Virgil’s Identification with Orpheus
(Georgica 4.453-529)

Robert Ulery

Wake Forest University

This paper explores the interpretive consequences of the quite natural assumption that Virgil identifies with the poet Orpheus (and with Proteus as the teller of the tale) in the Aristaeus episode that crowns the fourth book of the Georgics. 

When Aristaeus succeeds in overcoming the transformative wiles of Proteus and wins the privilege of hearing his oracular speech, the reply is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, told in a surprisingly selective way.  The way in which the story is told is due in part to the identification of the poet with the heroic subject.  Even the context of the story suggests the analogy with the poet and his reader, as Proteus is quietly engaged in his task when Aristaeus takes hold of him and must hold on as Proteus goes through multiple physical transformations as a way of escaping.  Proteus is described as a vates whose reply is with multa vi and passion as he fatis ora resolvit.

Eurydice the coniunx of Orpheus suffers the bite of the serpent while attempting to escape Aristaeus; that to which the poet is wedded seeks to avoid the attentions of the other, the reader, and in so doing is subject to death.  All nature mourns; and in the poet’s singing of his lost wife, Virgil begins an unusually long series of tricola.  The poet descends to the place of the dead, and that indescribable place is described in multiple ways:  Taenarias etiam fauces ...  The physical response of the inhabitants to his singing is described in number by a great simile:  at cantu commotae ... umbrae ibant ... quam multa in foliis avium se milia condunt ..., and identified in a lavish enumeration:  matres atque viri ... And the response is extended to the non-human underworld:  quin ipsae stupuere domus ...  All of these are threefold descriptions.

Suddenly at 485, leaving out the striking of a bargain with the ruler of the underworld for the release of Eurydice, we find the poet and wife on their way out.  Where is the song with which Orpheus won her release?  It is there, in lines 467-484, as Proteus/Virgil describes Orpheus’ descent and the response to his song of descent.   Virgil has identified himself with Orpheus, and his song in those lines has done what the Orpheus of the myth did.  In the next instant, the poet famously stops to look back in love at the object of his love, contrary to the rule imposed upon him, and in so doing dooms her to the death from which his singing had delivered her.  That which he has revived by his song can exist only if he does not look back at it in love, and when he does so, it escapes insubstantial from his grasp.  By analogy, the poem itself exists only in performance, ever subject to death but alive in renewed performance, if the poet turns his back on it and moves forward.

That forward movement is described in further lines embellished with another epic simile (septem illum totos perhibent ex ordine menses ... qualis populea maerens philomela sub umbra ...) and exotic place names (Hyperboreas glacies ...) as the poet seeks to regain what he has lost; and it is there that he is torn apart by Bacchantes (critics like me, tearing apart his fabric?).  But the head still sings out the name of the lost Eurydice in a final tricolon as the elusive Proteus vanishes again under the waves. 

That this story crowns the episode that (according to Servius) replaced an encomium to the disgraced poet Gallus makes the identification of the poet with the poet-singer a motif of great resonance.