![]() The bloodless spirits wept as he spoke, accompanying his words with the music. ![]() I ask this benefit as a gift but, if the fates refuse my wife this kindness, I am determined not to return: you can delight in both our deaths.’ Eurydice, too, will be yours to command, when she has lived out her fair span of years, to maturity. Here we are all bound, this is our final abode, and you hold the longest reign over the human race. All things are destined to be yours, and though we delay a while, sooner or later we hasten home. I beg you, by these fearful places, by this immense abyss, and the silence of your vast realms, reverse Eurydice’s swift death. ![]() He is a god well known in the world above, though I do not know if it is so here: though I do imagine him to be here, as well, and if the story of that rape in ancient times is not a lie, you also were wedded by Amor. I longed to be able to accept it, and I do not say I have not tried: Love won. A viper she trod on diffused its venom into her body, and robbed her of her best years. Then striking the lyre-strings to accompany his words, he sang: ‘O gods of this world, placed below the earth, to which all, who are created mortal, descend if you allow me, and it is lawful, to set aside the fictions of idle tongues and speak the truth, I have not come here to see dark Tartarus, nor to bind Cerberus, Medusa’s child, with his three necks, and snaky hair. Through the weightless throng, and the ghosts that had received proper burial, he came to Persephone, and the lord of the shadows, he who rules the joyless kingdom. When Thracian Orpheus, the poet of Rhodope, had mourned for her, greatly, in the upper world, he dared to go down to Styx, through the gate of Taenarus, also, to see if he might not move the dead. While the newly wedded bride, Eurydice, was walking through the grass, with a crowd of naiads as her companions, she was killed, by a bite on her ankle, from a snake, sheltering there. The torch, too, that he held, sputtered continually, with tear-provoking fumes, and no amount of shaking contrived to light it properly. He was present at Orpheus’s marriage, true, but he did not speak the usual words, display a joyful expression, or bring good luck. Hymen, called by the voice of Orpheus, departed, and, dressed in his saffron robes, made his way through the vast skies to the Ciconian coast: but in vain. Bk X:708-739 Orpheus sings: The death of Adonis.Bk X:681-707 Venus tells her story: The transformation.Bk X:638-680 Venus tells her story: The foot-race.Bk X:560-637 Venus tells her story: Atalanta and Hippomenes. ![]()
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