Orpheus and Eurydice: What Virgil, Ovid and Plato Each Tell Us

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice as Virgil, Ovid, Apollodorus and Plato tell it, side by side, including where they disagree on her death, the rule and the ending.

Nine Muses · Last reviewed October 24, 2026 · 5 min read

Orpheus is the singer whose music could move rocks and trees, who went down to the land of the dead to bring back his wife, and who lost her by looking back. Poets, painters and composers have retold it many times. Yet there is no single "original" version. The story reaches us through several ancient writers, and on some points they flatly disagree.

This guide sets the main versions side by side: the Roman poet Virgil (Georgics, Book 4, in James Rhoades's translation), Ovid (Metamorphoses, Books 10 and 11, in Henry T. Riley's 1851 translation), Plato (Symposium, in Benjamin Jowett's translation) and the Library of Apollodorus (Sir James George Frazer's 1921 translation), with background from Apollonius of Rhodes (R. C. Seaton's 1912 translation).

Who Orpheus was

The Argonautica of Apollonius opens its roll call of heroes with him: "First then let us name Orpheus whom once Calliope bare, it is said, wedded to Thracian Oeagrus." Men say, Apollonius adds, that his songs "charmed the stubborn rocks upon the mountains and the course of rivers," and that oak trees at Zone on the Thracian shore still stand in the ranks he led them into. Later in the voyage, Orpheus saves the Argonauts by playing so loudly that his lyre drowns out the Sirens.

Even his parentage was debated. Apollodorus makes him a son of Calliope and Oeagrus, and Frazer's notes list ancient writers who agreed. But Frazer also records that some said his mother was the Muse Polymnia, and that Pausanias "roundly denied that the musician's mother was the Muse Calliope."

How Eurydice died

Virgil and Ovid tell the death differently, and the difference changes the whole feel of the story.

In Virgil, the tale is part of a larger story about the beekeeper Aristaeus, whose bees have died. The sea-god Proteus explains why: Eurydice was fleeing Aristaeus's "hot pursuit" along a riverbank and never saw "a monstrous water-snake" in the tall grass. Aristaeus's bees are dying as punishment for her death.

In Ovid, there is no pursuer. Eurydice is a "newmade bride," strolling in the grass with a band of Naiads, when a serpent stings her ankle. Ovid adds an omen from the wedding itself: the torch of Hymen, the wedding god, only hissed and smoked and would not catch fire.

Apollodorus gives just the bare fact: she died "bitten by a snake."

The descent

Both Roman poets send Orpheus down through Taenarus, a traditional entrance to the underworld, and both describe the dead moved by his music. Virgil has the shades come "trooping" like flocks of birds; even Cerberus "held his triple jaws agape," and "Ixion's wheel stood still."

Ovid gives Orpheus a full speech to Persephone and Pluto. He has not come as a sightseer, he says; he has come for his wife, because "Love has proved the stronger." In Ovid's scene, Tantalus stops reaching for the water, Sisyphus sits on his stone, and the Furies weep for the first time.

The condition, and the look

Here the versions diverge in small but telling ways.

Virgil: the rule comes from Proserpine (Persephone). At "the very threshold of the day," a sudden madness seizes Orpheus, and he turns. Eurydice cries out, "Orpheus! what ruin hath thy frenzy wrought," and vanishes like "smoke dissolving into empty air."
Ovid: Orpheus must not look back until he has left the Avernian valleys. He turns out of love and worry, "fearing lest she should flag, and impatient to behold her." Eurydice, dying a second time, "did not at all complain of her husband; for why should she complain of being beloved?"
Apollodorus: the condition is stricter still. Orpheus must not turn round "until he should be come to his own house."

Virgil frames the look as a frenzy; Ovid frames it as tenderness. Which version a later poet or composer follows tells you a lot about how they want you to feel about Orpheus.

What happened to Orpheus

Again the details shift. Virgil says Orpheus wept for "seven whole months" beside the river Strymon and wandered the frozen north, rejecting all new love. The Ciconian women, during their Bacchic rites, tore him apart. His severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, still cried "Eurydice! ah! poor Eurydice!"

Ovid has him sit seven days on the riverbank without food and then avoid all women. In Book 11, the frenzied women of the Ciconians kill him while he sings, and his head and lyre float down the Hebrus to the shore of Lesbos, where Apollo turns a serpent that attacks the head to stone. Ovid then gives the story a gentler ending: Orpheus's ghost finds Eurydice in the fields of the blessed, and "now, in safety, Orpheus looks back upon his own Eurydice."

Apollodorus says simply that Orpheus was torn apart by the Maenads and buried in Pieria.

Plato's sharp dissent

Not everyone admired Orpheus. In Plato's Symposium, the speaker Phaedrus argues that the gods did not give Orpheus his wife at all. They "presented to him an apparition only of her whom he sought," because "he was only a harp-player, and did not dare like Alcestis to die for love." His death at the hands of women, Phaedrus claims, was punishment for that cowardice.

Keep in mind that this is a character's speech in a dialogue, not Plato's settled verdict on the myth. But it shows that, already in antiquity, people argued about whether Orpheus was a hero.

Comparing the versions at a glance

Cause of death: fleeing Aristaeus (Virgil); a stroll with the Naiads after the wedding (Ovid); a snakebite, no context (Apollodorus).
The rule: set by Proserpine (Virgil); do not look back until out of the Avernian valleys (Ovid); do not turn until home (Apollodorus).
Why he looks: frenzy (Virgil); love and worry (Ovid).
Eurydice at the end: a vanishing shade (Virgil); reunited in the afterlife (Ovid); never truly given back (Plato's Phaedrus).

Key takeaways

The Orpheus story survives in several ancient versions that disagree on how Eurydice died, what rule Orpheus broke and why.
Virgil ties the story to Aristaeus and his bees; Ovid makes it a love story with a happier afterlife.
Apollodorus gives the strictest condition: no turning back until Orpheus reached his own house.
Plato's Symposium has a speaker dismiss Orpheus as a mere harp-player who received only a phantom.
Even Orpheus's mother is disputed: usually the Muse Calliope, but some ancient writers said otherwise.

Sources

Spotted something out of date? Let us know.