The Last Song of Orpheus

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.

I sang to them. Oh, did I sing!

The bloodless ghosts wept as they heard me, and wheel-bound Ixion ceased his pushing, and Sisyphus too halted in his endless task to listen, and even Tityus’ vultures looked up from their bloody work to give me what must be, for vultures, a glance of compassion. The inexorable Furies themselves, those hideous crones with black bat-wings and bloodshot eyes and the heads of dogs, stopped their vengeful shrieking and came almost timidly up beside me to touch the hem of my robe. Tears were rolling down their shriveled cheeks.

“Come with us,” these grim sisters said, and, gamboling ahead of me like a pack of cheerful schoolgirls, led me through the meadows until the gates of Hades’ royal palace rose before me.

Queen Persephone herself received me. I was grateful for that, for softening the heart of her pitiless husband would have been a much harder task. But Persephone knows what it is like to be swept off into Tartarus in the prime of one’s youth, for she herself, the happy daughter of Demeter who brings fruitfulness to the fields, was carried away by stark Hades as she played in the green fields to be his queen in the infernal regions.

“I am Orpheus,” I said. “You know why I am here.”

“Yes. You seek your wife.”

I gave her no chance then to tell me that I could not have her. I knew I had to reach her heart before she could utter any word of prohibition. Wielding my lyre as Zeus wields his thunderbolts, I wove a spell of song around the dark world’s queen. I sang her the song of the love of Orpheus and Eurydice and I sang her the song of the death of Eurydice and I sang her the song of my despair and my wanderings and the song of my hope of a reunion, and I implored her, in the name of that aspect of God that goes by the name of Love, to restore her to me, so that once again I could go through the world singing of love’s wonder and joy.

I knew I had won my case. There had to be some shred of pity in her, queen of Hell though she was, and there was. Even if it had not been foretold, I would have known that my music had moved her, for I could see a flush come to her lovely cheeks, as though she were thinking of what her life had been like in her happy youth in the fields of Demeter before cold Hades had come for her in his black chariot.

She said, because it was necessary for her to say it, “Orpheus, surely you must know that the dead may not leave here once they have come.”

“I know that. I ask you to make an exception, O Queen. I implore you: release her from your husband’s cold grasp.” And I struck my lyre again, quickly recapitulating the themes of each song, the song of love, the song of death, the song of mourning, the song of yearning for reunion with my beloved. “Her time will come again, for she is mortal, and Tartarus will have her once more,” I told her. “But she was taken too soon.”

“You know that that is untrue.”

“I do,” I admitted. “But I beg you to let me have her until she grows old. And then she will be yours again.”

Sadly she shook her head, and said that that was impossible. But I could see from her eyes that our words were only a ritual, that in fact we were playing out a conversation that would end in her capitulation.

“If you will not release her,” I said, “then I will not return from this place alone. And so you will have my death as well as hers.”

But it is not my destiny ever to die, at least insofar as death is most commonly understood, and Queen Persephone knew that. With a little sighing sound she turned to one of her handmaidens and asked that Eurydice be brought forth; and shortly forth she came slowly forward out of that group of newly arrived spirits by the pool of forgetfulness beside the white cypress.

She was limping a little, for the injury to her foot had not yet healed, and she was very pale, and her eyes, that had been so bright and clear, had the dull hopeless look of death in them. But I knew that she still had not tasted the waters of forgetfulness, for a look of shock and surprise came upon her face as she saw me, and she trembled and wept and came running in her limping way toward me and flung herself into my arms.

I held her while she sobbed.

“Oh, Orpheus, have you also died?” she asked, at last. And I told her that I lived, and that I had come to fetch her out of Tartarus, for by special favor of the gods she would live again as well. As I spoke I looked beyond her to Queen Persephone, and begged her with my eyes, and the Queen of Tartarus said, “Yes. She is yours.”

Just at that moment, of course, that stark monarch Hades emerged from some chamber deeper within the palace and, knowing at once what had taken place among us, glowered at the two of us and at his queen in a cold fury, and for a moment I thought all was lost. But Persephone turned upon her husband a look of such tender supplication that even the frigid heart of King Hades was melted by it. For a time he stood silent, unrelenting, intractable, but one could see that gradually his stern resolve was falling away; and in the end he yielded, with a brusque nod of approval, to his wife’s request. Eurydice had his leave to depart from his kingdom.

But it would not be as simple as that, as anyone might have anticipated. He said, in a voice as black as the blackest night, “There is a condition, Orpheus.”

Yes. It was no surprise. The gods are not gentle, and this one is the least gentle of them all. And I knew that he would attach a condition, and what that condition would be.

He is a terrifying deity, Hades is: black-bearded, sharp-featured, with a hard, cold face and dark eyes that flash like lightning. Like his brothers Zeus and Poseidon he is of towering stature and strength, and like them he bears himself with a regal presence befitting his power in the universe. Every aspect of him is frightening. But would one expect any softer look for the lord of the land of the dead? If I had not been born without fear I would have fallen to my knees before him. But I stood firm. Without releasing Eurydice, who stood coiled trembling against me, I stared steadily at him and awaited the pronouncing of the sentence.

I could go, he said.

I was free to make the journey upward into the land of the living, and Eurydice could go with me.

I must not turn to look at her, though. Not the slightest backward glance until we reached the upper air, or he would reclaim her in that instant and never relinquish her again.

Well, yes: it was as I expected. Nor did I dare quarrel with his decree. One does not negotiate with the king of Hell. I offered proud Hades my thanks, and made my grateful obeisance to gracious Queen Persephone, and turned from them, with Eurydice at my side, to begin the journey to the world of living men and women.