Context Essay
Christian Woo
Thaddeus Lisowski
Latin 5 Honors
4/13/25
Ovid Project Context Essay: Orpheus and Eurydice
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice builds upon previous stories’ themes of combating the natural order in the name of love and introduces a new theme of extended grief and mourning.
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the first poem in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses, directly follows Book 9’s “Iphis and Ianthe”. Iphis, a biological girl raised as a male, falls in love with a beautiful maiden named Ianthe. However, Iphis despairs when she realizes her true sex. Following a speech where she deems her love for another female to be unnatural, she pleads with the gods to transform her into a biological male. The goddess Isis grants her wish, and the tale ends with the two lovers happily united.
While Ovid retains many of the themes present in the story of Iphis and Ianthe, his tale of Orpheus and Eurydice lacks a similarly heartwarming ending. The plot develops when a serpent bites newlywed Eurydice, and she passes away. My excerpt begins when Orpheus, unable to cope with the loss of his spouse, ventures into the Underworld and beseaches Persphone and Hades to return his wife, directly opposing the natural laws of life and death. Ovid portrays the poet as cunning and persuasive, and Orpheus uses a variety of tactics and linguistic gymnastics to persuade the king and queen of the dead. My excerpt ends when the king and queen, unable to refuse his prayer, call forth the shade of Eurydice. They offer him a chance to be reunited with his wife on one condition: he must trust that Eurydice is behind him and return to the world of the living without looking back. Orpheus agrees and begins his ascent back home. However, he loses faith in the gods’ promise and turns around just in time to witness the loss of his wife for a second time. After completing his journey, he sits stunned by the River of Styx, refusing to sleep and eat for 7 days. The final lines of the story illustrate how broken Orpheus truly is: still wounded by the loss of his wife, the grieving poet will reject the company of all other women.
Ovid brings this theme of extended grief into the following story when he writes about the death of Cyparissus. Cyparissus is a young boy beloved by Apollo. Apollo gifted him a beautiful stag, and the boy greatly cared for his pet. After accidentally killing it with a spear, he was overwhelmed with grief and asked Apollo to allow his tears to fall forever. Witnessing the boy’s despair, Apollo turns him into a Cyprus tree, whose sap forms tear-like droplets around its trunk.