Eurydice

Eurydice is the wife of Orpheus, the singer of Thrace. The sources give her little life of her own. Apollodorus says that when his wife Eurydice died, bitten by a snake, Orpheus went down to Hades, wanting to bring her up. He persuaded Pluto to send her up. The god promised to do so if Orpheus did not turn round on the way until he came to his own house. Orpheus disobeyed, turned and saw his wife, and she went back (Library 1.3.2).

Ovid gives the wedding. Hymen came to the marriage of Orpheus and Eurydice but brought no good omen, and his torch only smoked. Soon afterward the bride walked with a company of Naiads, and a serpent bit her ankle. She died (Metamorphoses 10.1-10). Ovid tells this in the same poem that holds the myths of love and transformation, but her story ends in no changed body. Orpheus went down by the Taenarian gate. The condition was that he must not turn his eyes back until he had left the valleys of Avernus, or the gift would be lost (Metamorphoses 10.50-52).

In Ovid the rulers of the dead, Hades and Persephone, are moved by his song and grant the request. Near the surface Orpheus turned to look, and she slipped away. Her last word was a farewell that he could barely hear. Ovid adds that she had nothing to complain of against her husband except that he loved her greatly (Metamorphoses 10.56-63).

Virgil tells her death differently in the fourth book of the Georgics. There the cause is told to the beekeeper Aristaeus. Eurydice fled from his pursuit along a river and trod on a huge water-snake in the grass. A chorus of her dryad companions cried out at her death (Georgics 4.453-460). Virgil says Proserpina had laid down the law of the return. Orpheus, forgetful and overcome in mind, looked back (Georgics 4.487-491).

Plato gives a harsher account in the Symposium. Phaedrus says the gods sent Orpheus back from Hades without his wife, showing him only a wraith of the woman for whom he came. He lacked the spirit to die for love as Alcestis did, and he had contrived to enter Hades alive. The gods then laid on him the penalty he deserved (Plato, Symposium). The full descent story is told on its own page.

Ovid ends the pair's story below the earth. After Orpheus's death his shade goes down and finds Eurydice. They walk together, sometimes with him ahead and sometimes behind, and he can look back at her without harm (Metamorphoses 11.61-66).