Orpheus and Eurydice: The Descent into the Underworld

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of the most moving love stories ever told, and one of the most influential. A musician loses his wife on their wedding day. He goes down alive into the land of the dead and sings so beautifully that the rulers of the underworld agree to release her. There is one condition: he must not look back at her until they reach the upper world. At the very threshold of the light, he turns — and loses her forever.

The best-known versions are those of two Roman poets: Virgil, in the fourth book of the Georgics (29 BCE), and Ovid, in books X and XI of the Metamorphoses (8 CE). Earlier Greek sources allude to the story but tell it only in fragments — and some of them may have had a happier ending.

The Death of Eurydice

Eurydice was a nymph — in some accounts a dryad, a spirit of the trees — who married Orpheus, the Thracian singer whose music could charm beasts and move stones. The marriage was ill-omened from the start. Ovid says that Hymen, the god of marriage, came to the wedding but brought no joyful words, and his torch sputtered and smoked and would not catch fire.

Soon afterwards, Eurydice was walking through a meadow with her companions when she stepped on a snake and was bitten on the ankle. She died at once. In Virgil’s version, she was fleeing from Aristaeus, a beekeeper and son of Apollo who was pursuing her, and did not see the serpent hidden in the long grass by the river. Aristaeus’s bees later died as a punishment, and it is to explain their loss that Virgil tells the whole story.

The Journey Down

Orpheus mourned her with songs that filled the mountains with lament. Then he did what no living person was supposed to do. He went down into the underworld through the Taenarian gate, a cave at the southern tip of the Peloponnese that the Greeks believed led to the realm of Hades.

He passed among the thin ghosts of the dead and came to the dark throne of Hades and his queen Persephone. There, accompanying himself on the lyre, he sang. Ovid gives his song: he had not come to see Tartarus or to chain Cerberus; he had come for his wife, taken before her time. All mortals, he sang, belong to the gods of the dead in the end; Eurydice too would return to them when she had lived out her proper span. He asked only for a loan, not a gift. And if the gods refused, he would not return either — they could rejoice in two deaths.

The Underworld Stands Still

The effect of the song was unprecedented. Virgil and Ovid describe the whole underworld pausing to listen:

The bloodless ghosts wept.
Tantalus stopped reaching for the water that always receded from him.
The wheel of Ixion, on which he was bound forever, stood still.
The vultures stopped tearing at the liver of Tityus.
The Danaids rested from filling their leaking jars.
Sisyphus sat down on his boulder.
For the first time, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears.

Persephone and Hades could not refuse. They called Eurydice, who came forward from among the recent dead, still limping from her wound.

The Condition

Eurydice could return to the living world on one condition. Orpheus must walk ahead and not look back at her until they had left the valleys of the underworld; otherwise the gift would be void.

The two set off up a steep, dark, silent path through the murk. Eurydice followed behind, unseen.

The Look Back

They were almost at the surface. Orpheus could see the light. Then — afraid that she was no longer following, or longing to see her — he turned.

Eurydice was drawn back at once. She stretched out her arms to him, trying to hold and be held, but caught only the yielding air. Ovid says she did not complain; what could she complain of, except that she had been loved? She spoke a last “farewell” that barely reached his ears, and sank back into the dark.

Virgil gives Eurydice a more reproachful farewell. “What madness has destroyed us both?” she cries. “Once again the cruel Fates call me back, and sleep closes my swimming eyes. And now farewell: I am carried away, wrapped in vast night, stretching out to you — no longer yours — my helpless hands.”

Orpheus tried to follow, but the ferryman Charon would not take him across a second time. For seven days he sat on the bank of the Styx without food, then returned to the upper world.

After the Loss

Orpheus withdrew to the mountains of Thrace. For three years, Ovid says, he shunned the love of women, either because of his grief or because he had pledged himself to Eurydice. He sang to the trees, the animals, and the rocks. His songs in Book X of the Metamorphoses — the tales of Pygmalion, Adonis, Hyacinthus, and others — are among the most famous in Latin poetry.

He met his death at the hands of the Maenads, the frenzied worshippers of Dionysus, who tore him apart. His head floated, still singing, down the river Hebrus to the sea. In Ovid’s version, the story has a gentle coda: Orpheus’s shade descended to the underworld and found Eurydice in the Fields of the Blessed. Now they walk together — sometimes side by side, sometimes she ahead and he following, and sometimes he goes ahead and looks back at her, safely.

Why Did He Look Back?

The central question of the myth has invited endless interpretation.

Doubt. He could not hear her footsteps, and feared the gods had tricked him. His failure is a failure of faith.
Love. He looked back because he longed to see her. Virgil calls it a “sudden madness” of love — forgivable, “if the dead knew how to forgive.”
The nature of death. Death cannot be reversed. However beautiful the music, the natural order must reassert itself. The condition was always a way of saying no.
The artist and the subject. Many modern writers, most famously the French critic Maurice Blanchot, have read Orpheus’s glance as a figure for the artist, who must turn to look at the thing he loves in the darkness even though looking destroys it.

Was There Once a Happy Ending?

Intriguingly, some of the earliest references suggest that Orpheus may have succeeded. Euripides’s Alcestis (438 BCE) refers to Orpheus’s ability to charm the underworld as if it was successful, and a speech in Plato’s Symposium claims that the gods showed Orpheus only a phantom of his wife because he, a mere musician, was too cowardly to die for love. The name “Eurydice” itself does not appear in surviving literature until the fourth century BCE. The tragic ending, with its fatal backward glance, may have been perfected — or even invented — by later poets. It has since become impossible to imagine the story any other way.

Parallels in Other Traditions

The motif of a forbidden backward look recurs across world mythology. In the Hebrew Bible, Lot’s wife looks back at the destruction of Sodom and is turned into a pillar of salt. In Japanese myth, the god Izanagi descends into the underworld of Yomi to bring back his dead wife Izanami, but breaks her request not to look at her — and sees her rotting body (see Izanagi in Yomi). In the Maori story of Hine-nui-te-pō and other traditions, similar prohibitions govern contact with the dead. The rule is always the same: the living cannot see the dead as they are and hold on to them.

Legacy

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has been retold in opera, ballet, painting, poetry, and film more often than almost any other myth. Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) and Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) are cornerstones of opera; Gluck’s aria “Che farò senza Euridice?” (“What shall I do without Eurydice?”) is one of the most famous in the repertoire. Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” imagines Eurydice as so absorbed in death that she no longer remembers her husband. Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2019.

The myth endures because it expresses something every bereaved person knows: the longing to bring back the dead, the moment when it seems almost possible, and the unbearable instant of loss that comes again.

Last reviewed: September 2026.