So I put away my bright wedding clothes and donned the black cloak of mourning, and as the flames of her funeral pyre rose toward the heavens I sang a dirge for my lost Eurydice that brought torrents of rain from the sky; but the fire burned on and on even so, until the last of my Eurydice was consumed and I was left alone with my despair.
I could find nothing to console me for my loss, neither in the philosophies of Egypt nor in the serene wisdom of Apollo nor even in my own music. Distraught, I drifted from land to land, singing the sad song of lost Eurydice over and again. But my singing gave me no solace. Nor was it welcomed by others. I wept, and everyone about me wept also. I cast such a pall of gloom over all who heard me that men feared my coming, and word traveled ahead of me that all should flee, for the bleak-hearted Orpheus was approaching, singing a song that would rend the heart of any listener just as the death of Eurydice had rent his own. They say the gods themselves wept for me. They say even rocks shed tears at the sound of my lyre, and the sorrowing trees cast their leaves to the ground even in the green days of summer. Of weeping rocks and grieving trees I will tell you nothing. There are many stories that are told about me. I do not confirm; I do not deny.
Then one day a nymph appeared before me—a messenger from Zeus, surely, a shimmering golden beam of sunlight breaking through my darkness—and said, “You are so foolish, Orpheus, roaming about like this constantly singing your somber song. What good does such a song serve? The woman you loved is dead, yes. But you will not bring her back with a song like that.”
I knew the part I was meant to play in this little colloquy. Dutifully I said, “What kind of song, then, should I sing?”
“A song to soften the hearts of those who keep her now,” replied the nymph. “A song of the sort that only Orpheus can sing. Go to the Netherworld, Orpheus. Sing for Hades and his wife Persephone. Enchant them into restoring your bride. It is the only way. Strike your lyre, Orpheus! Plead for her return! Ask the gods of the Netherworld to relent, and they will! They will!”
6
The Netherworld has many gates, but the one that was best for my purpose was situated at Tainaron in the far southern Peloponnese, which is a back entrance to Tartarus close by the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone, and that was where I made my descent. The preparation for the journey took me many days. One does not go lightly into the Netherworld. I fasted; I bathed; I sequestered myself in a house of fire and steam and sat by the heat until every pore of mine had opened. Then I went to the sacred grove of Persephone and dug a trench and sacrificed a young ram and a black ewe to the Queen of Hell, and their blood ran down into the earth and was received below. I felt the cold wind blowing upward toward me out of the kingdom of Hades and the gate opened for me.
The road into Hades’ realm is a difficult one, a baffling circuitous path of innumerable branches and forks that leads down into that infinite pit, that great gulf that has neither bottom nor foundation. It is necessary for the souls of the newly dead to be accompanied by guides as they proceed to whatever last resting place awaits them. But the journey was familiar to me, for I knew that I had made it many times in cycles past, though this was, as ever, the first of them. Unerringly I chose the correct forks, and I swam the river of blood and the river of weeping, holding my lyre high above my head as I swam, and onward through that shadowy realm of the dead I went until I came to the shores of the Styx, which is a river that no one can cross unaided, for its black waters are poisonous; and I waited there beside the barren bank of that chilly stream until the grim ferryman, seeing what he took to be a newly arrived soul on the bank, came rowing toward me.
“Take me across, Charon,” I said.
He gave me a cold, cold look. Hell’s ferryman was a huge brawny man, uncouth and filthy, with matted hair and a coarse tangled beard. His body was powerful, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with great muscles that rippled and swelled with every stroke of his oar. He wore only a soiled, tattered rag about his loins and his eyes were as cold and hard as ice. “Who are you to come to Hell while breath still is in you?” he demanded, resting on his pole. “It is not given to those who live to enter here.”
By way of reply I unslung my lyre and struck a gentle chord, and told him that so long as my dear one had been deprived of life I could no longer be said to be alive myself, for my heart was dead within me. Orpheus of Thrace am I, I said, the musician, the beloved of bright-shining Apollo, and I sang to him of the love of Orpheus for Eurydice, and of her cruel death and her husband’s grief, and from the way that I sang even that formidable ferryman could see at once that I was that very Orpheus. He knew then, for it was foretold as everything is foretold, why I had come, and his icy eyes clouded over, and the muscles of his jaws worked with turmoil and pain. For Charon is forbidden by the gods’ decree to ferry the living across the Styx and, knowing what I was about to ask of him, every fiber of his being was bristling with the desire to refuse my request. But he could not refuse. Zeus himself had sent a messenger to tell me to come here. Taking me across was forbidden, and yet he could not refuse. In the toils of that conflict the ferryman was hopelessly lost, and he stood before me irresolute, baffled, angry.
I sang my songs and my singing began to melt through his bewilderment. I told him that Eurydice had been taken before her time—it was not true, of course, since nothing can ever happen before its time—and that I was here to plead with the gods of the Netherworld to release her to me. And as I saw his dour expression beginning to soften, my singing grew in fervor, until I was singing once again with the irresistible beauty that had been at my command before her death and which I had not been able to recover since that dark day.
My playing worked its force upon him. The ferryman closed his eyes a moment and let his clenched muscles loosen their grip. Then he shrugged a shrug of resignation and beckoned me aboard his boat and rowed me quickly to the other bank.
Cerberus, the three-headed dog that the monster Echidna spawned when she lay with the monster Typhon, was waiting for me there, crouching before the inner gate. He is a savage frightful thing, is Cerberus, all yellow fangs and writhing snaky hair, and it is a wonder that the spirits of the newly dead do not perish again with fright at their first sight of that awful hound. But it is not the task of Cerberus to rebuff the newly dead; it is living intruders like me whom he must guard against, and as I approached him his hackles rose and his jowls quivered and blazing spittle splashed from his three terrible mouths. From him came a ferocious growl, in truth three growls emerging from them together, each at a different clashing pitch so that they set up a sound most dire and harsh. But I had no fear of him. I played for him and sang to him and he paused in mid-growl, seemingly perplexed, and his great body, which had been tense and poised for a leap, slumped back in a posture of ease, and as I continued to sing his eyelids began to droop and he lowered one head and then another and then the third, and soon he lay with chins against the ground, sleeping as pleasantly as any happy puppy. I walked around him and went on my way.
What else can I tell you of my journey toward the monarchs of the Netherworld?
Beyond that gate I entered the Asphodel Fields, where those who in life were neither virtuous nor evil congregate and the souls of dead warriors twitter aimlessly like bats at sundown. With my lyre held before me I came to the ominous grove of black poplars, those joyless trees that signify the bleakness of this gloomy realm, which I had sung of often enough the way I had sung of love before I had ever known it. Onward from there I went to the lofty white cypress, Queen Persephone’s sacred tree, beneath whose spectral shade hordes of bloodless, nearly transparent ghosts gather to drink at the pool of forgetfulness before they are sent onward to their last dwelling-place. On the far side of it I came to the place of torment where the impious Ixion eternally pushes his heavy wheel in a circle and the vultures gnaw forever at the liver of that miserable giant Tityus and the ever-toiling Sisyphus fruitlessly rolls his huge stone uphill, only to see it tumble back again. All these, caught up in the strains of the melody I played, paused in their preoccupations to stare at me as I went past.