throw herself down and die there and then. But the tower spoke to her, explaining how she might carry out Venus’s command and still live.
Psyche did exactly as the tower said. She entered the Underworld by way of Tainaron in the Peloponnese, carrying two coins and two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water. She paid Charon one coin to be ferried across the river, and she threw one of her bread sops to Kerberos to gain entry to the dark palace of Hades, all the while avoiding the various snares that Venus had set along her journey. When she reached Proserpina (Persephone), who offered her a chair and a magnificent meal, she was careful to sit on the ground and to eat only a crust of common bread. The goddess gave her what she came for in a sealed box, then she returned to the land of the living, appeasing Kerberos with her second sop and paying Charon with her second coin.
She came thankfully back to the daylight, but disobeyed one last instruction that the tower had given her: that on no account must she open the box. She allowed her curiosity to get the better of her and lifted the lid, intending to use a little of the beauty within on herself, so as to win back Cupid’s love. Out stole a fatal sleep and overpowered her, and she fell to the ground as if she were dead.
Cupid, however, had been desperately missing his lost love, and he now flew to her aid and brushed the cloud of sleep away from her. She sprang up to deliver the box to Venus, while Cupid went to plead his love with Jupiter (Zeus). The great god gave divine consent to his marriage with Psyche, and appeased Venus by making Psyche immortal so that the match was no disgrace. All the gods held a great wedding breakfast to celebrate the union, and in the fullness of time Psyche’s baby was born, a daughter called Voluptas (Pleasure).
ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE
Orpheus, a son of one of the Muses, was the supreme singer and musician of Greek myth, so skilled that he entranced the whole of nature with his song, taming savage beasts and moving even rocks and trees. As Shakespeare would put it (Two Gentlemen of Verona III.ii. 78–81):
"For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews,
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans
Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands".
The story of Orpheus descending to the Underworld to fetch his beloved wife Eurydice back from the dead is one of the best known of all myths, becoming an endless source of inspiration to post-classical artists of all kinds. The legend was an early one, for Euripides refers to it in his Alkestis of 438 BC, a play which also tells of a wife returning from the dead (see below); but it is only in the Roman poets that the story of Orpheus’ descent is first told in detail. We find a full and moving version in Ovid (Metamorphoses 10.1–85, 11.1–66).
Soon after Orpheus married the nymph Eurydice, she died of a snake-bite, and he so mourned her loss that he was even willing to brave the journey down to Hades to try and regain her, hoping to rouse the sympathy of the shades and so win for her a reprieve from death. He passed through the entrance to the Underworld at Tainaron, then courageously made the long and lonely descent. He sang for Charon, the ferryman, and for the watchdog Kerberos, and both were so charmed by his music that they allowed him to enter. When he reached the abode of Hades and Persephone, he sang again, pleading for his wife who had been cut off before her prime, and with his song he entranced the entire world of the dead. All the shades listened and wept.
Tantalos forgot his hunger and thirst, and the wheel of Ixion stayed motionless. The vultures stopped tearing at Tityos’s liver. The daughters of Danaos held their pitchers still, and Sisyphos sat idle on his great rock. Then, for the first time, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears. Most important of all, Hades and Persephone could not bear to refuse Orpheus’ pleas and said that he might take his Eurydice back to earth. Their only conditions were that he must lead the way on the journey out, and that he must not look back at her until they had both regained the light of the sun.
It may well be that in the early, lost version of the myth Orpheus succeeded in winning back his wife, but this is not so in the familiar, later version. The two of them set off, with Eurydice following her husband, and Orpheus was just reaching the end of the long ascent when, eager to see his wife and afraid that her strength might be failing, he looked back. At once she slipped away into the darkness, dying for the second time.
Orpheus tried to follow her, but this time Charon firmly refused to take him over the Styx, so he had no chance of gaining a second entry to Hades. Eventually he returned to Thrace and wandered through the land, mourning inconsolably and singing of his loss, and refusing to look at any other woman. His end was a violent one, for Thracian women tore him to pieces, resentful because he had scorned them.
The birds and the beasts, and even the rocks and the trees, wept for Orpheus. His limbs were scattered in different places, and his head was thrown into the river Hebros where it floated, still singing, down the stream and into the sea. It was carried southwards to Lesbos and buried there by the people of the island, who were thereafter rewarded with an especial skill in music and poetry (and in particular the great poets Sappho, Alcaeus and Arion).
The Muses gathered up the scattered fragments of Orpheus’ body and buried them in Pieria, where he was born. Here over his grave the nightingale was said to sing more sweetly than anywhere else in Greece. Pausanias (9.30.4) tells us that there was a famous statue of Orpheus on Mount Helikon, home of the Muses, where he was surrounded by animals of stone and bronze, all entranced by his singing. Zeus immortalized his music by setting his lyre among the stars as the constellation Lyra.
As for Orpheus himself, his shade passed once more to Hades, where at last he could clasp Eurydice in his eager arms. Now he was able to walk with her and gaze his fill, and never again need he fear to lose her by an incautious glance.
