Ovid's Story of Orpheus and Eurydice

Ovid, Samuel Garth and John Dryden (T) · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 6 pages

Six pages giving the Orpheus and Eurydice episode from book X of the Metamorphoses in the celebrated verse translation of 1717 by Sir Samuel Garth, John Dryden and others, printed continuously with the book's other subjects named at the head — Eurydice, Hyacinth, Pygmalion, Adonis, Atalanta and Cyparissus.

The episode opens on the wedding rather than the death. Hymen comes in his saffron robe through the unmeasured air at Orpheus's call, but descends with ill-omened augury: the god neither looks cheerful nor speaks prosperously, and his torch will not blaze but weeps in hissing smoke, and no amount of whirling and shaking can wake its flame. The disaster follows immediately — the bride running joyfully among the Naiads over the flowery plain, bitten by a venomed viper as she passes, falling and breathing her last on the instant. Orpheus, having mourned a loss no superior power will restore, leaves the realms of light and dares the dark Tenarian road, passing through the gliding spectres of the buried and the phantom people of the world below to reach Persephone and the king of ghosts. The centrepiece is the song he sings when he arrives, and its restraint is what makes it famous: he tells the powers beneath the earth that he has not come out of curiosity to explore their hell, nor to boast how Cerberus retired at his approach, but seeks his wife alone, and for her sake supports these terrors and makes this journey — describing how she trod by chance on a lurking viper's crest and was snatched untimely to her tomb with her growing years cut short.

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