One backward glance cost Orpheus his wife, and Plato called him a coward
Orpheus sang so movingly that Hades, lord of the dead, agreed to release his wife Eurydice on one condition: walk ahead and never look back. Hearing no footsteps behind him, Orpheus turned just short of daylight and lost her forever. Ancient writers disagreed sharply over whether he was a tragic lover or a fraud.
Orpheus came from Thrace, in north-eastern Greece. Most accounts make him the son of Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope, though some name Apollo as his father, and it was Apollo who handed him a lyre and taught him to play. His marriage to Eurydice was happy but brief: the god Hymen, summoned to bless it, warned that such perfection would not last. Soon afterwards she was out among the Nymphs when a snake bit her and she died on the spot. Some versions have her running from the shepherd Aristaeus, who had pursued her; others say she was only dancing.
Grief carried Orpheus into the underworld, protected by the gods where any other living person would have perished. He won over the three-headed dog Cerberus and then sang before Hades and Persephone until the god relented. The terms were that Eurydice should follow him out and that he must not turn to see her. Close to the exit, hearing nothing, he feared a trick, looked round, and she slipped back among the dead. He could not go down a second time. Later tellings say he died at the hands of frenzied Maenads or wild beasts, his still-singing head drifting to Lesbos, or that Zeus struck him with lightning to keep the underworld's secrets safe, after which the Muses preserved the head and set his lyre in the sky as stars.
The details depend on who is telling it. Virgil closed his farming poem the Georgics, in 29 BC, with the story and was the first to bring in Aristaeus and the sad ending. Ovid's Metamorphoses, in 8 AD, blames a dance with nymphs on the wedding day instead. Plato was scathing: in the Symposium, Phaedrus says the gods showed Orpheus only a phantom, because a man unwilling to die for love deserved no more, and punished him with death at the hands of women.
Few Greek myths have been retold as often. Boethius worked it into The Consolation of Philosophy in 523 AD, Rilke wrote a poem on it in 1907, and Marcel Camus relocated it to Brazil in the 1959 film Black Orpheus. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an Antwerp tapestry from about 1685 showing Orpheus playing to Hades and Persephone.
Source: Orpheus and Eurydice