ALKESTIS AND ADMETOS
In the myths as in life, love, however strong, is all too often cut short by death, so let us end with a myth where the opposite happens, and it is love, not death, that triumphs.
Admetos was the king of Pherai in Thessaly and a favourite of Apollo. The god had once been forced by Zeus to serve a mortal for a year as a punishment for killing the Cyclopes, and because Admetos had so great a reputation for justice and hospitality, it was to his home that Apollo chose to come. There he served as a herdsman, and Admetos treated him so well that the god made all his cows bear twins. He also helped Admetos to win the hand of his chosen bride, Alkestis, the beautiful daughter of Pelias, king of Iolkos. She had so many suitors that her father set an apparently impossible test to decide between them, saying that he would give her to whoever could yoke a lion and a boar to a chariot. Apollo tamed the beasts and harnessed them, and Admetos drove the chariot to Pelias. Alkestis became his.
At their marriage, Admetos forgot to sacrifice to Artemis and the angry goddess filled the bridal chamber with snakes. Apollo once again intervened to help, advising Admetos to appease Artemis with sacrifices. This he did, and all was well. Then the god won an even greater boon for his friend from the Fates. He made them drunk, then persuaded them to agree that when Admetos arrived at his fated day of death, he might still live on, so long as he could find someone willing to die in his place.
Admetos felt sure that one of his parents would be only too happy to sacrifice themselves for their own son. After all, they must love him, and they were now old, with most of their lives behind them. Why should not one of them at least be willing to go down to the dead as his substitute? They soon put him right, for they had no intention of leaving the sweetness of life before they had to, and in the end it was his wife Alkestis who agreed to make the supreme sacrifice and die for him. The outcome is movingly dramatized in Euripides’ Alkestis, his first surviving play (438 BC), and here, when Admetos upbraids his father Pheres for his selfishness in being unwilling to die, Pheres indignantly gives his reasons (690–704):
‘Don’t you die on my behalf, and I won’t die on yours! You love to look on the daylight. Don’t you think your father does too? As I see it, we shall be dead for a long time, while life is short and very sweet. You, with no shame at all, have taken pains enough to avoid dying … So should you be abusing any relative of yours who does not wish to die, when you are a coward yourself? Hold your tongue! Remember that if you love life, so do all men.’
The play opens when Alkestis and Admetos have been happily married for several years, with children born to them, but now at last the fated day of death has arrived. Thanatos, the implacable god of death, comes to take Alkestis to the Underworld. Even as Admetos, with a complete change of heart, begs her not to leave him, she dies. Now he must come to terms with his loss. Yet this seems impossible, for he finds that, with Alkestis dead, he no longer wants the life that she has won for him. Now at last it is clear that his avoidance of death, through her loving self-sacrifice, has condemned him to a life of permanent mourning, a kind of living death (935–49):
‘I think my wife’s fate is happier than my own, even though it may not seem so. No pain will ever touch her now, and she has ended life’s many troubles with glory. But I, who have escaped my fate and ought not to be alive, shall now live out my life in sorrow. Now I understand … Whenever I come indoors, the loneliness will drive me out again when I see my wife’s bed, and the chair in which she used to sit, now empty, the floor in every room unswept, the children clinging round my knees and crying for their mother, the servants lamenting the beloved mistress they have lost.’
The situation is saved by the great hero Herakles. He visits Pherai on his way to catch the man-eating mares of Diomedes, and Admetos, still hospitable even in his deepest grief, takes him in without telling him that Alkestis is dead, pretending that the signs of mourning in the house are for a woman of no importance.
Herakles happily accepts the hospitality offered him, and in his usual fashion: he cheerfully eats and drinks to excess – to the outrage of one of the servants, who tells him the truth about Admetos’s loss. Herakles sobers up at once, and plans how best to help the friend who has welcomed him while ignoring his own sorrow: he will risk his life by contending with Death himself (837–49):
‘Come, my heart that has endured so much, and come, my hand: now show what kind of son Tirynthian Alkmene, daughter of Elektryon, once bore to Zeus. For now I must save this woman lately dead, now I must bring Alkestis home again and serve Admetos out of gratitude. I shall go and keep watch for the black-robed lord of the dead, for Death himself, and I think I shall find him near his victim’s tomb, drinking the blood of offerings. And if I rush from my place of ambush and grasp him tight, throwing my arms around him, there is no man shall free him from that rib-crushing grip until he yields the woman to me.’
Herakles adds that, if need be, he will even go down to Hades itself to fetch Alkestis back to the land of the living, but it does not come to this. He wrestles with Thanatos by Alkestis’s tomb until Death gives up his victim, then he brings Alkestis home again. Husband and wife are miraculously reunited, and Admetos is only too happy to accept ordinary mortal existence once more.
Written by Jenny March in "The Penguin Book of Classical Myths", Penguin Random House, UK, 2009, chapter 17. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.