If poetry is the mode to counter the impending darkness of death, then the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in Georgics IV offers readers a commentary on verse’s power, and its limitations. Book IV of Georgics focuses on the power of verse to deliver humanity from death. By framing the tragedy of Orpheus with the tale of Aristaeus and his sickly bees, Virgil intends for Georgics IV to operate on a another level, delivering his readers a dialectic on death not just as the inescapable “iron slumber” but, more comfortingly, as a force for regeneration and restoration.
Orpheus and Eurydice
The tale of Orpheus and Eurydice signifies the desire to cheat death. While Orpheus’s grief stirs Proserpine and earns him a chance to rescue Eurydice, his mission is unsuccessful. Orpheus glimpses his bride over his shoulder, breaking his agreement, thus banishing her to the underworld. This is the plight of the poet, for as he succeeds in drawing figures from the darkness of his mind, his creations only exist in limbo beyond the living. Like Orpheus’s Eurydice, they “Retir[e] like subtle smoke dissolved in air” when scrutinized too closely in the light of day.
Virgil understands a poet’s power cannot extend beyond the boundaries of thought, that Eurydice can never emerge from the darkness. Poetry is, at best, a temporary easing of desire, an attempt to breathe form into chaos. Through the device of Orphic myth, Virgil mimics the operations of desire upon the mind. He creates the anticipation of resurrection, only to steal it back, a glimpse of what might be, a smoking dew in the half-light of Hades. Virgil illustrates how desire, by virtue of its fantastic quality, can never be fulfilled.
Aristeaus the Bee Keeper
In Georgics IV, he does so by framing Orpheus’s tragedy with that of Aristaeus, a shepherd whose bees are struck down by Orpheus's curse. Seeking to reverse his fortunes, Aristaeus captures the trickster god Proteus. For Virgil, Proteus represents indecipherable human desire. Like verse, Proteus takes many forms, but in the end, when fettered or, poetically deciphered, his various shapes give way to deeper truths. He is both the “secret cause, and cure of all [Aristaeus’s] woes." By harnessing Orphic desire as “the cure” for Aristaeus, Virgil mitigates its initial failure. The sacrifice of cattle, a ritualized act, allows Aristaeus to regenerate his bees and right the wrong he committed against Orpheus.
Thus the ritual sacrifice is a restoration of meaning to meaningless death. In distinguishing between the arbitrary deaths of Orpheus and Eurydice and the orderly sacrifice of the heifers and bulls, Virgil illustrates that death can be an appropriate mechanism for the restoration of order to the natural world. While he offers no concrete solutions to the problems of grief and suffering, Virgil does offer some temporary solace in poetry.
Restoring Nature
Virgil conceives that poetry is very much a ritualized act, a restoration of the natural order—an offering to quell desires, to assuage grief, to right wrongs. He also sees that poetry is only a limited response, it can only briefly distill darkness into metaphor, imagery, allegory. Thus, verse acts out desire, slaking the force of the human mind, never fulfilling the dreams that it seeks to rectify within its lines, and like the promise of Eurydice’s resurrection, evaporates when faced with the real.
Translator: John Dryden, The Georgics. Kessinger Publishing 2007
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